13 ms·

Why Daylight Saving Time Should Be Abolished

220 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

saraid216 15y ago
I think I agree. I can see lots of semantic problems, but I can't think of anything that would be an actual problem. After all, we already have Zulu time, Unix time and UTC being used in various places. Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough?
- msbarnett 15y ago
  > After all, we already have Zulu time, Unix time and UTC being used in various places. Tangential, but "Zulu time" is just another name for UTC.
  - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
    I hope you never have to care about this, but Zulu is synonymous with GMT, not UTC. UTC includes leap seconds, whereas GMT does not. There also used to be differences with some measurements of GMT starting the numbering at noon instead of midnight (madness!) I am the creator and maintainer of http://the.endoftimezones.com http://the.endoftimezones.com and an amateur time historian.
    - adestefan 15y ago
      Zulu includes the leap seconds. Zulu just comes from US Navy denoting it as Time Zone Z and all US Navy time zones are based on offset from UTC.
      - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
        Ah, thank you. I suppose that is the amateur in amateur time historian ;)
yurylifshits 15y ago
Russia just did it in 2011. It will no longer have time adjustments twice a year. Last one was in Spring 2011.
- usaar333 15y ago
  Wait.. so it is now permanently on Daylight Savings time? (e.g. sun at highest point at ~ 1pm every day?)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Not a bad idea really. Since it gets dark muuuch sooner in the winter, it always made since to me that we should just stay on daylight savings time year round.. so effectively bump everybody over one time zone permanently. I'd rather have sun after I work than before it, leaving work in the afternoon and seeing stars is absurd.
    - adestefan 15y ago
      The time of sunrise/sunset is dependent on the latitude you're at. For those living closer to the equator the time differences don't have much of an impact.
  - yxhuvud 15y ago
    Yes.
TomOfTTB 15y ago
DST is an example of how stuck in our ways humanity can be. In addition to the evidence in the article there have also been studies that have shown increased car accidents, lost productivity and all kinds of other problems caused by the cognitive impact of a whole society trying to wake up earlier then their body is expecting. As far as energy usage is concerned I could see the argument being true if we could pick when the time changed each year to correspond with temperature fluctuations. But since weather tends to vary from year to year and we change the time on a set day the effort seems moot.
- kiba 15y ago
  Who the hell is responsible for much of the DST insanity? I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.
  - ghaff 15y ago
    People who like light in the evenings during the summer. Especially when one lives far East in a timezone. Though personally I'd be perfectly happy with New England having say, double Daylight-Savings year round. As a compromise, move to Atlantic Time.
    - zasz 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time If you scroll down to the "Politics" section, DST was implemented as a way to save coal during WWII.
      - ghaff 15y ago
        The point though is that the argument that it saves energy is questionable at best. Frankly, any legitimate defense really hinges on the argument that people prefer it.
        onenine 15y ago
danboarder 15y ago
As I recall, Russia has done just that this year and abolished the practice in Moscow, switching to GMT+4 year-round. Quote: “Every fall and every spring we are swearing at this system,” Medvedev said. “Our biorhythms are damaged. We are all angry. We either oversleep and turn up late for work or wake up too early and don’t know what to do with this free time. Let alone poor cows and other animals that can’t understand why they should have their meals or be milked earlier or later.” Here is a story on it: http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  What he said. First Daylight savings time, then Centigrade and the metric system. These three changes would give our economy a significant boost IMHO. Using outmoded metrics is an insidious and wasteful form of protectionism.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    I don't see how centigrade would actually help. I agree that it's better for scientific measurements (if not as good as Kelvins) but the typical Fahrenheit range is much better suited for weather conditions than centigrade from a usability standpoint. The typical weather conditions on the inhabited parts of the earth don't range much further than 0-100, whereas centrigrade can't represent any kind of legitimately wintry conditions without resorting to negative numbers and everything above 50 is completely unused. From a usability standpoint, it makes sense that typical temperatures should be distributed along a 100 point scale, and that only genuine extremes should exceed the ends of that. Fahrenheit meets that requirement; centigrade doesn't.
