Hacker News Reader

Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

Can we just stick to the Daylight time year round?

I am 100% for getting rid of this dumb system.

That's what's probably going to happen, sadly:

"The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year."

Why is it sad?

Because it is not the "natural" time but the artificial one that is chosen.

How is the other one natural? It's all based on artificial boundaries and divisions anyway. Seems to me the sun is highest several hours after noon and midnight is closer to sunset than sunrise.

> Seems to me the sun is highest several hours after noon and midnight is closer to sunset than sunrise.

The definition of noon is when the sun is at its highest point. Yes, due to timezones real noon may be half an hour from clock noon — but that's all (modulo places which are on a neighbouring timezone for reasons; regardless, being more than 1½ hours from real time is political stupidity).

Are you in China? I understand the PRC believes that all Chinese should be on Beijing time — c.f. above, under political stupidity.

> The definition of noon is when the sun is at its highest point.

A historically tenuous regional decision about naming, does not influence global reality beyond being contextually incompatible. So what?

I know it would "feel" right to have the centre of daylight hours at 12PM on summer solstice... but it's much more useful to have lighter evenings that mornings in my opinion.

+1 1PM middday.

Full disclosure : I am not a morning person.

Humans already don't plan their day strictly around sunlight. Otherwise we wouldn't go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am (or even later) but rather go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am.

> Humans already don't plan their day strictly around sunlight.

For maximum health & energy efficiency, though, we probably ought to (just like we probably ought to build our houses so that air conditioning is optional & heating is efficient).

I would argue they still plan according to the sun. Why have most westerner cultures slowly adapted to a 9 - 5 schedule when older generations used to work 8 - 4? Daylight savings slowly convinced society to start the work day 1 hour later.

Unless you like keeping track of time with a sundial that doesn't seem like a very strong argument.

There's nothing that makes summer time more natural than winter time other than that winter time precedes summer time. Both essentially are societal constructs, though.

Summer time is on average further off from solar time.

For instance normal time is pretty close to solar time when you're around Berlin.

It's the time matching how most of western society (if not humanity) works.

Most people don't center their night around 00:00, it's usually centered around 03:00~04:00

You get the job of re-labeling all the sun dials, I guess.

That's a jip! We should be changing to Winter time and get the hour we lost back! We're going to get shafted in this deal!

I know! Let's split the difference, half an hour to each side.

Russia tried switching to summer time permanently, it didn't work. If you need to pick, you need to go for winter time all year round. Otherwise you get really dark winters in Northern Europe, but people forget that, because they want sunlit evenings in the summer time.

This doesn't make any sense. I'm in semi-northern Europe and we get like 6-hours of light at the lowest point. How does it make the winter darker if that light is from 10-16 rather than 9-15 ?

Better to have the light even later in winter, instead of while inside during work, like 14-20.

It may seem like it would be better, but the russians actually tried it, and it turns out that's it's not. The argument in Russia was that permanent summer time cause stress and health issues (https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/russia-abandons-perman...).

The part that's weird is that everyone have arguments as to why DST would be better, but the country that actually tried it switch to permanent winter time after few years.

Between 1948 and 1981 Denmark didn't even have summer time and Germany managed just fine without DST from 1949 to 1980, so why can't we go back to not having it?

And this is probably why Iceland doesn't have DST - no point in having it that far north. (Although they're on UTC year-round when they're "naturally" on the western edge of UTC-1, so you could say they have year-round DST.)

I think you might have it backwards. Permanent DST would result in more light in the evenings. (Unless there's a difference between EU and US daylight savings that I am misunderstanding).

As it is now, in November we will subtract one hour from the time on our clocks. This means that if it gets dark at 7pm on November 3, on November 4 it will instead get dark 6pm since an hour has been lost.

I am actually an advocate for going in the other extreme--make current DST the default (that is, +1 always), but in the winter set clocks forward another hour (+2 total), so it stays lighter in the evening. This way we get more daylight in the winter when we actually need it! I'd rather have daylight after work than before work so I can actually enjoy it.

Can confirm - permament summer time was an awful idea. Both from personal point of view and some economical conclusions.

Rigth now (since 2014) we have only "winter" time for all regions except for a few (like Altai for example)

We get really dark winters no matter whether we're on DST or not. Makes absolutely no difference.

