
Show HN: Natural Language Time Zone Converter - hpoydar
https://slashtz.com
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digital_ins
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?

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hpoydar
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.

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digital_ins
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.

