Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 555 posts

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#451

Post by raldi »

lmm wrote: post #402
raldi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Standard Time, it would have been dark out until 7:40am today here in SF. That's really tough on people (or children) who have to be at work/school by 9 or even 8. By mid-December, sunrise wouldn't be until almost 8:30. In Seattle, it would be dark outside until 9am. Losing an hour of sleep in the spring is rough, but I'd rather do that (and get an extra hour in the fall) than have to get ready in the dark al…

The roads are busier in the evening than they are in the morning. So being able to come home in daylight is more important than being able to go to work/school in daylight.

But in many places, evening rush hour would be in the dark in the winter with or without daylight saving. So it's not either/or but rather one/none.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#452

Post by amptorn »

barnacs wrote: post #123
kryptiskt wrote: post #24

So you want to abolish time zones ( https://qntm.org/abolish )

If I want to talk to Uncle Steve, I don't really care what time it is either here or there, or what it signifies. All I care about is whether we can communicate synchronously at the time or not. If he doesn't want to be disturbed for whatever reason, he can mute/turn off his phone and I can send him an asynchronous message. Problem solved.

...Your solution is to just try at random? And if it doesn't work, give up?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#453

Post by Sean1708 »

jameshart wrote: post #275
cyberferret wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 kids. They are grown up now, but when younger, they were actually cared for by family or a friend of the family who was a professional carer. We were fortunate enough to be able to dictate their care times to suit our schedule. I daresay that if your childcare centre only offered a 11am to 7pm slot then your work schedule would shift accordingly. And why wouldn't a child care institution offer split shifts like thi…

Don't kids go to school where you live?

Where on earth do you live that school is 9-5?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#454

Post by ajmurmann »

AckSyn wrote: post #170
ajmurmann wrote: post #162

I have huge issues with DST and how we measure time in general (24hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds?! Who the f* came up with these crazy ass numbers?!). But what bugs me much more is the insane calendar. 12 Months with arbitrary numbers of days. That's just crazy. In the very least we could make it so that January to May have 31 days and the remaining months get 30. ideally we would switch to the positivist calendar. Th…

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2011/11/15/3364432.ht... > Our 24-hour day comes from the ancient Egyptians who divided day-time into 10 hours they measured with devices such as shadow clocks, and added a twilight hour at the beginning and another one at the end of the day-time, says Lomb. "Night-time was divided in 12 hours, based on the observations of stars and https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exp…

Are you kidding me? I know it comes from the ancient Egyptians. That's not a fix, that's an explanation and it's an explanation that makes it even worse. It's the equivalent of a conversation that goes like this:

   A: Why do you guys have these weird variable names in your code that you touch every day?
   B: Well, the company was started in the 70s by a bunch of Egyptians who named their variables in Egyptian.
   A: But they are all gone now, right and nobody here speaks Egyptian anymore?
   B: Yeah.
   A: Why did you never rename it? This stuff makes it really hard to ramp up.
   B: *shrug*
Only that this happened 2000+ years ago! Plenty of time to refactor that shit. It's even worse if you look at the purposefully broken month names. September to December are named "7th" to "10th". However, some arrogant pricks decided to inject their own names as months in between and couldn't even bother fixing the months whose names they now broke. And nobody bothered in the meantime to go back and fix it. It's 2000 years later and instead of fixing it we coerced most of mankind into using this obviously broken piece of crap.

EDIT: Formatting

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#456

Post by kwhitefoot »

iagooar wrote: post #346
roel_v wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Verbally, speaking with USians, 15.00 is always pronounced "3pm"." It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. 24 hour clock is merely for writing things down. I mean it would already be an improvement if the US would catch up with that, just saying that a 24 hour clock isn't said out loud as such. (not disagreeing or anything with you I guess, just adding some information).

> It's like that everywhere in Europe. Nobody says 'see you at fifteen'. And, as always, trying to generalize over a whole continent doesn't work out. It's perfectly fine in German or Polish to say "see you at fifteen".

Same here in Norway. 3 p.m. is klokke femten.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#457

Post by daveheq »

This is idiotic; it would actually have the same problem but worse: translating time to where the sun is relative to Earth. It's called false simplification; it looks easier on the surface but is actually more difficult for the person, just for some blog writer's own convenience.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#458

Post by cafard »

jhbadger wrote: post #247
zeta0134 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar…

That first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

I will just point out for the benefit of those who run Emacs and haven't yet discovered it, that in calendar mode, "p f" will tell you, for example, that November 7, 2016 is 17 Brumaire, year 225 of the revolution.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#459

Post by achr2 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #29

Getting rid of Daylight Savings makes complete sense, and it's something we should really pursue. Getting rid of Time Zones is ridiculous. People know that 6am roughly is morning, and 6pm is roughly the evening. When you're dealing with someone internationally, you know not to call them at midnight their time because there's a high probability they may be sleeping. Having time roughly follow a standard around the wor…

I genuinely don't see a difference between looking up an unknown timezone, and looking up a 'part of day offset'. As it stands I need to look up an overseas timezone and then figure out the offset from my timezone. With a universal time, I would instead lookup a 'part of day' offset to know if it is okay to call/schedule a meeting.

But the benefit is that the overall system is far simpler - Time no longer has alternate interpretations.

And for semi-local contexts, you already know that the next state over, or the other side of the country is one or two hours ahead/behind - the same as today.

And mostly the mental model people use for long distances works similarly to universal time anyway - I know my time, and after a few interactions, I know an 'offset' to their timezone.

Though, I guess the real bummer would be being in a 'part of day' zone where the date changes in the middle of the workday... ha

Post reply on HN