Please no. Winters will be absolutely miserable for one. For another, my internal clock is most comfortable with waking up at 9AM. It doesn't understand numbers and clocks, so in the summer that means 10AM. Going to work at 10 is ok, but 11 starts getting a bit uncomfortable, though luckily I've so far picked jobs that let me do that. But the discrepancy between the clock showing nearly noon and my internal clock believing it's morning does cause me a bit of anxiety. You can always do whatever you want after dark, but I can't sleep when I'm driving to work.

also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

also

Single time zone earth please

https://qntm.org/abolish

Do you like the idea of having to remember that stores in japan open at 23:00 UTC, somwehere else at 3:00 UTC etc.?

That sounds like a way less annoying issue than trying to schedule things across borders

No, it just shifts the problem to needing to know which are the working hours at each location you want to interact with. Timezones and Daylight Saving are completely different issues that appear related. Both have flaws, but at least local timezones are a sensible abstraction for general societal behaviour in a given location.

If you want a fixed standard time, we already have UTC, - get used to it and the offset of the _local_ times you need to know.

https://qntm.org/abolish

Unless you’re proposing everyone on earth work during the same hours, you’re still going to have to know the standard working hours in the region they’re in. Time zones are basically a standard version of that. Not to mention, a single solar day makes dealing with weekends/holidays way harder.

Yes!

Also, just like you don't need to remember timezones today (you can just google them), you won't need to remember daylight hours (or whatever the terminology will end up being) in a single timezone future (because Google will know)!

> because Google will know

Yes! Why have a single, standard system known as timezones when each and every calendaring app can have their own "not a timezone" timezone mappings. That way Apple, Google and Microsoft can have three incompatible mappings between UTC and local time.... er.... accepted local customs. It will be great!

Then think only in UTC! Global Infrastructure has been using this single timezone for over 40 years.

Also, once you know the easy-to-remember-or-lookup offsets of the locations you interact with you can even translate in your head to save others the effort.

I bet the Japanese would remember that pretty quick. If I visit Japan, I don't know customs and practices of local business and have to look things up or go with a local anyway. I certainly don't like people forgetting what timezone I'm in and scheduling important meetings for 6pm on the Friday before a long weekend, or having to stop and look stuff up because I can't remember whether or not I'm in sync with the next state of over during this time of year. The fact is time is different everywhere but we hide that in the way we represent it, making it harder to deal with it.

> scheduling important meetings for 6pm on the Friday before a long weekend

Have you ever considered that people might be just assholes? :)

I consider that all the time, but people I work with often have no idea I spend most of my time in another timezone.

You already have to do that - if you're in France and it's within a couple of hours of when the sun is highest in the sky the shops are probably shut. On a Sunday they probably don't even open at all.

I already have to deal with the fact that shops in Australia close at 5pm (local time), not at 10pm like they do in my home country.

This is a weak argument for keeping timezones around imo.

Do you often find it necessary to remember when stores open in other countries? Even within my town all the stores open/close at different times from each other.

That’s a stupid idea.

Not only will all references to times in movies etc stop making sense. It will not even help to solve any of the perceived problems, like scheduling calls. You might be able to specify the time without a time zone, but you still have to look up if that time is within their daytime.

Literally the only people who would profit are those tasked with maintaining time-related functions in operating systems... who would lose their jobs.

All references and depicted cultural practices in movies, novels, plays, etc, become dated over time anyway. The world keeps changing.

What does UTC lack for you to fulfill that role?

I said it half-jokingly, trying to continue the train of thought of OP. The current system is quite fine.

Globally this would be too much, but why not in EU? It is +1 for some, and -1 for others, not that much. Just stretch to CET, just like Spain already does.

I suspect most supporters of that idea live near Greenwich latitude but I might be wrong...

Longitude, you presumably mean.

exactly, sorry.

also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units

but only when the Gravitational constant is measured with more precision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

I still remember my "Swatch The Beep" watch =)

Swatch Internet Time feels to me like a prime example of adding another standard for no reason whatsoever, other than to attach a brand to a timezone for promotion of course. I don't know why people keep bringing it up.

At a time when people were still wearing watches, you could have an alternative time standard, on your wrist, in actual hardware.

Nowadays, you could have that easily as an app on your smart watch, but of course, there are far fewer people wearing smart watches.

Also don't forget the egalitarian approach of using a time format that's equally foreign to everybody.

It is a pretty nifty concept - having time in a day measured as divisions of 1000 (a "beat", a minute and some seconds) is aesthetically more pleasing and probably easier to deal with rather than divisions of 60, 24, and 12.

Kinda like how SI units are easier to reason about than imperal ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com