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Comment by fryguy | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, there's an ambiguity here. Suppose that you're going to watch the Super Bowl with your friends in Chile. So you set the appointment for 1830 local time in Chile. Then Chile changes their timezone, and your local time is wrong since the actual event is based on Eastern time, and not Chile time.

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You simply need to observe the rule that event times should be specified in the time zone of the event itself.

If the event is a meeting, then the meeting organizer will be in charge of setting the appropriate time zone.

That doesn't sound simple for the user at all. If I'm meeting locally with friends to see the game/oscars/wtv, I don't know or care about the time in the original timezone. My local TV guide / newspaper shows it in local time, and that's what everyone in the meeting cares about, so why would I set it to a completely different TZ?

Admittedly setting a time zone different than your local zone is an edge case. 99% of the time your local zone is the correct default. It would come up if you're scheduling a meeting for your trip to a different zone, or setting your TV to record the football game being broadcast from Chile.

That is outside of the scope of the article. In this case you have to ask yourself. Do you want to save an appointment for 18:30 in Chile? Or for the Superbowl? You have to choose one.

If you really want to be sure tell your friends to use the timezone of the event. Maybe say "let's meet at 19:00 New York time" if the game starts at 20:00 in New York and you want to meet an hour before.

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