    - StavrosK 15y ago
      That's just a convention. I don't much care if temperature today will be 28 C or 28.5 C, it doesn't matter and it varies anyway. We really don't need that much precision in temperatures.
    - cfn 15y ago
carsonm 15y ago
I definitely prefer the light later in the evenings (DST), I'd just like it to stay that way year-round. (i.e. let's stop the madness, but it would be a pity if we stuck with Standard Time year-round, we should stick with DST year-round).
- dmauro 15y ago
  +1 Standard time makes me bummed out.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  You want more evening light, you get up earlier. I want more morning light. Can't stand getting up when it's night, don't care when it gets dark later in the day. How about we just agree that "noon" means "sun straight overhead" (within a half hour for time zone position) and each get up as each sees fit, with no thrashing over forcing strangers to adhere to an unwanted deviation at arbitrary dates.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Not everyone can just roll into work, lunch, dinner, meetings, dates whenever the hell they feel like it. People have to coordinate their schedules.
    - ctdonath 15y ago
      YOU try "coordinating schedules" with a couple of toddlers who now are up and raring to go at 5:00AM, thanks to a conspiracy of complete strangers to #^*& with my clocks. As of this morning I hate DST 10x more than ever.
wallflower 15y ago
China has a single time zone, Beijing time http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astronomical-information-center/world-tzones http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astr...
- monkeyking 15y ago
  China is doing it right.
techdmn 15y ago
I don't know about energy savings, but I know DST has cost plenty in developer time, including mine. :)
- tristan_juricek 15y ago
  Oh man I had so many stupid problems caused by developers who made two decisions: 1. "hey let's store times in the local time zone in the DB" 2. "oh the user wants their local time, I'll just use an offset" This comment just brought back the memories... And no, I'm no longer at that company.
Symmetry 15y ago
I was rather annoyed this last week at trying to schedule meetings with people in Europe who have a DST that started a week before ours did in the US.
zeroonetwothree 15y ago
Yes, we should 100% make it permanent. It's simply better to have more daylight in the evening than in the morning.
- joelmichael 15y ago
  Do you think it's better for the sun to rise at 8:25 am? Because that would be the situation during the winter solstice in San Francisco if DST was made permanent. Not much fun to wake up and go to work in darkness. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&month=12&year=2011&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1 http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&#...
  - fiblye 15y ago
    Most people seem to have bigger issues with getting out of work/school and going back in the dark. Leaving work at night is just depressing because you have the feeling of no free time, whereas it doesn't matter in the morning because you're probably just having breakfast and getting ready to leave.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
lutorm 15y ago
Is really the twice-a-year DST change significant compared to time changes while traveling? I mean, what fraction of Americans do not travel to another time zone at least once per year?
- coffeedrinker 15y ago
  It is for people who have small children with nap times and feeding times that are scheduled. There are many disruptions that would not affect me, but do strongly affect others.
- joeyh 15y ago
  That's an interesting question, especially as it relates to the whole thing with most Americans not having passports. But, traveling across timezones is not mandatory, while DST is. Choosing to experience stress, additional radiation, and a government fondling is one thing, having it forced on you in your own home would be another. Also, when I travel to California, I'm happy to get up at 6 am local, and go to bed at 11 pm, which leaves my body clock mostly alone. (Europe is much harder.)
- hdctambien 15y ago
  Probably a large fraction. Most people I went to high school with never leave the city we grew up in, let alone the time zone. I didn't leave my timezone until after I had graduated college... and almost all of those times were to go to PAX .. which is now also on the east coast so I haven't even done that in 2 years.
- kristopolous 15y ago
  Agreed. The argument about gaining or losing sleep has always struck me as a bit meaningless. What time do I go to bed? Between 11 PM and 7 AM ... depends on the day. What time do I wake up? Oh between 8 AM and 2 PM. Am I some 18 year old without a job who doesn't need to perform? Nope, I do programming and go to the office 5 days a week, lead meetings, conduct interviews all that stuff. I don't take any drugs and am right around 30. This is not just me too. I, and I think everyone I've ever talked to about this have no real substantial long term issues with 10 hours of sleep one night, 6 the next, 8 after that, etc. and having it occur at widely varied times.
