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

The Waste of Daylight

nms.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 251 posts

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#221

Post by asoneth »

heavyset_go wrote: post #218
cptskippy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a hack because it's easier to change the fundamental concept of time than it is to change all of our published schedules. Imagine if businesses, trains, fairies, parks, etc all had summer and winter hours. A simple glitch in the Matrix twice a year is preferable.

Many parks open and close at sunrise and sunset, effectively ensuring that they have different summer and winter hours.

Good point.

It's too bad that this would be hard to use for anything besides sunrise and sunset, e.g. "breakfast served daily from sunrise+1h to sunrise+6h".

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#222

Post by ogre_codes »

DC1350 wrote: post #182
ogre_codes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock. Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environmen…

Where do you live? I would be awake for only 8 hours a day if I followed this in the middle of winter.

You are missing the point.

It is difficult to sleep with natural light. That doesn't mean we collapse to the ground when it gets dark.

As I said, we rise with the sun, and stay awake so long as it makes sense.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#223

Post by asoneth »

rjmunro wrote: post #169

Moving around what we call the hours of the day is a really stupid way to change habits. Why not do this for other unit's of measurement? People travel at 70mph on highways, have accidents and die. Lets make 1 mile only 1200m instead of 1600m, now when the speed limit is 70mph, people will really be travelling at 84kph instead of 112kph, so less will die. It's utterly absurd. Just post a 50mph limit. If you want peop…

Coordinating a mass schedule change at a specific point in time is just a different method of implementing daylight-savings time.

Between the two, changing wall clocks seems like the simpler of the two options, but either is fine.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#224

Post by DC1350 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #222
DC1350 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live? I would be awake for only 8 hours a day if I followed this in the middle of winter.

You are missing the point. It is difficult to sleep with natural light. That doesn't mean we collapse to the ground when it gets dark. As I said, we rise with the sun , and stay awake so long as it makes sense.

The sun doesn’t rise until almost 8:30 near the end of the year so there’s no natural light to interrupt my sleep.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#225

Post by derefr »

ako wrote: post #116
derefr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make a difference: only some professions are harmed from the lack of light, and only those professions would need to change their schedules to follow the sun. When you change the clock, it affects everybody. But people can change their own (business's) schedule without affecting anyone else.

But it is easier to accomodate to if everyone is affected, everything is connected: you may not be affected, but the school of your kids is, and the opening of daycare, the opening times of the stores, your sports facilities, etc. If everyone changes, you can keep all the dependencies the same, otherwise you have to reconsider all dependencies.

> it is easier to accommodate to if everyone is affected

This is theoretically true about a lot of things, but we don’t try to actually do it for almost any other case. For example, it would be easier to accommodate wheelchairs if we just outlawed stairs and made it so every grade-separation must only be bridged by a incline. But we don’t do that. We build the incline, but we also continue to build stairs.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#226

Post by dahart »

mrfusion wrote: post #185

I support full time DST but ... Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings? I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.

It is weird and a little funny to think about, and it's kind of true that many people are powerless in a way because of their job. But I'm not sure it's fair to paint this as people being completely powerless nor as some kind of issue where people believe in legislation over personal freedoms. I choose to keep my job, and I want my job to be happening at the same time that other people are working.

Our industrialized economies live on schedules. Business and work and school and even just social gatherings of any kind all need to agree on what time things will start and stop. Communication and transportation all depend on wide agreement about when people expect to be working.

There's legislation because society and the economy depends on when the workday happens, and because it's important that many businesses are on the same schedule, not because legislators care what you do with your evenings.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#227

Post by ogre_codes »

_ph_ wrote: post #121
quicklime wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app. I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time. Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start wor…

Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude)…

> Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart.

DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#228

Post by e12e »

dsego wrote: post #178
e12e wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle - but assuming that school ends at 5, that means it'd be problematic picking up/being home in time for your kids in winter becomes an issue. That could be solved by summer/winter schedule being recommended across industries - but then you might end up back with an effective DST anyway - forcing new sleeping patterns in the shift...

Due to lack of school buildings in a lot of places in my country we have school in two shifts. These rotate, one week from 8 to 13:30 and the next 14-19:30. As a kid I had to walk around 30min to and from school, carrying a small torch when it was dark. Just to give you some perspective.

I'm more thinking about parents here. Kids can do whatever we demand from them ;)

I assume your parents were home when you got home at eight - but how about the early shift - were you alone from 1330 until 1700?

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#229

Post by llampx »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #167
richrichardsson wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the safe and conservative way to do that is to use today's winter time all year round What are the points that lead you to this conclusion? Personally I'd prefer if DST was abolished by staying on Summer Time permanently, as I dislike the lack of light in the evening, and couldn't care less about the dark mornings, but mine is a purely selfish reasoning.

I applaud your self-awareness and courage to say you’re selfish. No other comment - I just found that refreshingly non-controversy-seeking and honest.

People are overwhelmingly selfish, they just don't like to mention it. Even in politics, people vote for their interests I'd say a vast majority of the time.

Re: The Waste of Daylight

#230

Post by quadrifoliate »

mrfusion wrote: post #185

I support full time DST but ... Isn’t it weird to think That the Vast majority Of people are so powerless over their own schedules that they need nationwide legislation to do what they want and enjoy their evenings? I don’t have a point. It’s just kind of a funny thing to think about.

On those lines – if we as a society are going to accept this twice-yearly glitch in the matrix, it should be done in a humane way so as to enable humans to cope with a sudden change to their schedules. I'm thinking things like:

- Highway warning signs for 1 week before and after the sudden time change

- Speed limits are lowered on expressways for 2 weeks after the time change

- Businesses are not allowed to penalize workers for any lateness-related reason for up to 1 hour for 2 weeks after the time change

- Maybe even an extra Monday's holiday for Spring Forward! Holidays are notoriously scarce around this time of the year anyway.

...and so forth.

That's what I think is missing. I think most people can agree that it's a pretty fundamental change to circadian rhythm, essentially forcing everyone to go through a minor version of jet lag. What seems to be missing is the acknowledgement that this can be a big deal for some folks, and helping them adapt as a society.

Post reply on HN