Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time • Hacker News Board

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#151

Post by dahart » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #139

dahart wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know how someone ever could think this is a good idea Why is that? Whether or not it’s still a good idea, lots of people have thought so in the past. You don’t see the fact that governments have implemented it as evidence that there has been consensus and something legitimate there you might have missed? I honestly don’t care if daylight saving is abolished, but when I was younger, I used to think like you…

> What, exactly, is “evil” about that? People literally die because of the change. Every year, extra people die so you can enjoy more sunshine in summer evenings. You dismissed these deaths because you "like what happens".

I did not dismiss any deaths. What are you referring to, the morning commute? Daylight Savings time was invented before the mass morning commute via car even existed. If there are reasons to get rid of DST now for public safety, I’m for it.

But if avoiding fatal car crashes is the goal... maybe getting rid of cars is the solution, rather than obsessing over the very marginal effects of DST?

Do you drive a car?

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#152

Post by ghaff » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:23 PM UTC

wlll wrote: post #143

hunter2_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, we could all just use UTC and set our own schedules with infinite granularity based on sunrise/sunset. I'm good with that.

That's pretty much what I do. I've worked remotely as a contractor (from the UK for mostly US companies) and I've rarely set an alarm for work in over 10 years. DST changes just slip past.

I used to care a lot about DST because I live far east in a timezone (Boston area) and had fairly fixed working hours. These days I'm remote and besides a few relatively early meetings, I'm pretty flexible so I don't really care at this point what effective timezone I'm in (within reason) over the course of a year. I might even feel at this point that the very minor annoyance of changing clocks and syncing with worldwide DST changes doesn't really have offsetting benefits for me.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#153

Post by imglorp » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #110

Jabbles wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't go away, software will still be needed for when states inevitably change their timezones.

Right. OP's is more an argument against time zones than Daylight Saving Time. Honestly though, this should only be a problem for the small subset of embedded software without access to the Internet. If major OSes time zone databases are not able to be updated independently of the rest of the OS, that's kind of on them. We know time zone boundaries have been changing arbitrarily for decades, so shouldn't this be a sol…

Not against zones; I was hoping to shine a light on all the complexity around the TZDB, which is a mapping of zones to switchover times. Eg,

    $ zdump -v US/Eastern | grep 2020
    US/Eastern  Sun Mar  8 06:59:59 2020 UT = Sun Mar  8 01:59:59 2020 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
    US/Eastern  Sun Mar  8 07:00:00 2020 UT = Sun Mar  8 03:00:00 2020 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
    US/Eastern  Sun Nov  1 05:59:59 2020 UT = Sun Nov  1 01:59:59 2020 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
    US/Eastern  Sun Nov  1 06:00:00 2020 UT = Sun Nov  1 01:00:00 2020 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

If everyone simply picked a zone and stayed there, without the switching schedule above, you'd only need a mapping of zone to GMT offset and be done with it.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#154

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

zwily wrote: post #122

hunter2_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at a big tech company for half a decade, and without fail, every year there was some kind of serious bug caused by DST.

Things either happened twice or never, it was always really painful. In any growth company, I would imagine that these things keep occurring, as people haven't hit the bugs themselves yet.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#155

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:26 PM UTC

Right on. About time. My wife and I live in Arizona - no daylight saving time.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#156

Post by animal_spirits » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #107

mannykannot wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hate the idea of losing an hour off summer evenings. Of course, the rational solution is for society to adjust its schedule, but that will never happen.

But you'll be gaining an hour of summer nights. With DST, the sun goes down way too late, around 10pm in summer. With the climate as it currently is, summers have become unbearably hot and this will probably get worse in the future. When I get home from work on a summer day, around 18:00-ish. being outside is unbearable. It doesn't get comfortable outside until the sun goes down. By moving the clock forward, you're r…

It really depends on where you live, where I am at in the Midwest United States, as soon as I'm off from work in the summer I want to spend every waking minute outside if possible

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#157

Post by dahart » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

sojournerc wrote: post #137

dahart wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you stay on DST through the winter, most places in the US will have a morning commute in the dark. The reason we switch is to keep the sunrise just slightly more even. The annual swing in sunrise time is just under 3 hours. With a DST switch, the swing becomes less than 2 hours, at the cost of switching twice.

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 hours are 9-5, and that most people will wake ~2 hours before work to get ready, then updating the clocks relative to the work day does, in fact, give you more daylight evening time in the summer.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#158

Post by _ph_ » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:28 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.

That is mostly an illusion. Over time, the day cycle aligns with the sun, not what the clock says. People in places which are on the west side of the corresponding timezone tend to do things later than those on the east side. And since introduction of the DST, a lot of countries shifted their typical timepoints towards "later" to compensate for it.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#159

Post by adrianmonk » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #127

jt2190 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's not the VM engine (JIT compiler, etc.) itself, of course. It's a data file that resides in the Java Runtime Environment directory, and some of the standard library code uses this file.

I assume it's done this way because it's the most foolproof way to get consistency across all platforms.

If Java did delegate, it might be hard (or even impossible?) to get the same behavior out of all the different underlying APIs on each platform. And it would be challenging to create the tests to validate that it really does behave consistently.

Also, although it creates extra maintenance work, it has the advantage that it decouples Java-level and OS-level updates. Suppose development machines run one OS (with its TZ data) but QA and production run a different OS. To harmonize environments as closely as possible, it's helpful that you can keep the TZ data versions on all JVMs in sync without relying on multiple OS vendors' patch processes to enable that.

Re: Governments Worldwide Consider Ditching Daylight Saving Time

#160

Post by contravariant » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

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.

Here's hoping we can finally end the madness of having (temporary) UTC+2:00 in places west of Greenwich.