Siri, What Time Is It in London? • Hacker News Board

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#11

Post by Hamuko » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:08 AM UTC

Same thing happens with Frankfurt. If I order something from Amazon.de, my package usually goes through Frankfurt. When I checked my package tracker app on my iPhone, I was surprised to find out that Frankfurt is actually on the Germany-Poland border.

Turns out that if I enter "Frankfurt, Germany" into Apple Maps (which I assume is what the package tracker app does), it takes me to "Frankfurt (Oder), Germany" instead of "Frankfurt am Main, Germany".

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#12

Post by marius_k » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

You have to know the time in London Canada when you're king, you know?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uio1J2PKzLI

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#13

Post by dusted » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

Okay, I knew I was stupid already, but if I was an assistant, and smart enough to know there was more than one London (which I've until recently not been), I'd have asked "Which one?" in case there was not enough context to make a guess. There are probably _A_LOT_ of people who have a lot more to do with the non-british London who'd be very sad indeed if The Machines (tm) suddenly decided that EVERY request about London MUST ALWAYS be about the British one..

Kinda like how I'm eternally sad when I get german results, just because my connection is from Germany, but I am Danish, sitting in Denmark and am usually NOT looking for the nearest biergarten (lies, I am, but we have none).

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#14

Post by ksec » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

new2628 wrote: post #6

It is amusing that someone thinking London means London, Canada should be fired for stupidity, but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever) hours to his current time and needs an elaborate device to do it is seen as smart and insightful. This is some pretentious BS.

> but someone who cannot compute what is the time in another place by adding 7 (or 10 or whatever)

The whole point of asking is precisely because I dont know how many hours I have to add. And neither do I know if said country, region or city is having whatever DayLight Saving hours etc.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#15

Post by avip » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

_jplc wrote: post #8

Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

I'm too lazy to clarify my thoughts, you're fired.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#16

Post by SirHound » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

_jplc wrote: post #8

Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

Is it? Siri is a digital assistant. The point is it should be held to a much higher standard. It's currently awful to the point of uselessness. So what standard of assistant is it? Not one you'd employ.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#17

Post by dkdbejwi383 » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #10

I’ve always phrased the question as “What is the time in the UK” (as a British person living in the USA). It’s unclear to me whether my form of asking the question is because it’s the best way to get a “good” answer from Siri, though I don’t think it would ever occur to me to ask what the time is in London versus the last city I lived in (Bath) in the first place, since they’re always the same.

Maybe because you know that there's only one timezone for the UK, so there's no point asking "What's the time in London" and "What's the time in Preston" because you know the answer is the same, but since America has 3 or 4 timezones (I'm not sure, I know it's at least three), American people intuitively specify the city, since "What's the time in the USA" is not valid

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#18

Post by SirHound » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

avip wrote: post #15

_jplc wrote: post #8

Siri got it wrong and you got mad, we get it. The childish rant about firing assistants is unnecessary.

I'm too lazy to clarify my thoughts, you're fired.

Too lazy to clarify by "London" you don't mean London Ontario? Give me a break.

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#19

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:12 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #4

Shouldn’t they simply default it to the most populous city by that name, or some other criterion for “better-known”?

[deleted]

Re: Siri, What Time Is It in London?

#20

Post by denster » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:14 AM UTC

I think dates, times, UTC offsets, and locales/cultures is a topic we frequently think of as "that's easy" [1] when in practice it's painstakingly hard to get right.

As an example, we've spent the past few days on our eng team refining our spreadsheet functions for date/time handling, and it's like the 5th time we've iterated on this (after supporting everything Excel / Google Sheets do).

Funny part is, I'm sure we'll iterate on it even more -- it's hard to get this topic both right & make it easy to use / approachable.

Btw, does anyone have good reading materials on this topic? (date/time/locale handling)

[1] I'm biased as a founder at https://mintdata.com, but thankfully our engineers set me straight on the subtleties :D