5 ms·

I changed all my clocks awhile ago to UTC 24 hour. My life is 0 to 23 as it should be. An hour is an array index between that range. UTC is the standard. Standa

I changed all my clocks awhile ago to UTC 24 hour. My life is 0 to 23 as it should be. An hour is an array index between that range. UTC is the standard. Standards are great. Like headphone jacks. Imagine (john lennon voice) everyone living this way. Stop thinking your 23 must be night time and my 7 must be start of day. They are just numbers. It's 20 right now. What does 20 mean? Nothing, it's just a pointer.

spacehunt 10y ago
For recording events that happened, sure. For future events (eg. meetings at 10am every Tuesday), unfortunately we still need to deal with timezones...
- andrewfromx 10y ago
  no that kind of thinking is what causes world wars! Everyone can agree on 0 to 23 the whole world over and make that "Tuesday 10am" meeting.
  - amptorn 10y ago
    What does "am" mean?
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  No, the idea is that everyone uses UTC. There is no benefit to individual timezones.
  - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
    Then everyone outside the tropics has to adjust their daily schedule as the seasons change. Measured time is a tool that exists for the convenience of man not computers or their programmers.
    - andrewfromx 10y ago
      u think 7 implies light? And 22 implies dark? Or vice versa? They are just numbers!
    - sdoering 10y ago
      I agree. Also swatch tried this. The respective watch still resides in my collection. Swatch beat (or was it beep) decided the day into 1000 pieces and had no timezones. Clearly it worked and no one uses the old system anymore. <irony off> For me timezones are OK. They are a cultural construct developed to accommodate the custom of counting the hours from sunrise (later midnight) and higher numbers meaning later in the day. Not every sociocultural construct is bad just because it causes us code monkeys some trouble. And believe me. Trouble it causes day in day out to me.
      - spacehunt 10y ago
        Ah the Swatch Internet Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ... I remember implementing this for a local BBS, nobody could figure out how it worked.
      - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
        They arrogantly based it on UTC+1. Might have been useful of it was sane
        WorldMaker 10y ago
        Yes, because UTC itself is a non-arrogant, sane default. Clearly the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is the center of the Earth and always will be.~
      - andrewfromx 10y ago
        but try living UTC 24 yourself. Change all your own clocks. I did awhile ago and I'll never go back even though I live in Los Angeles. Everyone can do this as well and be liberated from time.
nradov 10y ago
Alternatively we could go back to the old approach from before time zones and make 12:00 PM wherever you are be the time at which the sun is at its zenith that day. It's obviously kind of silly but could actually work now that many people tell time with GPS linked devices.
- amptorn 10y ago
  Do you know why we invented time zones?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Train crashes. Seriously. Trains presented the first time that 1) humans could travel at a sustained rate above about 10 mph, and 2) presented roadways on which it wasn't possible to spot oncoming traffic and decide, at any point, to simply pull to the side to let it pass. There was also the matter of coordinating service with local pick-up and drop-off, and whatnot. So now you had a requirement for all points along a linear track to actually agree on the answer to the question "what time is it now?" "Local noon" was no longer an adequate solution, or at least, it wasn't adequate with the means available at the time for computing offsets between your local noon, my local noon, and Train Time. Railroad engineers (train drivers), track switching controls, and other elements also had to be, or could be, coordinated. Uncoordinated switching leads to packet collisions, or in this case, literal train wrecks. Which are messy, bad publicity, and discourage business. Hourly offsets were reasonably close to solar time (generally no more than 30 minutes off), and abstracted enough complexity that offsets could be calculated (a given train was unlikely to cross two time zones in a day). This happened in 1883. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html
- tzs 10y ago
  Alternatively to that alternative approach, instead of making local noon be the anchor point, make local sunrise the anchor point: the sun rises at 6 AM. Note that this has the side effect of automatically making it so the extra daylight during times of the year with more daylight come at the end of the working day, without the need for daylight savings time.
mjevans 10y ago
I'd like to see something to drive the adoption of 'local relative' offsets. It has to be better than 9am is breakfast, noon is lunch, and 6pm is dinner; in that it has to be short and memorable. The time of an event that happened needs to just be UTC; period. The time that something is planned might not be an event, but could be a relative reference.
- serge2k 10y ago
  "local relative" What does that even mean?
itp 10y ago
I used to be firmly in your camp, and then I read this: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish For the tl;dr crowd, pulled from that article (although I highly recommend you just read it): Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also: - causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable - necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time - convolutes timetables, where present - means "days" are no longer the same as "days" - complicates both secular and religious law - is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people - makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world - does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time - is not simpler. As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
- andrewfromx 10y ago
  you might have a point (or two haha) but all I can say is try it. Goto UTC and see how you like/hate it. Also what if not everyone did this but every programmer the world over did this. It would be such a wonderful programmer bonding thing where if you are a serious developer, you live in your life in UTC 24.
- jedrek 10y ago
  The true tl;dr is this: hours are meta-information. Just like 5am is very early in every time zone, 11pm is late. We expect businesses to be open from 8-11 to 16-19, just like we expect everybody to be awake between 11-21. Now, remove that bit of metadata and we need to figure out how to encode/transmit it again. At the end of the day, we just recreate time zones, with the added downside of removing a common language we have while traveling - Visit SF from the UK and not only are you jetlagged, but you need to remember that every time of the day you're used to needs to be shifted by 8 hours. - and just... talking to people in other time zones. Right now, if you post a story on HN about needing to get up for work at 4:30am, everybody will understand: this person gets up for work really early! Move to UTC and it means nothing.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dfbrown 10y ago
Timezones are useful because they let us answer the question "what point in the day is it at <location>." People's schedules are more or less aligned around local sunrise and sunset so knowing what time of day it is at a location important when communicating with people in that location. See https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish China already tried getting rid of time zones, and even though it's only 5 time zones wide it caused enough issues that far western provinces use their own unofficial local time: http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...
serge2k 10y ago
You realize this doesn't actually effect anything except making you and anyone you interact with have to do the mental math for the correct offset? The only reason to use UTC is so you can compare timing of geographically diverse events easily (plus things like daylight savings). Local time is still local tmie.

