Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#171

Post by diroussel » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #165

imglorp wrote: post #12

Social issues aside, the software perspective of keeping up with DST is very costly. Every time any government entity anywhere on Earth changes its mind about what zone they're in and when, the IANA needs to reissue the TZDB. Then every OS and platform vendor needs to patch up to a new TZDB. Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. This i…

> Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. Java also ships their own SSL trust store instead of using the system one. Why, just why?! Every system capable of running Java also has its own trust store...

Yeah, I find this really annoying too. Java has all the right integration to windows trust store and you can write custom code to use it. But it’s not sued be default.

This makes using internal CAs a nightmare.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#172

Post by mac01021 » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

jibbit wrote: post #101

Pandavonium wrote: post #3

Having young kids, I'd love to see the changing of the clocks go the way of the dinosaurs. I don't care which way, just pick one and stick with it.

Do children not need more sleep in winter, like adults?

When my kid was 1 year old, she was on a sleeping schedule where I would wake her up just in time for me to get her to daycare before heading to my 9am daily standup, and then falling asleep at night at whatever time she would be sleepy as a result of the morning wakeup time.

Maybe I could have planned for the clock change better and done something gradual but, the abrupt way we did it had the effect that she was totally thrown off and could only sleep a couple of hours on each of the two nights following the change.

As luck would have it, staying up with her all hours for those two nights that year left me with a terrible cold that left me miserable and exhausted for more than a week.

I don't know if this answers your implied question or not. But that's what happens to many parents every year.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#173

Post by chowned » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

Adutude wrote: post #109

We should all just be on GMT. In software development on Pacific time, I always feel bad for the guys offshore that have to stay up late at night to make our morning meetings. It sure would make things a lot more easy from a coding perspective. But to the point DST only adds complexity to the already complex task of converting time to GMT and back so that you can synchronize events in different time-zones, I fully su…

This comes up on every single article about timezones. Humans need to know what time it is based on the solar day. If it's 5:00 AM for me and 5:00 AM in Sydney, I have no clue if anyone in Sydney is awake. Timezones are for humans, not computers.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#174

Post by ghaff » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #123

bostonpete wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work schedules are often tied to all sorts of other schedules that limit flexibility -- things like school schedules, stock market or customer hours, published hours for retail or government offices, etc. If there's a practical benefit to schedule adjustment (and there is at certain latitudes), it can often only be realized by many if society as a whole shifts.

Society managed to simultaneously shift their entire collection of clocks twice a year. Is it really that much more of a pain to instead just say "we're all simultaneously going to work and school an hour earlier for a few months"?

And then why the hell bother? You've now replaced a coordinated government-implemented system with a complete patchwork system at the company, school, and individual level.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#175

Post by ghaff » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #157

sojournerc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still the same swing in sunlight time, just masked by changing the clocks. Some people will prefer sun in the morning, others in the afternoon. The answer is to allow flexibility of schedule to accommodate preferences, not switching clocks. It doesn't do anything other than mess with routines. Daylight is not saved, or extended.

> The answer is to allow flexibility of schedule That works for a lot of us in tech with online computer jobs, but simply is not realistic yet for most of the world’s laborers. > Daylight is not saved, or extended. This is a framing, it depends on your point of view. Certainly I’ll agree the term “daylight savings” was conceived as a positive spin on the idea. On the other hand, if you take it as a given that work ho…

Yes. I can assure that most retail and service industries, to pick just two examples, are going to be keeping the same hours year round.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#176

Post by chowned » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

nogabebop23 wrote: post #59

nostrademons wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don't need to have clocks at all, which was an industrial-age invention. The concept of standardized time and hour-long timezones dates from the mid-1800s, and was a construct of the railways (which needed to publish schedules that'd be valid across long distances). Before then each village or region had its own time. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/invention-...

Do you think agriculture hasn't moved into a post-industrial age? Modern farms are tightly integrated into a global supply chain from imputs to product and definitely need to work on the same standardized schedule as the rest of the world.

I still don't understand how the wall clock prevents them from getting up an hour earlier or later.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#177

Post by tzs » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #50

I think permanent DST makes more sense. The best hours of the day are in the evening. Folks are off from work, kids are home, the heat of the day is gone. It’s a great time to get out to a park or a stroll.

The problem with that in more northern latitudes is permanent DST pushes the morning commute deep into darkness.

From a safety perspective, if you have to have one of the morning or evening commute in darkness, it is safer to have that one be the evening commute.

There are a couple reasons for this.

1. Mornings tend to be colder than evenings. In fact, the early mornings before sunrise are often the coldest time of the day. You are more likely to have icy roads in the morning, more likely to have snow on the roads, more likely to have fog.

If you have to drive in the dark, evening dark is usually safer.

2. Schedules are more in sync in the morning. People tend to start out of the home activities over a narrower time range than the range of times they return to the home.

In particular, school gets out early enough that most non-adults are home before it gets dark in the evening, greatly reducing the number of pedestrians and bikes that people driving in the evening dark have to contend with compared to those in the morning dark.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#178

Post by brandmeyer » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #73

imglorp wrote: post #12

Social issues aside, the software perspective of keeping up with DST is very costly. Every time any government entity anywhere on Earth changes its mind about what zone they're in and when, the IANA needs to reissue the TZDB. Then every OS and platform vendor needs to patch up to a new TZDB. Just for laughs, Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. This i…

Very costly? That would require some serious evidence. And even then, so what?

> And even then, so what?

I have to agree. The function of software is to reflect the state of reality as it is. Human sociopolitical reality is complicated; that's just a problem to deal with.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#179

Post by _ph_ » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

aimor wrote: post #166

More and more I'm ready to abandon time zones altogether and use UTC (or another equivalent) as my default. In the past I thought the idea to be ridiculous, but now I don't think it's so radical.

I don't think this is a good idea. People on average take a long time to develop the intuition about numbers and units. Just look how the US resists to change to metric units. Just using UTC would require everyone require a new intuition about times, and what is even worse, a different one in each location. Time zones are bad enough, but they keep the rough approximation that 12:00 is about the middle of the day. And in some regions, people just tend to be a bit "late" to compensate for their timezone weirdness.

Also, it would make any kind of writing about times basically impossible. Whenever you write a sentence like: "they met at 18:30" most people would understand that this means the early evening. But when you read: "they went for a swim at 20:00 UTC" you don't know what that means, until you know where they meet. And happen to know the timezone offset. Or have to google it. Every time you read a sentence like that.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#180

Post by ghaff » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

mankyd wrote: post #163

ghaff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it depends on latitude and where you live in a timezone (as well as individual preferences). If Boston were to stay in Eastern time (and it probably would because New England switching to a different timezone than the rest of the east coast and an hour further from the west coast has its own problems), the elimination of DST would move sunrise back to about 4am in midsummer.

Longitude, but yes.

No. I actually did mean latitude because that affects the length of the day at different times of the year. On the equator, there's not much point. Presumably, you're in a timezone that makes general sense relative to typical work patterns so that the sun is up during your awake time. Conversely, live in northern Alaska and you probably have almost too much sun in the summer so no need to optimize and it's dark enough in the winter that no fiddling with timezones is going to give you enough light.