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

Time to Dump Time Zones

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 555 posts

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#421

Post by cheiVia0 »

reflexive wrote: post #313
cheiVia0 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just get up earlier and leave work earlier.

This is true if your only goal is to maximize the amount of daylight you have after work - taken to its logical conclusion, you would just go to work in the middle of the night and get off in the morning. However, if you add the constraint that you never want to go to bed before sunset, you will improve by adjusting the clock so sunset is at a relatively constant time.

Sunset changes day to day, are you really adjusting your clock every day to match sunset?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#422

Post by fao_ »

Asooka wrote: post #378
bluejekyll wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.

Or, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.

  Unusber
It might not be correct, but I would prefer "Unober"

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#423

Post by kleigenfreude »

fsiefken wrote: post #374
kleigenfreude wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps". You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term. Here is the short list of those: * Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mar…

Garamond I get, even though I think Quikscript would be even better. But what's to like about Inuinnaqtun that would make it suitable for an auxiliary or default languague? Wouldn't Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona or Ithkuil be better candidates?

> Wouldn't Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona or Ithkuil be better candidates?

I believe that we should use a language that has not only survived the test of time, but is still spoken by its native population and shows its expressiveness by its many words for forms of water. It also had 410 speakers according to a 2011 census, which is more than native speakers of Lojban (20-200), Elefen (30-100), Toki Pona (3-100), or Ithkuil (0-10).

As an example of its practical use compared to Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona, or Ithkuil, here is a stop sign in Inuinnaqtun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuinnaqtun#/media/File:Nutqar...

I've not seen a stop sign in Lojban, Elefen, Toki Pona, or Ithkuil. How could that be safe?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#424

Post by tom_mellior »

Dayshine wrote: post #391
tom_mellior wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my friend on the other side of the country says "I woke up at 9 this morning", I have a pretty good idea of what that means. Do you really? If your friend called, said "I woke up at 9 this morning", then hung up, you wouldn't really know what that means. Usually your friend would embed this information in some context, like "I woke up at 9 this morning, but I had an important meeting scheduled for 9:30, and my c…

> "I woke up at 9 this morning", Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep. > "I woke up at 22 hours this morning, Now I have no idea whether that's good/bad/early/late without a lookup table.

> Yes you do, you know he woke up possibly a little late, but didn't massively oversleep.

As I tried to illustrate in the rest of my post, there are a lot of (cultural, and other) assumptions that go into this. If they are usually at work at 8, then sleeping until 9 is pretty massive, especially if a long commute is involved.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#425

Post by emodendroket »

CydeWeys wrote: post #232
cyberferret wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because convention dictates that they have to be in the office between 9-5, or because those are the only times that they can actually do the work they are paid to do? I appreciate that factory assembly line workers, shopkeepers and many others have to have set hours, but even so, does that have to conform to the 9-5 standard? An example using Banks, an ancient entity that exemplified the 9-5 ethos: Here in Australia…

> Why on earth don't they do a 'double shift', whereby one smaller team comes in at, say 6am to start the preparation and open the doors at, say 7am and work until 1pm. Another team can come in at 11am and work through to 7pm, doing the cashing up and closing the doors at 6pm. The reason they don't do this is that that would require workers to stay at work later, which would take away from time spent with kids, eatin…

Well, not only that, but also keeping the thing open all day and night would cost extra and the most common tasks can be served by the machine anyway. And especially in the case of a bank we have to keep security in mind too.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#426

Post by emodendroket »

barnacs wrote: post #280
grzm wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Once you dump the notion of 'local time night is for sleeping, local time 9-5 is for working' all this seems like the next logical step to me." Can you expand on this? I read this as setting up schedules to potentially rotate everyone's sleep/work schedules, independent of the diurnal cycle. Though I wonder if I'm not reading too much into it.

I didn't really mean to imply that, but it would be interesting to see how reliant humans are on ~24 hour cycles apart from convention. It may be more deeply rooted in the way of nature than our work/sleep/leisure schedule within such cycles and changes in temperature and natural light may throw off our biology but with so many advances in artifical lighting and temperature control we shouldn't be so strict as to not…

Our bodies respond to natural light. If we're deprived of it we run on more of a 25-hour cycle.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#427

Post by calanya »

eutropia wrote: post #259
bluejekyll wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the mon…

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

For male scientists. Feels weird

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#428

Post by kleigenfreude »

astrodust wrote: post #345
kleigenfreude wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, is there really an efficiency gain to be had here? Not immediately. Any change from the status quo hurts businesses. There is no require change to code, logic, data, etc. that "helps". You can, however, make changes that inflict serious pain but are good long-term. Here is the short list of those: * Everyone going fully metric and use ISO for everything not metric. This would help things not crash into Mar…

Metric is universal but for a few stubborn hold-outs.

Stubborn is a bit harsh.

The UK Metrication Association in 2006 estimated the cost of converting road signs to be £80 million. Only the road signs.

Now consider UK and the US as a whole- all of the cost to the government, businesses, non-profits, etc.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#429

Post by fnj »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #344
nayuki wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this proposal does make things a lot easier because: twelveHour = twentyFourHour mod 12 But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12

> But instead with the status quo, we need to add this extra line of logic: > if twelveHour == 0 then twelveHour = 12 That's because humans naturally begin counting from 1, not 0. Mainly because we are counting objects, not adding an array index to a pointer.

Time is not a count. Time is a linear displacement, just like distance. As such, it only makes sense to start with 0. Did you ever see a ruler that starts with "1" at the very end? Of course not. It starts with "0", but they just don't bother to print the "0".

One inch is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. One hour is a displacement of "1" from the beginning. It's pretty stupid to arbitrarily call the beginning "12".

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#430

Post by vidarh »

wernercd wrote: post #287
jhbadger wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

Metric? Yeah... us Americans would never go for that garbage... :)

But you do.. Sort of. One of the original signatories of the treaty of the metre, and all of your silly units for length and mass at least are defined in terms of SI units as of 1959 [1] [2].

So when you give someone an inch, you're specifically giving 25.4mm ;)

[1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-lengt...

[2] https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...

Post reply on HN