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

Are the Americans Awake?

are-the-americans-awake.yusuf.fyi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 175 posts

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#91

Post by ooterness »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #72
izzydata wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more perplexed that China decided it should only have 1 timezone. It also decided that timezone should be from the perspective of the eastern coast. When does the sun rise and fall for the western most people?

Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone? The sun rises and sets at different times according to both latitude and longitude. Timezones only handle longitudinal daylight adjustments. We already deal with plenty of incongruity around daylight. Why not embrace the variability and let go of the idea that we can predict daylight based on the hour alone? Let people localize the time to disco…

Why even use time that's linked to the rotation of our home-planet? That's as geo-centric as it gets.

Just count the number of seconds since the GPS epoch in a galaxy-centered inertial frame. This post was made at 1,373,034,914.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#92

Post by zokier »

petesergeant wrote: post #82
zokier wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm perplexed at the implication that we "decided" to have the number of time zones that we do, rather than just acknowledging the reality that the US is a fairly big country. Timezones are still a social construct, and decision made. Mainland China is wider than contiguous US, and yet it runs on single TZ.

> Mainland China is wider than contiguous US, and yet it runs on single TZ That's because a vast majority of the country (and certainly all the politically empowered citizens) live in a much smaller span for which the single timezone is pretty accurate. It works in China by not caring about people to the West.

Well, another example is Spain that is at +1 purely for convenience, to get western europe under single timezone, rather than the +0 that their geography suggests.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#93

Post by msla »

> given that the USA decided that having 4, 9 or 11 timezones — depending on how you count — was completely manageble on their end

Europe has four time zones, same as the Lower 48, if you ignore overseas territories, overseas collectivities, and whatever other remains of the various European empires. Besides, the alternative is to pull a Mainland China, which spread one time zone across enough land to need four or five of them.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#94

Post by wongarsu »

dylan604 wrote: post #65
wongarsu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* 8:00 to 24:00 (or 8:00 to 0:00)

There is no 24:00. It goes from 23:59 to 00:00

Of course there is. Just because it doesn't appear on common clocks doesn't mean it isn't a valid time. To quote page 15 of ISO 8601:2004 (the newest version available on libgen):

> hour is represented by two digits from [00] to [24]. The representation of the hour by [24] is only allowed to indicate the end of a calendar day

And Page 17:

> NOTE 1 Midnight will normally be represented as [00:00] or [24:00].

> NOTE 2 The end of one calendar day [24:00] coincides with [00:00] at the start of the next calendar day, e.g. [24:00] on 12 April 1985 is the same as [00:00] on 13 April 1985. If there is no association with a date or a time interval both a) and b) represent the same local time in the 24-hour timekeeping system.

> NOTE 3 The choice of representation a) or b) will depend upon any association with a date, or a time interval. Representations where [hh] has the value [24] are only preferred to represent the end of a time interval in accordance with 4.4 or recurring time interval in accordance with 4.5

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#95

Post by RegnisGnaw »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #70
cvoss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's also the decision to use hour-aligned timezones. Why not half hours? Why not two hours? It's very much a conscious decision.

1 hour is easy to remember, makes the math easier, and not so far apart that it creates radically different concepts of time for people on the extreme ends. With one hour time zones: * If someone is 3 time zones ahead, they're 3 hours ahead * There are 24 time zones and 360 degrees neatly divides by 24 * 2 hours between time zones means that within a time zone, the sun rises on one side at 8 am and on the other side…

We have :30 and :45 time zones though, no :15 time zone. So that doesn't quite apply.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#96

Post by some_random »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #86

Why does this mention Threads of all things.... a week in we're worried about when to post on Threads? Site is DOA without any network effects from hashtags or whatever....

I find it kind of strange to call Threads DOA, especially from lack of hashtags which haven't been relevant on Twitter for years.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#97

Post by dylan604 »

wongarsu wrote: post #94
dylan604 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no 24:00. It goes from 23:59 to 00:00

Of course there is. Just because it doesn't appear on common clocks doesn't mean it isn't a valid time. To quote page 15 of ISO 8601:2004 (the newest version available on libgen): > hour is represented by two digits from [00] to [24]. The representation of the hour by [24] is only allowed to indicate the end of a calendar day And Page 17: > NOTE 1 Midnight will normally be represented as [00:00] or [24:00]. > NOTE 2…

Note 3 is just wrong. 00:00 is the start of the next day. Otherwise, your previous day would now be 24hours + 1second. "representations" is just allowing people to do things incorrectly and having everyone else accept them.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#98

Post by watwut »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #72
izzydata wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more perplexed that China decided it should only have 1 timezone. It also decided that timezone should be from the perspective of the eastern coast. When does the sun rise and fall for the western most people?

Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone? The sun rises and sets at different times according to both latitude and longitude. Timezones only handle longitudinal daylight adjustments. We already deal with plenty of incongruity around daylight. Why not embrace the variability and let go of the idea that we can predict daylight based on the hour alone? Let people localize the time to disco…

Because this way, when someone tells me "it was 5:00 or 16:00" I know whether it was their morning or evening or around lunch. I do not have to take out map to figure out where they were located to figure out any of that.

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#99

Post by justrealist »

Sankozi wrote: post #81
justrealist wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about the concrete thing you're suggesting — making people 4 timezones away wake up early just to be aligned with bureaucrats! Eliminating timezones on its own does not make people wake up before dawn. Consolidating timezones while not forcing people into unnatural wake/sleep cycles accomplishes nothing. You still would have to figure out when people in SF wake up!

Why do you think it accomplishes nothing? Benefits just from communication perspective are enough to consider single timezone. > You still would have to figure out when people in SF wake up! Exactly! It is argument against multiple TZs not for it.

Think about this harder! Let's say everyone in the US was on "Eastern Standard Time". You're scheduling a meeting for eastern standard time. You still have to figure out when your San Francisco coworkers wake up, in Eastern Time!

Except without timezones, you just have to remember that SF is 3-ish hours off so people wake up at 11am. If you just had timezones, you wouldn't have to keep this in your head!

Re: Are the Americans Awake?

#100

Post by acatton »

zokier wrote: post #92
petesergeant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mainland China is wider than contiguous US, and yet it runs on single TZ That's because a vast majority of the country (and certainly all the politically empowered citizens) live in a much smaller span for which the single timezone is pretty accurate. It works in China by not caring about people to the West.

Well, another example is Spain that is at +1 purely for convenience, to get western europe under single timezone, rather than the +0 that their geography suggests.

Spain is not UTC+1 purely out of convenience. It's because of history

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/...

> So on Oct. 23, 1940, Hitler took a train to the Spanish border to woo Spain's Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco.

> But Spain was in ruins from its own Civil War in the late 1930s, and Franco didn't have much to offer. He stayed neutral, but switched Spain's clocks ahead one hour, to be in line with Nazi Germany.

> Ever since, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, Portugal and Morocco — its clocks are on the same time zone as countries as far east as Poland and Hungary.

And the country/politicians are thinking about going back to UTC+0 due to all the problems UTC+1 poses due to geography.

Post reply on HN