shwa 15y ago
When posed with the question, if there were one invention you could erase from human history, what would it be-- the only erasure I could think of that would have a wholly positive effect was dst. What other fixture of American (others too, I'm sure) life is so colossally pointless?
joeyh 15y ago
Last winter I tried as an experiment setting up my own personal time zone, and not "falling back" an hour. Since I live in an offgrid cabin, having the sun still up at 6 pm in midwinter is especially useful -- it means an extra hour when I'm using direct solar power while working and not draining batteries. It was occasionally confusing to visitors that clocks were not at the time they expected. Otherwise, I didn't have many problems with scheduling; I work with people in many timezones anyway so having to adjust times is standard practice. If I forgot to make an adjustment, I'd arrive early. Restaurants were occasionally annoying when I wanted lunch and they were still finishing late breakfast service, but they tend to have some crossover time anyway, and I don't mind a 1 pm lunch either. I'm planning to do it again this winter. BTW, tech-wise, it's easy enough to configure a personal time zone, at least on Linux. Just set TZ=JEST+4. (And be happy not changing the remaining dumb clocks. The only clock I had to manually adjust was on my android phone.)
- vinhboy 15y ago
  You live in an "offgrid cabin" with an android phone and internet? Interesting... do tell...
  - __alexs 15y ago
    Presumably he's referring to the electrical grid (hence the PV and batteries) rather than trying to avoid WiFi so he doesn't get migraines.
- lukev 15y ago
  Maybe I'm really confused, but how is this effectively any different from just "shifting" your personal schedule? The day is still the same length. The effect is the same as if you just got up at 7am instead of 6am and went from there. Measured time exists only for interaction with others, so wouldn't it make more sense to continue to use society's time standard, and just shift your personal activities accordingly?
  - joeyh 15y ago
    Might work for some people who are not influenced by the clock; personally for me if it's not 12 pm it's not lunch time.
dhx 15y ago
The real answer to this problem is to recognise that different people have different chronotypes (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chronotype https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chronotype). Flexible working arrangements allow workers to adjust their lives to match their circadian rhythms and other biological needs. Productivity increases due to workers shifting their workloads to the optimal times of day. Perhaps some workers perform better over the span of a day if they take a 4 hour break in the middle for a main meal, quick sleep and some social activity? Perhaps others perform better if conducting their work in one contiguous block? Some people like ordered, repeatable and structured schedules. Others prefer a flexible schedule where the order of their day may be completely different each day of the week depending on what commitments they have planned and what opportunities suddenly become available. Daylight savings and fixed 9-5 working hours are deprecated concepts in a modern "high-tech" society.
zerostar07 15y ago
In the process why don't we also redefine the second and split the day to 1000 minutes?
- ernesth 15y ago
  It's been tried before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Decimal_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci... and it lasted even less than the republican calendar. And retried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
zdw 15y ago
Why stop there? Abolish time zones. Everyone should be using UTC directly. This would solve more problems than it causes.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  One step at a time will lessen the shock.
- majika 15y ago
  I vehemently disagree. I think the problems that this causes are larger than the current solution. Timezones aren't a human construction. Humans have only offered a series of approximations that are accurate enough. Cognitive dissonance: What time is the business day of Shanghai? What time should I arrive in New York to get there in the morning? What time will my American guildmates be online? People would still have to memorise the major timezone offsets, and this would negate any purported advantages. If we're still going to have to memorise timezone offsets, why bother? Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part of the day is it in New York?" The latter will be asked in place of the other, but it would also be harder to answer due to no localised New York time. "What's the time in New York?" can be answered by knowing that American EST is GMT-5. My local timezone is GMT+10, and it's currently 1300. Hence, I now know that it's 12 PM in New York, which means it's dark, which means that businesses there are shut and it's a bad time to call friends there. I'll admit that DST makes things harder, but I can still calculate a good approximation on the fly. 11 or 12 PM - it doesn't really matter. If it does, well, I know that the northern hemisphere will be at the end of Autumn, so NY-local DST is probably over. With one global timezone, how do I answer "what part of the day is it in New York?" Well, I still have to remember that New York's "timezone" is -4 GMT, and I still have to remember that my local "timezone" is +10 GMT. I still have to do a calculation, but I have to have a mapping of times to the state of the day in my head to know where New York is in relation. It's so much more complicated. It also makes it hard to know "when" a certain place is. Say I arrive in London, and it's overcast. I'd actually have to calculate what part of the day it is, by working off my home time->day-state mapping. That's so wrong.
  - muyuu 15y ago
stdbrouw 15y ago
Am I the only one who at least subjectively likes DST? I hate waking up in the dark, which DST doesn't help with, but the alternative, namely moving clocks one hour ahead the whole year through (effectively bumping up a time zone) would make me feel downright miserable. Also, I just love being able to sit outside in the sun until 11 P.M. in the summer. That said, I did just miss a meeting this morning because the EU switches to winter time at the end of October whereas the US switches early in November. Makes it even more confusing.
dreeves 15y ago
I view DST as a clever hack to solve an otherwise intractable coordination problem: getting everyone to shift their schedules to not waste all that extra morning daylight in the summer. As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like that personally but I think that too many people would have a problem with kids going to school in pitch darkness in the winter and whatnot. The theoretical ideal would be that standard business hours continuously adjust so that they always start soon after dawn. That maximizes the amount of after-work sunlight, without sacrificing daytime sunlight. Despite the existence of people who prefer early morning daylight, I think that maximizes social efficiency. Of course it's not (currently) practical to continuously adjust, so DST is a coarse approximation. I do appreciate the ridiculousness of changing the clocks instead of changing our schedules. But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. Think about the massive interdependence: work schedules, daycare, trains, social activities, etc etc. It really has to happen all together en masse or it doesn't work. Whether it's worth the hassle (and, yes, the real cost in lost productivity and sleep disruption) is of course still debatable but I think those declaring it pure insanity haven't fully thought it through. PS: Interesting exception that proves the rule: Arizona opts out of DST because it gets so hot in the afternoon and evening that people actually prefer the early morning daylight.
- orangecat 15y ago
  But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. I'd think that if all government agencies including schools switched their schedules at the DST point, most companies would quickly fall in line. And ideally lots of companies who currently have fixed hours would realize they don't actually need them. At the very least, stop mucking with the changeover date every few years and breaking millions of software installations.
  - dreeves 15y ago
    That's persuasive. You might be right. It's a tough sell though: Come on everyone, time to start waking up earlier! Up and at 'em! Daylight's a-wastin'! (Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of changing my mind! It could never happen without the clock-shift hack.) I agree about not changing the changeover date; that seriously compounds the hassle of it. Any clock that auto-adjusts on the old schedule has to be manually adjusted 4 times per year!
ctdonath 15y ago
All these posts on HN about DST with no mention of impacts on systems? DST sucks on embedded systems, especially when the change dates are changed. Not knowing the local DST standard, or not being able to update fielded systems when legislation changes the DST dates, means a system may be on the "wrong" time for days, weeks or months. Many are opting to abandon automatic time changes for "hour+1" user settings, or ignoring DST altogether. Could be amusing to compute how much worldwide total storage and CPU time is devoted to handling DST.
- delinka 15y ago
  My opinion goes like this: all computer systems should track time in GMT and not care in which timelines the humans live. Your admin (or his software) in NY can convert to local time when he needs it. Your backup admin in LA can do the same thing. Why a system at this point in tech history needs to keep local time is beyond my understanding.
  - delinka 15y ago
    Of course I meant "timezones" and not "timelines" - thank you, autocorrect.
  - ctdonath 15y ago
