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Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

Living in germany I often times have to raise eyebrows at the basic assumptions american coders often have with regards to encoding, timezone awareness and other common defaults.

An american friend with french heritage noticed happily after moving to germany that the accent de gue on his last name was finally printed correctly on his mail and packages.

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Actually I (as a Dane) feel that we are all fortunate because the US is in multiple timezones. Had one of the small single-timezone countries headed the IT revolution, we would surely have much greater problems, similar to the way ascii still lives on in systems where it clearly shouldn't.

As a Dane now living in the US.

All apps I'm building now has a US-audience which means that they have to be timezone aware per default as opposed to apps with a danish audience where I didn't have to be concerned about timezones. The truth is, timezones are a pain.

Lets not get carried away - everyone in Germany misspells my Swedish first name. (Because I use a spelling that is not used in Germany everyone here "corrects" my name, even when I enter myself it on websites, etc.)

My French friend Stéphane (male) had a lot of trouble in the US. A very large number of sites and services don't let you enter the accent. Many places that had any kind of the human in the loop would also "correct" his gender to female and name to Stephanie.

I'm not saying we're beyond error, but atleast the input field didn't force you to change the letter or throw an error otherwise. ;)

Many of my collages use the unaccented version of their names just to avoid complications. I use my accents whenever it's possible though.

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