4 ms·

I like DST, it's a pragmatic political solution to a sociological problem. Here's the problem. During summer, people want to enjoy more sunlight during the eve

I like DST, it's a pragmatic political solution to a sociological problem. Here's the problem. During summer, people want to enjoy more sunlight during the evening and do not care about having that much sunlight early mornings. So some countries implement DST by advancing the clock by one hour. This solves the problem but seems like a bit of a hack and is painful for developers to deal with. Now, you could say that this could be very easily solved by just having people come earlier to work during summer and having the shops having different hours during summer time and winter time. This would be cleaner, there wouldn't be the DST transition and less headaches for us poor souls who have to develop applications to deal with it. The problem with the simple clean solution is that convincing employers to change their office hours would be much harder, you'd need to fight against inertia. It'd be also very difficult to codify into laws due to the widely differing operating hours from business to business. Likewise, changing the time people eat wouldn't necessarily work because people tend to be irrational about things like time and wouldn't actually eat one hour earlier in summer which would also make it difficult to get restaurants to change their operating hours... The world is messy, people are messy and tend to resist change. So the DST is a simple hack that allows people to get what they want without an overly high cognitive surcharge and work to make that change. I work from home as a freelancer so I have a much more flexible schedule that most but I still like having DST because my friends who do not have that flexibility end up with more daylight hours in Summer.. I've lived in countries with and without DST and, honestly, I love the added daylight hours in the evening, it's enjoyable and it's a huge plus compared to countries that do not have it. I consider the very slight jetlag during the transition worth it (and honestly one hour jetlag is quite easy to handle). (Of course, if you asked me about DST last year when I was dealing with a bug that was triggered by it, I'd be ranting a lot more :-))

paulddraper 10y ago
"DST is a simple hack" You lost me.
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  Well, that's actually a very precise explanation of DST in a nutshell: like other "simple hacks", it is very simple in theory. The complexity inherent in the various details and in interacting with its surroundings (hello 2:00 AM, hello crontab) forces the hack maker and everyone else to invent more hacks, which gradually become less simple, until it's a tangled web of spaghetti hacks-upon-hacks-upon-hacks, with The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young dwelling somewhere in the middle of it all.
  - nicolas_t 10y ago
    Thanks! you described it better than I could :-)
projectramo 10y ago
Look around for articles on the cost of DST. Here is one estimate at nearly half a billion a year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-time-cost-financial-lost-sleep_n_2813799.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-tim...
- acid__ 10y ago
  $434 million / $18.5 trillion = 0.000027 0.0027% of the GDP :)
- nicolas_t 10y ago
  The problem is that it's very difficult to really quantify the long term effects of DST. I know for example, that there's an increase in heart attacks the first 3 weekdays of switching to DST so that seems bad but then the researcher noted that when reverting back to winter time, people had a decreased rate of heart attacks due to having had an extra hour of sleep. It's things like this that makes me think that it's not so clear cut. There's also research that shows that DST reduces the amount of car accidents: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_and_Long_Run_Effects_of_Daylight_Saving_Time_on_Fatal_Automobile_Crashes https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_a... On the contrary to a lot of studies, this study finds little proof of an increase in accidents in the first few days after the change and explains that by the fact that they considered a higher number of years (28 years) than most research. The problem is that with DST we have the typical situation of having short term effects are relatively easy to study and will tend to be negative (due to the one less hour of sleep) but with potential long term effects that are beneficial but hard to quantify. As humans we tend to discount long term effects anyway so the discussion quickly focuses on the negatives.

paulddraper 10y ago

"DST is a simple hack" You lost me.

Piskvorrr 10y ago
Well, that's actually a very precise explanation of DST in a nutshell: like other "simple hacks", it is very simple in theory. The complexity inherent in the various details and in interacting with its surroundings (hello 2:00 AM, hello crontab) forces the hack maker and everyone else to invent more hacks, which gradually become less simple, until it's a tangled web of spaghetti hacks-upon-hacks-upon-hacks, with The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young dwelling somewhere in the middle of it all.
- nicolas_t 10y ago
  Thanks! you described it better than I could :-)

projectramo 10y ago

Look around for articles on the cost of DST. Here is one estimate at nearly half a billion a year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-time-cost-financial-lost-sleep_n_2813799.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/10/daylight-saving-tim...

acid__ 10y ago
$434 million / $18.5 trillion = 0.000027 0.0027% of the GDP :)
nicolas_t 10y ago
The problem is that it's very difficult to really quantify the long term effects of DST. I know for example, that there's an increase in heart attacks the first 3 weekdays of switching to DST so that seems bad but then the researcher noted that when reverting back to winter time, people had a decreased rate of heart attacks due to having had an extra hour of sleep. It's things like this that makes me think that it's not so clear cut. There's also research that shows that DST reduces the amount of car accidents: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_and_Long_Run_Effects_of_Daylight_Saving_Time_on_Fatal_Automobile_Crashes https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4985756_The_Short_a... On the contrary to a lot of studies, this study finds little proof of an increase in accidents in the first few days after the change and explains that by the fact that they considered a higher number of years (28 years) than most research. The problem is that with DST we have the typical situation of having short term effects are relatively easy to study and will tend to be negative (due to the one less hour of sleep) but with potential long term effects that are beneficial but hard to quantify. As humans we tend to discount long term effects anyway so the discussion quickly focuses on the negatives.