spacehunt 10y ago

For recording events that happened, sure. For future events (eg. meetings at 10am every Tuesday), unfortunately we still need to deal with timezones...

andrewfromx 10y ago
no that kind of thinking is what causes world wars! Everyone can agree on 0 to 23 the whole world over and make that "Tuesday 10am" meeting.
- amptorn 10y ago
  What does "am" mean?
thaumasiotes 10y ago
No, the idea is that everyone uses UTC. There is no benefit to individual timezones.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  Then everyone outside the tropics has to adjust their daily schedule as the seasons change. Measured time is a tool that exists for the convenience of man not computers or their programmers.
  - andrewfromx 10y ago
    u think 7 implies light? And 22 implies dark? Or vice versa? They are just numbers!
  - sdoering 10y ago
    I agree. Also swatch tried this. The respective watch still resides in my collection. Swatch beat (or was it beep) decided the day into 1000 pieces and had no timezones. Clearly it worked and no one uses the old system anymore. <irony off> For me timezones are OK. They are a cultural construct developed to accommodate the custom of counting the hours from sunrise (later midnight) and higher numbers meaning later in the day. Not every sociocultural construct is bad just because it causes us code monkeys some trouble. And believe me. Trouble it causes day in day out to me.
    - spacehunt 10y ago
      Ah the Swatch Internet Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time ... I remember implementing this for a local BBS, nobody could figure out how it worked.
    - kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
      They arrogantly based it on UTC+1. Might have been useful of it was sane
      - WorldMaker 10y ago
        Yes, because UTC itself is a non-arrogant, sane default. Clearly the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is the center of the Earth and always will be.~
    - andrewfromx 10y ago
      but try living UTC 24 yourself. Change all your own clocks. I did awhile ago and I'll never go back even though I live in Los Angeles. Everyone can do this as well and be liberated from time.

