Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacobsenscott 1956 days ago
I cringe every time someone send me an email that says "I can meet at 10 PST" no matter what time of the year it is. But what can you do.

As far as the unix utilities go, the behavior is non-intuitive for sure, but can probably never be changed without breaking massive amounts of existing systems. The behavior is also reasonable considering the system constraints at the time it was written. Consulting an ever changing tz database every time the command runs was not an option, and maybe isn't even today.
1 comments
jackson1442 1956 days ago
> I cringe every time someone send me an email that says "I can meet at 10 PST" no matter what time of the year it is.

Why? An average person (read: non-developer) rarely needs to think about their timezone, save for when it changes. As a human, it seems relatively straightforward to intuitively determine whether that person is in DST or not.

If you were a UNIX machine (or a developer providing input to one such machine, I guess), it might be more appropriate to ask for a response in the Americas/Chicago format or something like UTC-0600, but it seems rather coarse to require that everyone adhere to your personal timezone standards when interacting with you.

Personally, I frequently schedule meetings with clients all over the US where their timezone isn't necessarily clear to me, so I usually just say something along the lines of "1045am CT," omitting the S/D in its entirety.

link
jacobsenscott 1956 days ago
I cringe because I've dealt with so many timezone bugs, because it is notoriously hard to get right. So it is just sort of a PTSD reaction. Of course I know what they mean, I just cringe to myself.
link
Dylan16807 1956 days ago
> As a human, it seems relatively straightforward to intuitively determine whether that person is in DST or not.

But you don't know if someone used a calculator and invoked actual PST during the summer.

> I usually just say something along the lines of "1045am CT," omitting the S/D in its entirety.

Good.

link
exporectomy 1956 days ago
It may have to do with the appearance of arrogance in incorrectly using a term they don't understand instead of a simpler term they do.
link