    EMBEDDED systems. There is no admin who can just tweak a field for hundreds or thousands of devices out, not networked, who knows where.
    - delinka 15y ago
      I still don't see why an embedded system cares about timezones. It measures ticks. That's all.
joelmichael 15y ago
Daylight Saving Time is great. It helps us have more sunlight during the spring, summer, and fall. Everyone is happy when it is enacted in the spring and they get to have sunlight when they go home from work. And in the fall, you get an extra hour of sleep. It's win-win.
SeoxyS 15y ago
I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known as Swatch Internet Time. The unit represented a 1000 beat cycle centered around midnight on the Swiss meridian, ie. UTC+1. There'd be no daylight savings time. All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently useless ensures that it will forever be useless. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- edzme 15y ago
  Love the metric system. While stuff like this is cool it's too bad it'll never catch on.
- randall 15y ago
  Beats were actually used in a dreamcast game called Shenmue. Talk about useless trivia.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  There would also be no timezones. I have that watch, it's cool.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon". The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.
ricardobeat 15y ago
Still don't buy it. The article that it points to, where it's said that energy consumption is reduced by a mere 0.2-0.5% is talking about total consumption - in my understanding the most pronounced effect of DST is a reduction in peak consumption. In peak hours (around 6-7pm, when everyone is getting home), the extra energy is provided by coal plants, which are expensive and polluting. A 5% reduction in peak consumption might mean that dozens of coal plants are kept shut during that time. And even a 0.5% reduction is huge when you talk about a whole country...
dave1010uk 15y ago
Here's my comment and the following discussion from a while ago about having just one time zone: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528354
exDM69 15y ago
Greetings from 60 degrees northern latitude. We just turned our clocks back an hour a week ago. That means that there's an hour more sunlight before I wake up and it's dark by the time I'm out of work. I have to say, I don't really like the arrangement of daylight saving time. Today the sun rises at 07.52 in the morning and sets at 16.14 at the afternoon. It's going to be getting worse for two more months and that means it's 4 months before it's any better than today. For a six month period most of my life is walking through these orange tunnels that appear when sodium lights illuminate wet asphalt and concrete. The first symptoms of limited sunlight exposure are starting to show around this time of the year and supplemental vitamin d has to be taken or wild mood swings start to appear. When I used to live at a student campus, I had a period of "hibernation" every winter. I lived an ascetic lifestyle in the one square mile around the campus and the uni. I only left to go home for xmas. I re-emerged when the catkins started appearing on the willows. In these latitudes, it would make sense to be in permanent daylight saving time ("summer time"). During the summer and the winter there's really no difference since the sun is practically constantly up or down. It's the fall and the spring that make the difference. And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little closer to the equator, drop me a line :)
- sophacles 15y ago
  Have you considered going to a tanning bed? I have heard this works very well, improving mood and general outlook during the dark times. I plan on doing this 1-2 times a week when the winter gets going hardcore here as an experiment. In reading up on this subject, just a few minutes is all that is needed, the point is not a tan, just exposure to UV and brightness.
  - log6 15y ago
    Let's see how your mood is when diagnosed with skin cancer! Not that I would wish it in anyone, but intentional exposure to damaging UV when there are safer alternative treatments for SAD does not seem like a sensible course of action.
    - sophacles 15y ago
drdo 15y ago
I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that we should stop with DST, or the whole timezones thing for that matter.
T_S_ 15y ago
While we're at it... 13 months, 28 days each = 364 days Plus 1 or 2 special days at the beginning of the year. Much easier to figure out the day of the week for your next meeting. We could name the 13th month Jobsuary, or you pick.
- joeyo 15y ago
  Eastman Kodak used this calendar internally for over 60 years. They called the extra month Sol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
WalterBright 15y ago
Go all the way and everyone switch to GMT!
shaggyfrog 15y ago
> You can also thank railroads for time zones—geographic swaths of the globe set to the same hour. Or, more specifically, Sir Sandford Fleming. http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10182 http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10182

