5 ms·

100 Years Later, the Madness of Daylight Saving Time Endures

33 points by mkempe 9y ago

0xcafecafe 9y ago
I hope this gets done away with sooner rather than later. While I enjoy the extra one hour in the weekend before the holiday season, the spring forward generally causes me a headache lasting about a week.
- kevindqc 9y ago
  Because you're missing one hour of sleep? Maybe try to ease into it? 2-3 days before it happens, start getting up 15 minutes earlier. Then 30 minutes. Then 45 minutes. Then when its daylight saving get up on time (which would be 60 minutes earlier than usual, but only 15 minutes earlier than the day before).
- soperj 9y ago
  Just do it in a staged fashion for spring. I'm currently 40 minutes ahead, started in the beginning of february.
hawktheslayer 9y ago
This video is a must-share twice a year, especially for people who have moved to Arizona to free themselves from the madness. https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo
eliben 9y ago
These keep coming out, but I guess I just don't get it. Say, looking at it from the POV of parents with daycare/school-aged kids. Let's say that school always starts at 8, and kids wake up at 7. Full-day school/aftercare etc. is done by 5 PM or so. During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc. Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?
- jstalin 9y ago
  Just stay in daylight saving time, don't go back.
  - soperj 9y ago
    Go another hour further even.
  - eliben 9y ago
    The issue with this is the late sunrise in the winter. In mid-Jan in LA the sun rises at ~7AM. It would rise at 8AM with daylight savings in winter. This sucks terribly since it moves your whole commute into dark; kids walk to school in the dark, etc. It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)
    - ant512 9y ago
      That's called out at the end of the article: "But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."
    - nradov 9y ago
      I see nothing depressing about starting in the dark.
  - makosdv 9y ago
    There is a bill proposed here in Florida to do just that. We're already in DST 8 months out of the year anyway.
  - labster 9y ago
    I live a few miles from the 120th meridian in PST, and I enjoy astronomy. So let's just avoid DST completely, please. Don't know why anyone wants to live in DST all year, which is effectively just pretending you live 15 degrees to the east of where you are. On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.
jstalin 9y ago
The only redeeming quality of moving to Arizona has been the lack of daylight saving time.
BenjiWiebe 9y ago
I personally don't care if the reasons are bad. I can't explain why, but I look forward to daylight savings time and dread when it ends.
joncrane 9y ago
I remember reading somewhere that the whole switching time by an hour twice a year thing literally kills people every year. The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in traffic fatalities on those days. My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me. My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming positive.
- CDRdude 9y ago
  >My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me. I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
fhood 9y ago
> and even browned out lawns unaccustomed to so much daylight ...wait, what? What am I missing here?
- samjohnson 9y ago
  Are you missing that the quote is from a sentence listing example complaints and not actual affects of daylight saving?
  - fhood 9y ago
    I refuse to believe that people actually though the government was literally altering time itself.
- Tehnix 9y ago
  Is your question if lawns can brown out from too much daylight? Because they certainly can, and e.g. in South Korea they were brown most of the summer. (in reality, it's probably more a mix dry, warmth and light).
  - fhood 9y ago
    Sure, but would daylight savings be the cause?
bhauer 9y ago
Since several DST articles have been posted this week as we approach a DST-event weekend, I have found it interesting to read the comments on HN. My own comment [1] on Florida's vote to use permanent DST (assuming the federal government will allow it) expressed my sentiment as succinctly as I could. But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent "daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What anti-DST means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone eastward, but do so and be done with clock adjustments once and for all. And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to solve—just remove it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mkempe 9y ago
Why is this marked "[dupe]"? this article is dated March 9 and was not previously posted.
seanalltogether 9y ago
I remember how weird it felt the first time I visited Hawaii, where the sun year round comes up around 6am and goes down around 6pm. You could feel the cultural response to this. People were waking up earlier then I was used to, out shopping earlier then i was used to, and eating dinner earlier then I was used to. Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.
dennisdamenace 9y ago
How much expense goes into software which needs to support daylight savings? How many bugs have occurred because of it? Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for subtracting then add one hour for the year.
- l9k 9y ago
  How many bugs will pop up if we stop having DST?

33 points by mkempe 9y ago

I hope this gets done away with sooner rather than later. While I enjoy the extra one hour in the weekend before the holiday season, the spring forward generally causes me a headache lasting about a week.

kevindqc 9y ago
Because you're missing one hour of sleep? Maybe try to ease into it? 2-3 days before it happens, start getting up 15 minutes earlier. Then 30 minutes. Then 45 minutes. Then when its daylight saving get up on time (which would be 60 minutes earlier than usual, but only 15 minutes earlier than the day before).
soperj 9y ago
Just do it in a staged fashion for spring. I'm currently 40 minutes ahead, started in the beginning of february.

