15 ms·

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing. It is not just digital assistants, but so many oth

• wickerman 6y ago
  Another irritating bit about this is that when I search for news about my country in my language, spanish (I live in London, the UK one Siri, not the american one) I still get a number of english language results first.
  • Zenst 6y ago
    Did you search in spanish or english? Also local environment options - was in in english or spanish. But the whole language and geographic association is one area in which many software experiences seem to get mixed results. My pet gripe is when I install software and it offer English (American) and no English(UK) option. Though less impacting that some language handerlings, like yourself.
• AmericanChopper 6y ago
  For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.
  • nromiun 6y ago
    The issue isn't doing business in just America. The issue is the communication. Some services will have big banners like "Works everywhere flawlessly" and then (if you are lucky) in some dark corner of the FAQ there will be a tiny sentence, "Only available in US for now" (translation: it will never be available anywhere else). Even global companies like Google, Amazon do this.
    • AmericanChopper 6y ago
      In situations like that non-US consumers aren’t their customers, and they’re simply not interested in communicating with them.
      • nromiun 6y ago
        Then why are they on the internet? Aren't they aware that non-US people can also access it? And if they aren't interested then why do they add "for now" to their message? And are you telling me global companies like Google and Amazon don't have any non-US customers? I don't know which world is that but I want to live in it.
        • AmericanChopper 6y ago
          Google and Amazon aren’t particularly good examples of this. They don’t have very many services that are only available to US customers. But there are plenty of businesses that only trade with US customers, and make little effort to ensure that’s clear on their websites. To answer your question, the reason companies like that don’t put special effort into making this more clear is because while some people might think this is a problem, it’s certainly not their problem. If somebody browses their website for 20 minutes, decided to make a purchase, and realizes they can’t, the business hasn’t lost anything. That person was never going to be their customer to begin with, and it’s not exactly easy to put together a business case for improving UX for people who will never be customers. Im not really making any value judgements about doing this, I’m just giving you the perfectly rational explanation for how this occurs.
• ensiferum 6y ago
  Don't forget the "world series" for major league baseball played in the US and Canada. ;-)
  • freddie_mercury 6y ago
    A tired quip that doesn't get more clever with time. Guess what? The "World Cup" didn't invite any soccer teams from Africa or Asia to their 1930 tournament but they still called it a World Cup. The UK wasn't even part of FIFA at the time but they still pretended it was a "world cup".
    • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
      Aye and nobody invited Antarctica to the most recent one, so it's still not a World Cup!
    • brigandish 6y ago
      The baseball World Series has been contested since 1903. When are they going to invite the rest of the world?
      • freddie_mercury 6y ago
        Whenever they join MLB, just like you have to join FIFA to be in the World Cup.
        • incompatible 6y ago
          Do they even accept applications? The FIFA application process is apparently not very easy, but 211 national associations have still managed to join.
    • barneygale 6y ago
      Even in 1930 it involved several nations, and that was /ninety years ago/
  • sunkenvicar 6y ago
• zimpenfish 6y ago
  In the recent (~5y) past, I've asked Google Maps, from within London, a route to Charing Cross Station and been given the one in Glasgow.
  • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
    In the past few months I decided to give Apple Maps another try to see if it's any good. I tried to get directions from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria. It tried to send me to Victoria BC, Canada.
  • ben_w 6y ago
    Ouch! That’s even worse than a pre-smartphone fail I encountered ~15 years ago. I was on a train from London to Liverpool Lime Street Street, and somewhere around Nottingham one of the fellow passengers asked me when it would arrive in Liverpool Street Station.
    • danohuiginn 6y ago
      From Cambridge (UK), you can take trains either to Liverpool or to Liverpool Street Station (in London). Refugees would often be released from a nearby detention center with a ticket and instructions to take the train to Liverpool. More than one ended up lost and befuddled in Liverpool Street. [2nd-hand story from, likewise, 15 years ago. Accuracy not guaranteed]
      • InitialLastName 6y ago
        See also: New York Penn Station and Newark Penn Station are consecutive stops on the North-East Corridor line, and sound identical in conductor-ese. Causes regular panic attacks from first-time riders.
      • grahamel 6y ago
        had similar encounters with people asking how much longer it will take to get to Ashford as their Eurostar train leaves soon while on a train that stops at Ashford (Middlesex) instead of Ashford International, in Kent
• nicbou 6y ago
  This is rather inconvenient when shopping for niche products. American website assumes that everyone on the internet is American, and you have to go through the shopping cart experience to learn that they don't ship to Canada or Europe.
  • tragomaskhalos 6y ago
    To be fair, there is a tendency among Americans full stop (with the honourable exception of the good denizens of this and other likeminded sites) to assume that everyone on the internet is American.
    • abjKT26nO8 6y ago
      HN is not an exception. It's the most stark in threads about salaries.
