Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what problem he's trying to solve.

When I need to call my overseas colleague, I'll either need to look up his timezone to see what time it is in localtime to know if he's sleeping or eating lunch, or I'll have to look up a chart to know that it's 19:00UTC so it's typical lunchtime for him.

But when I travel, it's nice to look at any clock and know that it's almost dinner time without consulting a chart to figure it out based on the UTC time. Or when I'm watching a movie and the actor is in bed and the clock turns 06:00, I know he's been laying awake for most of the night, I don't need other cues to tell me what his normal sleeping time is.

I can understand the utility of UTC for coordinating events across the globe (which I do regularly when I look at logfiles), but using one global time seems like it would make things more complicated for more people than those that have things simplified.

He's trying to gain a minor benefit of cross-timezone synchronization at the expense of a major cost of disconnecting your lifelong sense of time from your daily activities. You would have to relearn what 3am meant in a practical sense (mid-day?, mid-of-night?) in your part of the world, which would be a big pain, but you could eventually do it. What would the big payoff be for that effort? 3am for you would be the same "instant" as 3am for someone in another timezone. Great, but you wouldn't know whether that instant would be their mid-day or mid-of-night, so you would have to look it up anyway to schedule the meeting, just as you would if you were on different timezones.

Then you move to another timezone and have to learn the meaning of 3am all over again.

Lots of pain, no net gain.

This solution was posted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28928550

It maps GMT hours to A-Z letters (omitting I and O). The advantage is that there isn't any confusing overlap between common 'folk' understanding of what hours are what, and the new time values are easily distinguishable from traditional timestamps without need for a TZ marker.

In a way it would carve out a separate, global sense of time in our mental space for use when we do need to coordinate (or just want to opt out of DST shenanigans), and yet let notions like "12:00 means lunch" live on alongside each other.

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