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Re:Show HN: Natural Language Time Zone Converter by digital_ins on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @11:42PM (#10462736)
This is the best thing I've seen in a long long time. I spend most of my days co-ordinating between timezones for my phone calls and this would really make my life much easier. Coming from an NLP background, I can say that the front-end simplicity does mask a whole lot of back-end complexity.

Quick question, how're you handling daylight savings? Do you rely on the in-browser JS to figure it out? Or are you using something like moment.JS to handle this for you?

Re:Show HN: Natural Language Time Zone Converter by hpoydar on Thursday October 29, 2015 @12:23PM (#10472235)
Thanks! We actually started with NLP libraries, but fell back on plain old regex, which in the end was the right tool for the job, though it got a bit hairy. (Nice to hear from someone who can appreciate it.) As for daylight savings, we use the browser to get a current GMT offset on your first request and determine an Olson TZ, which we cookie. Subsequent requests are passed off to a Node instance for processing along with the time zone, which also processes posts from Slack and HipChat. And yes, MomentJS and Moment Timezone are the workhorses here.
Re:Show HN: Natural Language Time Zone Converter by digital_ins on Friday October 30, 2015 @09:35AM (#10477656)
hahaha, yeah, good ol' getTimeZoneOffset() being put to work. It's shocking how crappy JS' date object is, it's near impossible to do anything powerful with it without resorting to obnoxiously-structured regex.

Once again - great job! I'm building complex conversational interfaces and even I think that this really is something.