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masklinn • today at 12:55 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

It’s really not clear what you’re asking.

The point of using zoned events is to match the life and expectation of people living in the real world e.g. if there is a meeting in Perth at 10AM, and the Perth timezone gets shifted, the meeting is still occurring at 10AM perth time. If it’s broadcast then every other time is what changes (or not).

If people want to fix their meeting internationally they can already do that by setting their meeting time in UTC.


Replies

rawling • today at 2:23 PM

In reply to

> future zoned datetime carry outright uncertainty as to their actual location on the timeline (as the zone’s offset can be updated at any point and any number of times until the event has elapsed)

I wondered if it would be worth applying a (optional?) version to a timezone when stored, so you could distinguish between "whenever it is this time in Perth" vs "when I currently think this time will be in Perth, though if Perth changes its mind on how it offsets time, I want to keep what time I currently think that will be".

But you're right, that doesn't really add anything over storing it as UTC.

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tshaddox • today at 4:55 PM

> if there is a meeting in Perth at 10AM, and the Perth timezone gets shifted, the meeting is still occurring at 10AM perth time.

The thing about this is that if Perth's time zone ever changes so erratically or with such little notice that participants need to be notified that the point-in-time of an upcoming meeting has changed, it's no longer clear whether the participants would actually want the zoned "Perth at 10am" time to be canonical.

If athletes were flying in from around the world for an international competition tomorrow at 10am, and Australia decided to increase Perth's UTC offset by 1 hour as of today, would we expect all athletes, organizers, fans, etc. to show up and do everything 1 hour earlier (by solar time)?

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