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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Probably the biggest barrier to ending daylight saving time is... do you go to year-round winter time or summer time?

And that's kind of the upside of daylight saving time: in winter, when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening; but in summer, when days are long, you want to move the extra morning daylight to the evening. So DST is kind of a compromise where we suffer the negative results of the changeover to get the positive results of morning light in winter and the positive results of extra evening light in summer.

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Stop switching. Stay on Summer Time.

Why stay on summer time? Because this routes more available daylight to the evening, which most often (for the bulk of people) is used as personal time, family time, everything other than work and school.

We already give up so much to those institutions, I could not possibly support sacrificing another hour of daylight to them.

Stop switching & stay in winter time!

My 2 cents worth...

Stop switching and split the difference. 1/2 to the summer and 1/2 to the winter.

I have advocated getting to root of the problem. That is having days in first place... Just get rid off the planet and so many problems are solved. We could make sensible second based calendar as we don't need to care about days, months or years anymore. Win, win, win I say...

I don't understand why people need sunlight for after-work activities though? Unless your hobby is calibrating sun-dials what are you doing?

Because we want to be outside on the sun. And before work there is a.) dark anyway b.) time pressure to finish that activity for work/school.

I guess I don't get what activities people are doing that need the sun. Sports pitches for example have floodlights. When I run in the evening I carry a torch. Where I live a bit further north it's going to be dark unless you shift the day by like three hours. We manage to do things after work just fine.

Some sports aren't played in areas with big flood lights, and many people don't live near that kind of infrastructure at all. It's totally fine if you aren't interested in those activites, but it's a little weird to me that you seem unaware that they even exist and millions of people like to do them.

No one said "totally impossible to do anything".

We want to do things on the sun. We don't want to have to carry torch. We want to get what little vitamin D we can get from more then just pills.

It is cool to see outside without having to go where floodlights are. Taking walk and see around, for example.

> We want to do things on the sun.

Just seems a bit disproportionate to offset everyone else's lives by an hour so you can have a walk in the sun or whatever.

Most outdoors activities are safer and more pleasant when there is some sunlight (think: walking through a forest, hiking, swimming in a lake, sports, having a picnic, etc).

Um, pretty much every outdoor activity? Hiking, yard work, sports, and even just socializing outdoors are pretty dramatically affected by the sun going down.

I use morning for personal time. Works for me.

I for one don't care about daylight in the morning - I like to sleep that part of the day.

The one that puts the sun where it belongs at 12

Where is that?

Closest to zenith, I presume.

Lol I meant the time that better aligns with the position of the sun relative to where you stand.

For most people, that's never. But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time.

The bigger question is why? Now that we have electric lights, why do you want equal daytime before and after noon?

Well, that is the very definition of noon. Which is handy, as the noon point doesn't move around much (a few minutes) over the year, while in northern latitudes the time of sunrise and set can move by several hours across the year. Noon has no special meaning beyond marking the middle of the daylight. All times are expressed relative to that and of course there is full freedom how to set up common time points like star of office hours, start of school etc.

Noon is not middle of daylight. Not everyone lives in place where that is aligned.

Well, sure, as we have time zones, it is not precisely aligned. But all time zones are aligned so that the noon point is somewhere inside them, not outside of the time zone.

Noon is generally not midday for most people. Far more stores are open at 7 PM than are open at 5 AM. Far more people are still up at 9 PM than are waking up at 3 AM. And the "9 to 5" song would center the day at 1 PM. It seems that in general society has decided hours after 12 PM are more useful than hours before 12 PM. It's far easier to just change the clocks to have 1 PM be midday, keeping DST year round, than to change society.

I wonder if it was ever so. Did noon mark the middle of the day in traditional societies? If so, when and why did it change?

> But standard time would be closer more often than daylight time.

On the eastern edges of current time zones. There's a 45-minute to 55-minute difference to cities on the western borders and many of them daylight time would be closer to "natural noon" than standard time.

I'd prefer one that fixes the clock to sunrise and lets noon and sunset drift rather than fixing noon and letting sunrise and sunset drift.

I could also try and get my coworkers to move our meetings earlier in summer so I can leave work by 3, but for some reason changing a "clock" seems to be more effective than getting people to buy into summer hours and winter hours.

Why do you want daylight in the morning in winter? Now that we have electric lights, we have pretty good control over our indoor lighting situation, and even our outdoor lighting.

There's a couple of reasons:

* There's some evidence that light is useful for the biological process of waking up and keeping people wakeful in the morning. Anecdotally, if it's a particularly cloudy day when I wake up, I am far slower to get going in the morning versus if it's a very sunny day.

* If you live in a region that is afflicted by snow and ice in winter, you want the sunlight to help with warming up pavement and melting snow and ice [in conjunction with road salt]. This use in particular isn't solved with artificial light.

Also it is very dark in areas with winter when there is no snow. Specially if it is raining. Having sun actually up helps quite a bit.

> Why do you want daylight in the morning in winter?

Well why do you want it in the evening instead? There's only so much daylight. I'd rather get up and start the day with some sunshine.

Our society is built around evening activities. People work during the day and socialize at night. Socialization is easier when the sun is out.

I don't care - I'll adjust my life to what works. This past year I've had phone calls with people in India, Australia, and Germany (I'm in the US) There is no possible reasonable timezone for all of us, but I made each one work.

Flip a coin and pick one. Either alternative is better than switching twice a year.

> when days are short, you really want to get the daylight in the morning not in the evening

That is your opinion which many do not share. As long as it is light out by 9am I don’t care.

California voters actually passed a referendum to move to year round DST, but federal law only allows year round standard time. I think most people prefer the idea of year round DST.

Could always move from Pacific Daylight Time to Mountain Standard Time.

Could also change working hours, same thing. Why is it even a debate?

States can't unilaterally decide that either. Federal law[1] determines which state is in Pacific/Mountain/etc. zones.

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CFR-2003-title49-vol1/CF...

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