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

Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 282 posts

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#121

Post by jt2190 »

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…

> Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones.

More precisely, the Java Virtual Machine (not the programming language) will, like any operating system running inside a VM, need to be patched with the new time information. Updating the host machine’s time info is not enough.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#122

Post by zwily »

hunter2_ wrote: post #90
imglorp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Most machines use UTC internally (with varying epoch dates to represent it). And this is absolutely great until you need to interface with meatbags, ie local time. It's not just display of time either: think about anything Cron does in localtime, eg backups or open building door locks, or send an ACH payment file; then ponder all the corner cases of DST switches. Eg do you do something twice, or never? Wh…

I doubt anyone wants something to occur twice, but they might have an opinion on whether a 1:30am job should occur on the first 1:30am or the second 1:30am in the fall change. For the spring change, I think all jobs scheduled between 2am and 3am (a period that collapses into a moment) should ideally occur at said moment, but I can see how a smear might be more practical in many cases. I don't recall how `cron` and ot…

Every software service I’ve worked on has had issues around DST transitions. That’s really the only programming benefit I see for getting rid of it going forward.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#123

Post by ryandrake »

bostonpete wrote: post #52
kingaillas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why the changing of clock settings? Could have just shown up earlier to follow the sunrise?

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"?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#124

Post by zwily »

ascar wrote: post #119
throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the fi…

For me your snippet was just a bit too short to get a feeling on the context of the conclusion. The other two paragraphs of the summary make it much clearer. Here they are: A solution to the problem is shown in Figure 2C, which contains a combination of obliterating DST (in favor of permanent Standard Time) and reassigning countries and regions to their actual sun-clock based time zones. Under such adjustment, social…

However, I think it’s actually easier to change the clock than to change the norms. (Which is silly!)

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#125

Post by ghaff »

throw0101a wrote: post #84

It should be noted that the folks who study this: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronobiology Seem to have come to a consensus that if we're going to get rid of DST, then health-wise it is best to have Standard Time year-round: > As an international organization of scientists dedicated to studying circadian and other biological rhythms, the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) engaged experts in the fi…

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.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#126

Post by cbanek »

Please god yes. I live in Arizona, where we have already gotten rid of it, but being sane in an insane world is still insanity. (You still have to deal with everyone else doing it.)

But as someone who spent a month fixing out a bug in Outlook about how birthdays show up one day late if they are on the time change day (it's a long story), please please fix this upstream.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#127

Post by heavenlyblue »

jt2190 wrote: post #121
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…

> Java seems to have its own TZDB so in general your OS and application layer might disagree about zones. More precisely, the Java Virtual Machine ( not the programming language) will, like any operating system running inside a VM, need to be patched with the new time information. Updating the host machine’s time info is not enough.

Why does JVM need to know about time zones?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#128

Post by mongol »

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…

Not following. What do you mean? Will he not need to stay up late if "all are on GMT"?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#129

Post by ianai »

input_sh wrote: post #108
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #63

What will it take for this to ACTUALLY happen? Every time change, I hear folks talk about how we should move to permanent DST, but nothing changes. I am tired of getting my hopes up.

EU voted to end it in 2019 (pretty decisively, 410 in favour and 192 against), and 2021 was supposed to be the final year. Unfortunately, it was postponed once again because of the pandemic. The implementation plan is for every country to choose which timezone to stay in (summer or winter), and I guess now is not the time for nations to figure out between themselves which timezone to stay in.

It’s not democracy if it can be postponed.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#130

Post by refurb »

andromeduck wrote: post #4

Can we get rid of timse zone and leap seconds too?

What benefit does getting rid of timezones get us?

Sure, it would be 9am GMT everywhere in the world, but it would still be "middle of the night" or "early morning" or "late evening" just the same. Everyone would just call that 9am GMT.

If you lived in London and wanted to talk to someone in Hong Kong, you'd still need to figure out what time makes sense for both of you. It might be 12pm GMT in London and Hong Kong, but your Hong Kong colleague is fast asleep at 12pm.

Post reply on HN