nradov 10y ago

Alternatively we could go back to the old approach from before time zones and make 12:00 PM wherever you are be the time at which the sun is at its zenith that day. It's obviously kind of silly but could actually work now that many people tell time with GPS linked devices.

amptorn 10y ago
Do you know why we invented time zones?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Train crashes. Seriously. Trains presented the first time that 1) humans could travel at a sustained rate above about 10 mph, and 2) presented roadways on which it wasn't possible to spot oncoming traffic and decide, at any point, to simply pull to the side to let it pass. There was also the matter of coordinating service with local pick-up and drop-off, and whatnot. So now you had a requirement for all points along a linear track to actually agree on the answer to the question "what time is it now?" "Local noon" was no longer an adequate solution, or at least, it wasn't adequate with the means available at the time for computing offsets between your local noon, my local noon, and Train Time. Railroad engineers (train drivers), track switching controls, and other elements also had to be, or could be, coordinated. Uncoordinated switching leads to packet collisions, or in this case, literal train wrecks. Which are messy, bad publicity, and discourage business. Hourly offsets were reasonably close to solar time (generally no more than 30 minutes off), and abstracted enough complexity that offsets could be calculated (a given train was unlikely to cross two time zones in a day). This happened in 1883. https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html https://www.timeanddate.com/time/time-zones-history.html
tzs 10y ago
Alternatively to that alternative approach, instead of making local noon be the anchor point, make local sunrise the anchor point: the sun rises at 6 AM. Note that this has the side effect of automatically making it so the extra daylight during times of the year with more daylight come at the end of the working day, without the need for daylight savings time.

mjevans 10y ago

I'd like to see something to drive the adoption of 'local relative' offsets. It has to be better than 9am is breakfast, noon is lunch, and 6pm is dinner; in that it has to be short and memorable. The time of an event that happened needs to just be UTC; period. The time that something is planned might not be an event, but could be a relative reference.

serge2k 10y ago
"local relative" What does that even mean?

itp 10y ago

I used to be firmly in your camp, and then I read this: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish For the tl;dr crowd, pulled from that article (although I highly recommend you just read it): Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also: - causes the question "What time is it there?" to be useless/unanswerable - necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time - convolutes timetables, where present - means "days" are no longer the same as "days" - complicates both secular and religious law - is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people - makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world - does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time - is not simpler. As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

andrewfromx 10y ago
you might have a point (or two haha) but all I can say is try it. Goto UTC and see how you like/hate it. Also what if not everyone did this but every programmer the world over did this. It would be such a wonderful programmer bonding thing where if you are a serious developer, you live in your life in UTC 24.
jedrek 10y ago
The true tl;dr is this: hours are meta-information. Just like 5am is very early in every time zone, 11pm is late. We expect businesses to be open from 8-11 to 16-19, just like we expect everybody to be awake between 11-21. Now, remove that bit of metadata and we need to figure out how to encode/transmit it again. At the end of the day, we just recreate time zones, with the added downside of removing a common language we have while traveling - Visit SF from the UK and not only are you jetlagged, but you need to remember that every time of the day you're used to needs to be shifted by 8 hours. - and just... talking to people in other time zones. Right now, if you post a story on HN about needing to get up for work at 4:30am, everybody will understand: this person gets up for work really early! Move to UTC and it means nothing.
- maxerickson 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dfbrown 10y ago

Timezones are useful because they let us answer the question "what point in the day is it at <location>." People's schedules are more or less aligned around local sunrise and sunset so knowing what time of day it is at a location important when communicating with people in that location. See https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish China already tried getting rid of time zones, and even though it's only 5 time zones wide it caused enough issues that far western provinces use their own unofficial local time: http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-has-one-time-zone-and-thats-a-problem/281136/ http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/china-only-...

serge2k 10y ago

You realize this doesn't actually effect anything except making you and anyone you interact with have to do the mental math for the correct offset? The only reason to use UTC is so you can compare timing of geographically diverse events easily (plus things like daylight savings). Local time is still local tmie.