220 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

I think I agree. I can see lots of semantic problems, but I can't think of anything that would be an actual problem. After all, we already have Zulu time, Unix time and UTC being used in various places. Maybe I'm just not being imaginative enough?

msbarnett 15y ago
> After all, we already have Zulu time, Unix time and UTC being used in various places. Tangential, but "Zulu time" is just another name for UTC.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  I hope you never have to care about this, but Zulu is synonymous with GMT, not UTC. UTC includes leap seconds, whereas GMT does not. There also used to be differences with some measurements of GMT starting the numbering at noon instead of midnight (madness!) I am the creator and maintainer of http://the.endoftimezones.com http://the.endoftimezones.com and an amateur time historian.
  - adestefan 15y ago
    Zulu includes the leap seconds. Zulu just comes from US Navy denoting it as Time Zone Z and all US Navy time zones are based on offset from UTC.
    - aaronblohowiak 15y ago
      Ah, thank you. I suppose that is the amateur in amateur time historian ;)

yurylifshits 15y ago

Russia just did it in 2011. It will no longer have time adjustments twice a year. Last one was in Spring 2011.

usaar333 15y ago
Wait.. so it is now permanently on Daylight Savings time? (e.g. sun at highest point at ~ 1pm every day?)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Not a bad idea really. Since it gets dark muuuch sooner in the winter, it always made since to me that we should just stay on daylight savings time year round.. so effectively bump everybody over one time zone permanently. I'd rather have sun after I work than before it, leaving work in the afternoon and seeing stars is absurd.
  - adestefan 15y ago
    The time of sunrise/sunset is dependent on the latitude you're at. For those living closer to the equator the time differences don't have much of an impact.
- yxhuvud 15y ago
  Yes.

TomOfTTB 15y ago

DST is an example of how stuck in our ways humanity can be. In addition to the evidence in the article there have also been studies that have shown increased car accidents, lost productivity and all kinds of other problems caused by the cognitive impact of a whole society trying to wake up earlier then their body is expecting. As far as energy usage is concerned I could see the argument being true if we could pick when the time changed each year to correspond with temperature fluctuations. But since weather tends to vary from year to year and we change the time on a set day the effort seems moot.

kiba 15y ago
Who the hell is responsible for much of the DST insanity? I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.
- ghaff 15y ago
  People who like light in the evenings during the summer. Especially when one lives far East in a timezone. Though personally I'd be perfectly happy with New England having say, double Daylight-Savings year round. As a compromise, move to Atlantic Time.
  - zasz 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time If you scroll down to the "Politics" section, DST was implemented as a way to save coal during WWII.
    - ghaff 15y ago
      The point though is that the argument that it saves energy is questionable at best. Frankly, any legitimate defense really hinges on the argument that people prefer it.
      - onenine 15y ago

danboarder 15y ago

As I recall, Russia has done just that this year and abolished the practice in Moscow, switching to GMT+4 year-round. Quote: “Every fall and every spring we are swearing at this system,” Medvedev said. “Our biorhythms are damaged. We are all angry. We either oversleep and turn up late for work or wake up too early and don’t know what to do with this free time. Let alone poor cows and other animals that can’t understand why they should have their meals or be milked earlier or later.” Here is a story on it: http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/ http://rt.com/news/daylight-saving-time-abolished/

anigbrowl 15y ago
What he said. First Daylight savings time, then Centigrade and the metric system. These three changes would give our economy a significant boost IMHO. Using outmoded metrics is an insidious and wasteful form of protectionism.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I don't see how centigrade would actually help. I agree that it's better for scientific measurements (if not as good as Kelvins) but the typical Fahrenheit range is much better suited for weather conditions than centigrade from a usability standpoint. The typical weather conditions on the inhabited parts of the earth don't range much further than 0-100, whereas centrigrade can't represent any kind of legitimately wintry conditions without resorting to negative numbers and everything above 50 is completely unused. From a usability standpoint, it makes sense that typical temperatures should be distributed along a 100 point scale, and that only genuine extremes should exceed the ends of that. Fahrenheit meets that requirement; centigrade doesn't.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    That's just a convention. I don't much care if temperature today will be 28 C or 28.5 C, it doesn't matter and it varies anyway. We really don't need that much precision in temperatures.
  - cfn 15y ago

carsonm 15y ago

I definitely prefer the light later in the evenings (DST), I'd just like it to stay that way year-round. (i.e. let's stop the madness, but it would be a pity if we stuck with Standard Time year-round, we should stick with DST year-round).