      • zeku 6y ago
        I'm interested to see this thread but posted 6 hours later. This happens on forums that are very EU/NA heavy--or games. The thread seems overly negative towards Americans and criticizes them heavily because half of America is still asleep and the other half just started working. If OP posted it later Americans would likely be filling the discussion with the reasons why your complaints are happening. My personal opinion is that US-centrism is obviously a thing, but EU people are so used to seeing it that they then mistake other things for it. This same thing happens with Spain and Mexico as well!
      • briandear 6y ago
        Hacker News is an American site, specifically a Silicon Valley site. If you went to a British site, they would be talking about things from a British context. All are welcome, but it’s a bit ridiculous to complain that every conversation on the internet doesn’t support multiple currencies.
        • abjKT26nO8 6y ago
• aib 6y ago
  Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?
  • Kye 6y ago
    Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.
    • gambiting 6y ago
      Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?
      • Kye 6y ago
        I don't intuitively know 17:00 is afternoon. I have to think about it. You get used to what you grow up with.
        • dkarp 6y ago
          It also may or may not be evening [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening
        • myrandomcomment 6y ago
          If you are an American joining the military is a quick lesson. Dates are d/m/y and time is 0000hrs. Distance for anything that is not your PT run is in KM. I had lived overseas so not a big deal for me, but others in my unit struggled for a bit. I have forced doing both f/c, mi/km and 12/24 on my family from the start. Both my wife and kid where pretty happy I did when we started traveling outside the US quit a bit. No issues on if they needed a jacket, how far away it was and what the transport schedule said.
• Naga 6y ago
  To be fair, where I'm from, "London" would probably refer to London, ON, but that's just because I live in Southern Ontario. So it's not like no one has heard of it. On the other hand: no one in Southern Ontario will be asking what time it is in London, ON because it's all in the same time zone, so this seems like a problem.
  • mikepurvis 6y ago
    Well, and it's further complicated by the context of what's being asked. Coming from Waterloo Region, if I ask what time it is in London, I almost certainly mean in England. But if I ask for directions to get to London, I probably mean the one that's a few hours away by car. So it's not as simple as just fitting these queries into generic templates and sending all instances of $LOCATION to a common geocoder.
    • Scoundreller 6y ago
      Now if we could just wipe Waterloo IA off the map...
    • eloisant 6y ago
      Yes, but we expect those assistants to be a little smarter than college programming assignment...
  • epistasis 6y ago
    It really highlights how all language is incredibly ambiguous, and depends on all sorts of cultural and semantic contexts to disambiguate, despite the inherent ambiguity not being at all a problem for its users. There's so much more to language than just a string of sounds or characters.
• stuaxo 6y ago
  It's ridiculous TBH, whether its travel apps, or setting timezones in things.
• wcarss 6y ago
  Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.
  • tjpnz 6y ago
    >I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times. That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.
    • Asooka 6y ago
      On the bright side, screaming at the void can be therapeutic for some people...
      • epistasis 6y ago
        The modern day equivalent of writing a stern letter and just leaving it in a drawer.
        • kitd 6y ago
          You could send it to The Times and see if it goes to the London version? ;)
    • chintan 6y ago
      There is an entire new class of species breeding over there: "Artificial Humans" [1]: A quantum state thing that may or may not be a real human. You can never tell. This is beyond Turing test. A real human behaving as bot or vice versa. [1]. https://trialx.com/blog/google-play-bans-our-covid-app-built-for-an-indian-city-government/ https://trialx.com/blog/google-play-bans-our-covid-app-built...
    • inakarmacoma 6y ago
• jonplackett 6y ago
  Was thinking this exact thing! All these companies are hugely US-centric. It's like this on maps too (apple maps is the worst) you can search for something fairly straight forward that should be local and it'll find you something in California. But I agree with the general theme of Siri being the dunce of the personal assistants. Mostly can't even hear its own wake word. You have to whisper Alexa's name when talking about her to prevent activation and in the same environment shouting at Siri produces nothing but silence.
  • jtbayly 6y ago
    It’s not US centric. It’s just that Siri, and the others (to a lesser extent?) are dumb. Try asking Siri for directions to your next appointment. She will tell you all about it, including where it is supposed to be, but she won’t give you directions. Mind boggling. And it’s not uncommon for me to search for some place in the Midwest USA, and get a result in Europe.
• ape4 6y ago
  For time you probably don't want the nearest. If you are 200km from London, Ontario you are most likely in the same timezone so you want London, UK. However for driving you do want the nearest.
• hn_check 6y ago
  "It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million." You realize these do this largely based upon actual usage, right? That it turns out that a significant percentage of people are actually more interested in London, Ontario. London Ontario has a significant military plant. An international airport. At 400,000 people, and being the hub for SW Ontario, is hardly a city "no one has heard about". I know of a number of organizations that have branch operations in London, Ontario as it's a major manufacturing city. It has a large university. It is clearly leagues below London, England, but the hilarious haughtiness by UKers about London, Ontario (always a sort of weird defensiveness and inferiority complex) does not correlate with actual reality. Ergo, a lot of people, over time, actually are more interested in London, Ontario, among users.