Time to Dump Time Zones • Hacker News Board

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#551

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #542

mark-r wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, I toyed with the idea of metric time. I realized it wouldn't work when I thought about TV shows - a 30 minute show would need to be condensed into 2 14.4 minute centi-days. That would require losing 1.2 minutes of commercials, never gonna happen.

A half hour in decimal time (half a deciday), would be 72 minutes normal time. A quarter decimal hour/deciday would be 36 normal minutes, which is pretty close and gives even more time for ads. You could also split time further into thirds, which would work even better with a base 12 system.

[deleted]

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#552

Post by mark-r » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #550

mark-r wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed you'd be breaking the units into tenths all the way down, not quarters as you advocate here. Would certainly solve the problem though, maybe even too well.

The units are based on 10, but nothing stops people from dividing it further. Just as someone might use a unit of "half a kilometer" or "half a liter", which are other base 10 units.

After giving this some more thought, I realize you're right. We already deal with programs starting on xx:30, now we'd just get used to things starting at x.25, x.50, and x.75. Instead of running from 8:00 to 8:30 PM, a show might run from 8.00 to 8.25.

6 minutes is too much time though, if you tried to fill that with ads you'd lose your audience fast.

Dividing into thirds doesn't really work in a decimal system.

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#553

Post by xom » Tue, Nov 08, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

bluejekyll wrote: post #160

minznerjosh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

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…

While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#554

Post by wtfishackernews » Wed, Nov 09, 2016, 12:12 PM UTC

powvans wrote: post #102

I've spent the last several years developing applications that have calendaring at the core, where users collaborate across timezones, and where proper timezone handling is expected. Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is, the technical in and out, the practical miracle that it all works in almost all the cases, that all the error prone complexity can be eliminated by acknowledging that i…

>Just try to explain to everyday people just how hard the problem is

A bit off topic but Computerphile / Tom Scott did an excellent video doing that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Re: Time to Dump Time Zones

#555

Post by snvzz » Sun, Nov 20, 2016, 5:01 PM UTC

minznerjosh wrote: post #61

darawk wrote: post #17

Hmm...this is an interesting idea. However, the core of the argument seems to be this: > “The economy — that’s all of us — would receive a permanent ‘harmonization dividend’ ”— the efficiency benefits that come from a unified time zone. But this editorial is pretty light on actually supporting that. The basic argument seems to be that it reduces 'translation costs'. But..does it? What about the benefits of being able…

This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation. I would be in favor of doing away with DST and also eschewing AM/PM in favor of a 24-hour clock. I'm surprised this article didn't mentio…

> This hits the nail on the head. Abandoning time zones would only make sense if there were no more need for time translation. But you'd still need to translate for the sake of biological clocks, and without time zones it would become more challenging to communicate that translation.

I argue it'd avoid mistakes, such as the assumption it's dark at the other clock's 18h because it is here.