4 ms·

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 (althou

by 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
  We already have "before sunrise" and "middle of the night" and "after dark" and sunrise and sunset and so on. Most of the time, there's little or no gain from attaching a number instead of using one of those. (I'm not arguing in favor of switching, just pointing out that we already have the descriptions for times of day)
  - dfbrown 10y ago
    Depending on the latitude sunset might be when people just start to get off work, or it might be well after dinner. Times have more semantic meaning than just the position of the sun.
  - joshAg 10y ago
    None of those are as exact as a specific time. Each of those phrases could be hours long. When you say before sunrise, did you mean 7:00 AM because it's the middle of winter or did you mean 4:00 AM because it's the middle of summer? I live at 37 degrees latitude, less than halfway to the north pole from the equator. It gets dark before 5 in the winter and after 9 in the summer. That's a 4 hours swing, and I'm not even at a very high latitude.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      My point was that conversationally, "the middle of the night" gets the point across that you got up early. It wouldn't even matter if the sun were up, it would still get the point across fine. Pedants that were concerned about the fuzziness of such words could hound the speaker for UTC.
      - rayiner 10y ago
        It doesn't. To me, "middle of the night" means midnight to one am. If you meant like 3 am to catch a red eye flight, then I've misunderstood you.
        10y ago
rayiner 10y ago
> 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. Time zones are a great example of complexity intrinsic to the problem. You can't get rid of such complexity, just move it around (or alternatively make your solution less useful). Getting rid of time zones does simplify time calculations for a computer. But it increases complexity elsewhere and makes computers less useful.
wglb 10y ago
There is a gap in reasoning here. Prior to timezones, all localities had their own time, and it was generally based on solar time. Thus, abolishing time zones could mean going back to local solar time, but the article presumes that this means going to UTC. (Whether it is UT1 or UT2, it doesn't say). This isn't all that complicated. Pick some astronomically-based event, say when the sun is at the zenith on equinox, and tie local time to that. Then, given that you have coordinates for every significant place on earth, it is an easy computer calculation to calculate the delta of time to where your uncle was sleeping. Similarly, the offset to UTC is trivially available. This is a calculation that ham radio operators, among others, already use to know what UTC the sunset or sunrise is (these are interesting times due to ionosphere changes around those times) at some random distant place far away, say Vanuatu.

by itp 10y ago

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
We already have "before sunrise" and "middle of the night" and "after dark" and sunrise and sunset and so on. Most of the time, there's little or no gain from attaching a number instead of using one of those. (I'm not arguing in favor of switching, just pointing out that we already have the descriptions for times of day)
- dfbrown 10y ago
  Depending on the latitude sunset might be when people just start to get off work, or it might be well after dinner. Times have more semantic meaning than just the position of the sun.
- joshAg 10y ago
  None of those are as exact as a specific time. Each of those phrases could be hours long. When you say before sunrise, did you mean 7:00 AM because it's the middle of winter or did you mean 4:00 AM because it's the middle of summer? I live at 37 degrees latitude, less than halfway to the north pole from the equator. It gets dark before 5 in the winter and after 9 in the summer. That's a 4 hours swing, and I'm not even at a very high latitude.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    My point was that conversationally, "the middle of the night" gets the point across that you got up early. It wouldn't even matter if the sun were up, it would still get the point across fine. Pedants that were concerned about the fuzziness of such words could hound the speaker for UTC.
    - rayiner 10y ago
      It doesn't. To me, "middle of the night" means midnight to one am. If you meant like 3 am to catch a red eye flight, then I've misunderstood you.
      - 10y ago

rayiner 10y ago

> 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. Time zones are a great example of complexity intrinsic to the problem. You can't get rid of such complexity, just move it around (or alternatively make your solution less useful). Getting rid of time zones does simplify time calculations for a computer. But it increases complexity elsewhere and makes computers less useful.

wglb 10y ago

There is a gap in reasoning here. Prior to timezones, all localities had their own time, and it was generally based on solar time. Thus, abolishing time zones could mean going back to local solar time, but the article presumes that this means going to UTC. (Whether it is UT1 or UT2, it doesn't say). This isn't all that complicated. Pick some astronomically-based event, say when the sun is at the zenith on equinox, and tie local time to that. Then, given that you have coordinates for every significant place on earth, it is an easy computer calculation to calculate the delta of time to where your uncle was sleeping. Similarly, the offset to UTC is trivially available. This is a calculation that ham radio operators, among others, already use to know what UTC the sunset or sunrise is (these are interesting times due to ionosphere changes around those times) at some random distant place far away, say Vanuatu.