Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnick | Hacker News Reader

It depends on the domain. If you are writing calendar software, it is legitimate to have "floating time" i.e. your medication reminder is at 7pm every day, regardless of time zone, travel, or anything else.

Unfortunately Google and many other companies have decided UTC is the only way, so this causes issues with ICS files that use that format sometimes when they are generating their helpful popups in the GMail inbox.

View on HN

Those aren’t timestamps. They’re descriptions of how to select them.

Oh yes true. Somehow I missed that important detail.

> If you are writing calendar software, it is legitimate to have "floating time" i.e. your medication reminder is at 7pm every day, regardless of time zone, travel, or anything else.

If you have to take medication (for instance, an antibiotic) every 24 hours, it must be taken at the same UTC hour, even if you took a train to a town in another timezone. Keeping the same local time even when the timezone changes would be wrong for that use case.

There are very few drugs where that's a requirement. Your kidneys and liver aren't smart enough to metabolize anything at precisely the same rate every day anyway.

If you're there for a while, you'll need to adapt anyway since your biorhythms will too. But there are plenty of other cases like a reminder to check something after dinner, or my standard wake-up alarm in the morning. Or if I plan to travel, book lunch at a nice place for 1pm, and put it in my calendar I just want it to be 1pm wherever I go, without caring about TZ changes.

Calendars, alarms, and reminders have some overlap here and floating time can be good for some cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com