Show HN: Combining UTC and local times (time zones) in one new clock
The thing about the hour -- the part that&#x27;s being abstracted away here -- is that (in most cases) it carries semantic meaning about daylight and thus about &quot;waking-world&quot; and circadian-rhythm expectations.<p>Yes, with timezones and UTC-offsets I have to keep in mind that 8:00 in my timezone might be 3:00 in someone else&#x27;s timezone, but once I do the simple math of adding the offsets and doing any necessary modulos, I now know that the meeting time I&#x27;ve chosen almost certainly isn&#x27;t a reasonable meeting time for that person.<p>I know from experience that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, 3:00 is still probably sleeping time, regardless of what timezone that 3:00 is in. 3:00 in UTC is sleeping time in London, 3:00 in UTC-5 is sleeping time in Atlanta, 3:00 in UTC+9 is sleeping time in Tokyo -- in any case, 3:00 is sleeping time.<p>Attempts to have &quot;one world timezone&quot;, even leaving out the existence of fractional-hour timezone offsets, will always throw away that semantic detail about human schedules.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say you just enforce that <i>everyone</i> uses UTC. Congratulations, you no longer have to do offset math.<p>Except that you have no idea if 10:00 is a reasonable meeting time for anyone within a few timezones of you (which remember, no longer exist, so you can&#x27;t really use them as references). You no longer have to memorize each participant&#x27;s offsets, but now you have to memorize the daylight hours for each participant instead, and that&#x27;s arguably harder (X&#x27;s daylight hours are 8:00-&gt;16:00, but Y&#x27;s daylight hours are 14:00-&gt;2:00, but then Z&#x27;s daylight hours are 12:30-&gt;20:30).<p>Yes, there are companies with overseas contracts who dedicate some staff to working the same hours as their overseas counterparts. Do we <i>really</i> want that to become the global norm, though? Because if not, then &quot;daylight hours&quot; remains an important concept, and it&#x27;s already baked semantically into the system of timezones we have today, more simply than the alternative.<p>So if we toss out the piece of information that conveys the detail about &quot;daylight hours&quot; (which is what this clock does with its letters-instead-of-hours), then we&#x27;re losing that information, and making it <i>much</i> easier to trample all over <i>somebody&#x27;s</i> reasonable working schedule.