dmauro 15y ago
+1 Standard time makes me bummed out.
ctdonath 15y ago
You want more evening light, you get up earlier. I want more morning light. Can't stand getting up when it's night, don't care when it gets dark later in the day. How about we just agree that "noon" means "sun straight overhead" (within a half hour for time zone position) and each get up as each sees fit, with no thrashing over forcing strangers to adhere to an unwanted deviation at arbitrary dates.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Not everyone can just roll into work, lunch, dinner, meetings, dates whenever the hell they feel like it. People have to coordinate their schedules.
  - ctdonath 15y ago
    YOU try "coordinating schedules" with a couple of toddlers who now are up and raring to go at 5:00AM, thanks to a conspiracy of complete strangers to #^*& with my clocks. As of this morning I hate DST 10x more than ever.

wallflower 15y ago

China has a single time zone, Beijing time http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astronomical-information-center/world-tzones http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astr...

monkeyking 15y ago
China is doing it right.

techdmn 15y ago

I don't know about energy savings, but I know DST has cost plenty in developer time, including mine. :)

tristan_juricek 15y ago
Oh man I had so many stupid problems caused by developers who made two decisions: 1. "hey let's store times in the local time zone in the DB" 2. "oh the user wants their local time, I'll just use an offset" This comment just brought back the memories... And no, I'm no longer at that company.

Symmetry 15y ago

I was rather annoyed this last week at trying to schedule meetings with people in Europe who have a DST that started a week before ours did in the US.

zeroonetwothree 15y ago

Yes, we should 100% make it permanent. It's simply better to have more daylight in the evening than in the morning.

joelmichael 15y ago
Do you think it's better for the sun to rise at 8:25 am? Because that would be the situation during the winter solstice in San Francisco if DST was made permanent. Not much fun to wake up and go to work in darkness. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&month=12&year=2011&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1 http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=224&#...
- fiblye 15y ago
  Most people seem to have bigger issues with getting out of work/school and going back in the dark. Leaving work at night is just depressing because you have the feeling of no free time, whereas it doesn't matter in the morning because you're probably just having breakfast and getting ready to leave.

deleted 15y ago

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lutorm 15y ago

Is really the twice-a-year DST change significant compared to time changes while traveling? I mean, what fraction of Americans do not travel to another time zone at least once per year?

coffeedrinker 15y ago
It is for people who have small children with nap times and feeding times that are scheduled. There are many disruptions that would not affect me, but do strongly affect others.
joeyh 15y ago
That's an interesting question, especially as it relates to the whole thing with most Americans not having passports. But, traveling across timezones is not mandatory, while DST is. Choosing to experience stress, additional radiation, and a government fondling is one thing, having it forced on you in your own home would be another. Also, when I travel to California, I'm happy to get up at 6 am local, and go to bed at 11 pm, which leaves my body clock mostly alone. (Europe is much harder.)
hdctambien 15y ago
Probably a large fraction. Most people I went to high school with never leave the city we grew up in, let alone the time zone. I didn't leave my timezone until after I had graduated college... and almost all of those times were to go to PAX .. which is now also on the east coast so I haven't even done that in 2 years.
kristopolous 15y ago
Agreed. The argument about gaining or losing sleep has always struck me as a bit meaningless. What time do I go to bed? Between 11 PM and 7 AM ... depends on the day. What time do I wake up? Oh between 8 AM and 2 PM. Am I some 18 year old without a job who doesn't need to perform? Nope, I do programming and go to the office 5 days a week, lead meetings, conduct interviews all that stuff. I don't take any drugs and am right around 30. This is not just me too. I, and I think everyone I've ever talked to about this have no real substantial long term issues with 10 hours of sleep one night, 6 the next, 8 after that, etc. and having it occur at widely varied times.

