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

Morocco abruptly drops clock change

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 206 posts

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#51

Post by zzo38computer »

glandium wrote: post #21
zzo38computer wrote: post #19

I don't like DST and think that instead the time zone offset should be set so that 12:00 is at approximately solar noon, and then count the seconds without changing for DST or anything else.

Where I live, solar noon is around 11:30am. The sun rising at 4:30am and setting at 6:30pm in the summer is sad. It's even worse in the winter when the sun sets at 4:30pm. (And I come from a country where solar noon is 2pm in the summer, making evenings quite enjoyable)

My opinion is, if you do not want to have dinner when it is dark, then have dinner when it is not dark. It is dark or light depending on what season, and what location, rather than the clock, anyways, whether you use DST or not.

The clock is good can tell you the time and how much time is passed and to synchronize the schedule for TV shows and cron events on computer and whatever, but is dark independently from that. If solar noon is at approximately 12:00 then the time doesn't jump (causing many problems with appointments and complications with other stuff that it doesn't need), and it will match with a sundial approximately and closely enough, but also that between for example 01:00 and 13:00 is going to be twelve hours, without needing to deal with DST.

(Avoiding DST is simplifying the computer programming too, as well as many other stuff too, so that is also good.)

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#52

Post by neonate »

jstanley wrote: post #39
neonate wrote: post #17

I'm glad they decided to keep summer time. I live in fear that we'll decide to abolish DST but keep the darker evenings all year round.

Your timezone does not dictate how dark your evenings are. The days have exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what numbers you choose to label the hours with.

You're talking about the diurnal cycle, but what we call evenings are defined by social convention and certainly do get darker after the November time shift.

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#53

Post by InclinedPlane »

School-Cotton wrote: post #27
nancyp wrote: post #5

US should do the same. Drop DST please! but not abruptly with a Trumpy Tweet.

Time zones in the US are a matter for the sovereign states, not the federal government. There already exists at least one US member state that doesn’t practice DST: Arizona.

Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though.

Edit:

http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313

The bottom line here is that a state (or other political subdivision — see the Wayne County, KY reference below) can only:

- Opt out of DST

- If not opted out of DST, you must advance an hour starting on the second Sunday of March and ending on the first Sunday in November.

- Petition the Secretary of the Department of Transportation and request a change of time zone designation.

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#54

Post by function_seven »

ganonm wrote: post #37
jimktrains2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that still doesn't solve the problem of having to know the local offset to know if a proposed time is reasonable for them, for say a meeting. It also makes it easier to talk to others, if they say "6pm" you think "dinner time" or "just off work" without having to know the location of the person, at the time they're talking about, which may not even be where they are.

Surely people would just start using some sort of utility that tells them 'people in X are usually awake between these hours'. It replaces an existing problem with a slightly different problem but the net gain is you remove all the annoying edge cases people currently have to deal with when converting between time zones. For example, no longer being confused about how long your flight lasts that traverses time zones.

And you introduce weird edge cases because days now change while you're eating lunch or driving home.

The phrase "Dinner on Thursday" would become really confusing. ("Do you mean after work on Wednesday? Or before the football game on Friday?")

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#55

Post by toyg »

Symbiote wrote: post #47
randyrand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that important to you? Never once have I cared that solar noon is not 12:00.

It's worth keeping Greenwich Mean Time as the time used in Greenwich, London and Britain. When arranging meetings etc, it's sometimes confusing to people far away from Britain that, during the summer, it's not "GMT" in London. That would be worse if Britain decided to use GMT+1 permanently. What other countries do leads on from that, otherwise there's not much point to timezones.

No, it’s worth dropping the anglocentric “GMT” altogether and using UTC everywhere instead. Let’s decouple time measurement from accidents of history, and make rational choices about what we want our life to be in the future, rather than being shackled by pointless traditions.

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#56

Post by function_seven »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #53
School-Cotton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time zones in the US are a matter for the sovereign states, not the federal government. There already exists at least one US member state that doesn’t practice DST: Arizona.

Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though. Edit: http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313 The bottom line here is that a state (or other political subdivision — see the Wayne County, KY reference below) can only: - Opt out of DST - If not opted out of DST, you must advance an ho…

Can't they just move to the neighboring time zone and not adopt DST? (i.e. If California wants permanent summer time, they can switch to MST and sync up with Arizona ("America/Phoenix"))

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#58

Post by zzo38computer »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #9
ravenstine wrote: post #8

Aren't enough clocks connected to the internet that the clock change could happen gradually rather than abruptly?

You could do something like Google has done with the Leap Smear on a larger scale, but the better question is why does the clock change need to happen at all? There's really no reason for it. It would be vastly easier for businesses which wish to let their employees out early enough to enjoy the sunlight to change their hours for a few months than for the entirety of society to change their sense of time. Also, you'd…

Yes. The clock doesn't need to change. You can schedule your employees out early to enjoy sun if they like to do, regardless of what the clock says.

If you are scheduling a meeting, you will specify the time by the clock, but how to decide what time, can be decided by whatever else is applicable, such as when it is light or dark outside, or other considerations, and then know what time on the clock that time will be, to schedule.

Yes, many clock won't and shouldn't need to be Internet. Even so, you can also to use a sundial or pocketwatch, anyways. I also use "dumb" alarm clocks, actually.

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#59

Post by School-Cotton »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #53
School-Cotton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time zones in the US are a matter for the sovereign states, not the federal government. There already exists at least one US member state that doesn’t practice DST: Arizona.

Not exactly, they do not have complete control. States can choose their timezone, they can choose whether to adopt DST or not. They cannot choose to switch to DST all year round though. Edit: http://timezonereport.com/?page_id=313 The bottom line here is that a state (or other political subdivision — see the Wayne County, KY reference below) can only: - Opt out of DST - If not opted out of DST, you must advance an ho…

Why not? Where does it say that?

Re: Morocco abruptly drops clock change

#60

Post by InclinedPlane »

ganonm wrote: post #24

Why can't we just get rid of time zones altogether and just use UTC exclusivsly? The amount of productivity lost to dealing with them is immeasurably high. I proposed this over dinner with some friends recently and they thought it was nuts, but within 20 minutes of discussion I think I had convinced most of them (or they just wanted me to shut up). Maybe once we colonise Mars and the meaning of a day becomes more vag…

You still have to maintain all of the same information. Keeping track of the local solar time for cities, countries, and regions. Also, consider what it would be like to travel to other time zones. Not only do you have to learn of the UTC offset for the local region in terms of the time of day, but you have to keep remembering it constantly for everything you do throughout the day.

So now, if you're living on the East Coast and you want to get up at 8am local time you need to set your alarm to 12pm UTC instead. But when you travel to Hawaii you need to set your alarm to 6pm UTC. And now every single one of your waking days is distributed across two days with the day change happening at local 2pm in the afternoon. Your work week is Monday through Saturday, your weekend is Saturday through Monday.

I do not understand why anyone ever thinks this insanity sounds like a good idea.

Post reply on HN