hawktheslayer 9y ago

This video is a must-share twice a year, especially for people who have moved to Arizona to free themselves from the madness. https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo https://youtu.be/k4EUTMPuvHo

eliben 9y ago

These keep coming out, but I guess I just don't get it. Say, looking at it from the POV of parents with daycare/school-aged kids. Let's say that school always starts at 8, and kids wake up at 7. Full-day school/aftercare etc. is done by 5 PM or so. During the summer in California, with daylight savings, the sun will rise at ~6 AM and set at 8 PM. The morning sun is mostly useless, at least for me. But 3 hours of sun after school ends is nice for kids to be outside, it's warmer, etc. Without daylight savings, the sun would rise even earlier at ~5AM and set at 7 PM. So we've lost an hour of evening sun for an our of super-early morning. Sounds like a bad deal to me, but what am I missing?

jstalin 9y ago
Just stay in daylight saving time, don't go back.
- soperj 9y ago
  Go another hour further even.
- eliben 9y ago
  The issue with this is the late sunrise in the winter. In mid-Jan in LA the sun rises at ~7AM. It would rise at 8AM with daylight savings in winter. This sucks terribly since it moves your whole commute into dark; kids walk to school in the dark, etc. It's pretty depressing to start the day in the dark, to be honest (with apologies to folks living in very northern or southern latitudes)
  - ant512 9y ago
    That's called out at the end of the article: "But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness."
  - nradov 9y ago
    I see nothing depressing about starting in the dark.
- makosdv 9y ago
  There is a bill proposed here in Florida to do just that. We're already in DST 8 months out of the year anyway.
- labster 9y ago
  I live a few miles from the 120th meridian in PST, and I enjoy astronomy. So let's just avoid DST completely, please. Don't know why anyone wants to live in DST all year, which is effectively just pretending you live 15 degrees to the east of where you are. On the other hand, leap seconds can die in a fire. Let's only correct that once a century, because no one outside of astronomy cares about that level of astronomical accuracy.

jstalin 9y ago

The only redeeming quality of moving to Arizona has been the lack of daylight saving time.

BenjiWiebe 9y ago

I personally don't care if the reasons are bad. I can't explain why, but I look forward to daylight savings time and dread when it ends.

joncrane 9y ago

I remember reading somewhere that the whole switching time by an hour twice a year thing literally kills people every year. The premise was that on the days right after the switch to the later sunrise schedule, sleepy people that were used to driving to work in daylight are now driving to work at night, and there's a statistically significant increase in traffic fatalities on those days. My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me. My goal in life is to perform a us government sponsored cost-benefit analysis for ending "daylight savings time" and have it come out as an overwhelming positive.

CDRdude 9y ago
>My source has been lost to the sands of time, but it rings true for me. I think it is mentioned in Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

fhood 9y ago

> and even browned out lawns unaccustomed to so much daylight ...wait, what? What am I missing here?

samjohnson 9y ago
Are you missing that the quote is from a sentence listing example complaints and not actual affects of daylight saving?
- fhood 9y ago
  I refuse to believe that people actually though the government was literally altering time itself.
Tehnix 9y ago
Is your question if lawns can brown out from too much daylight? Because they certainly can, and e.g. in South Korea they were brown most of the summer. (in reality, it's probably more a mix dry, warmth and light).
- fhood 9y ago
  Sure, but would daylight savings be the cause?

bhauer 9y ago

Since several DST articles have been posted this week as we approach a DST-event weekend, I have found it interesting to read the comments on HN. My own comment [1] on Florida's vote to use permanent DST (assuming the federal government will allow it) expressed my sentiment as succinctly as I could. But I want to make one more point to counter a sentiment I've seen in these threads. Most of us who out of convenience characterize ourselves as "anti-DST" don't much care if we have permanent standard time or permanent "daylight-saving" (summer) time. The specific singular timezone we select is inconsequential in my mind, as long as it is in fact singular. What anti-DST means to me is being opposed to the twice-annual madness of changing every clock in the nation. As I said in my other comment, these clock changes cause countless small nuisances, immeasurable drowsiness and lost productivity, and a non-trivial number of injuries or worse. So shift every state one timezone eastward, but do so and be done with clock adjustments once and for all. And yes, there are bigger problems in the world. But unlike solving healthcare, abolishing DST is just a decision. There's no hard problem to solve—just remove it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547740

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mkempe 9y ago

Why is this marked "[dupe]"? this article is dated March 9 and was not previously posted.

seanalltogether 9y ago

I remember how weird it felt the first time I visited Hawaii, where the sun year round comes up around 6am and goes down around 6pm. You could feel the cultural response to this. People were waking up earlier then I was used to, out shopping earlier then i was used to, and eating dinner earlier then I was used to. Nowadays it makes sense to me how much our schedules have been dictated by the effects of daylight savings. Going to work at 9am, eating dinner at 8pm, going to sleep at 1am. It feels now like we need DST to function correctly.

dennisdamenace 9y ago

How much expense goes into software which needs to support daylight savings? How many bugs have occurred because of it? Personally I deal with this problem a lot. It is a pain and expensive. Of course this is a problem because the time data my software ingests often doesn’t include the offset or zone. So I have to work around it. All for subtracting then add one hour for the year.

l9k 9y ago
How many bugs will pop up if we stop having DST?