shwa 15y ago

When posed with the question, if there were one invention you could erase from human history, what would it be-- the only erasure I could think of that would have a wholly positive effect was dst. What other fixture of American (others too, I'm sure) life is so colossally pointless?

joeyh 15y ago

Last winter I tried as an experiment setting up my own personal time zone, and not "falling back" an hour. Since I live in an offgrid cabin, having the sun still up at 6 pm in midwinter is especially useful -- it means an extra hour when I'm using direct solar power while working and not draining batteries. It was occasionally confusing to visitors that clocks were not at the time they expected. Otherwise, I didn't have many problems with scheduling; I work with people in many timezones anyway so having to adjust times is standard practice. If I forgot to make an adjustment, I'd arrive early. Restaurants were occasionally annoying when I wanted lunch and they were still finishing late breakfast service, but they tend to have some crossover time anyway, and I don't mind a 1 pm lunch either. I'm planning to do it again this winter. BTW, tech-wise, it's easy enough to configure a personal time zone, at least on Linux. Just set TZ=JEST+4. (And be happy not changing the remaining dumb clocks. The only clock I had to manually adjust was on my android phone.)

vinhboy 15y ago
You live in an "offgrid cabin" with an android phone and internet? Interesting... do tell...
- __alexs 15y ago
  Presumably he's referring to the electrical grid (hence the PV and batteries) rather than trying to avoid WiFi so he doesn't get migraines.
lukev 15y ago
Maybe I'm really confused, but how is this effectively any different from just "shifting" your personal schedule? The day is still the same length. The effect is the same as if you just got up at 7am instead of 6am and went from there. Measured time exists only for interaction with others, so wouldn't it make more sense to continue to use society's time standard, and just shift your personal activities accordingly?
- joeyh 15y ago
  Might work for some people who are not influenced by the clock; personally for me if it's not 12 pm it's not lunch time.

dhx 15y ago

The real answer to this problem is to recognise that different people have different chronotypes (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chronotype https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chronotype). Flexible working arrangements allow workers to adjust their lives to match their circadian rhythms and other biological needs. Productivity increases due to workers shifting their workloads to the optimal times of day. Perhaps some workers perform better over the span of a day if they take a 4 hour break in the middle for a main meal, quick sleep and some social activity? Perhaps others perform better if conducting their work in one contiguous block? Some people like ordered, repeatable and structured schedules. Others prefer a flexible schedule where the order of their day may be completely different each day of the week depending on what commitments they have planned and what opportunities suddenly become available. Daylight savings and fixed 9-5 working hours are deprecated concepts in a modern "high-tech" society.

zerostar07 15y ago

In the process why don't we also redefine the second and split the day to 1000 minutes?

ernesth 15y ago
It's been tried before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Decimal_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar#Deci... and it lasted even less than the republican calendar. And retried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

zdw 15y ago

Why stop there? Abolish time zones. Everyone should be using UTC directly. This would solve more problems than it causes.

mixmastamyk 15y ago
One step at a time will lessen the shock.
majika 15y ago
I vehemently disagree. I think the problems that this causes are larger than the current solution. Timezones aren't a human construction. Humans have only offered a series of approximations that are accurate enough. Cognitive dissonance: What time is the business day of Shanghai? What time should I arrive in New York to get there in the morning? What time will my American guildmates be online? People would still have to memorise the major timezone offsets, and this would negate any purported advantages. If we're still going to have to memorise timezone offsets, why bother? Rather than asking "what's the time in New York?," I'll be asking "what part of the day is it in New York?" The latter will be asked in place of the other, but it would also be harder to answer due to no localised New York time. "What's the time in New York?" can be answered by knowing that American EST is GMT-5. My local timezone is GMT+10, and it's currently 1300. Hence, I now know that it's 12 PM in New York, which means it's dark, which means that businesses there are shut and it's a bad time to call friends there. I'll admit that DST makes things harder, but I can still calculate a good approximation on the fly. 11 or 12 PM - it doesn't really matter. If it does, well, I know that the northern hemisphere will be at the end of Autumn, so NY-local DST is probably over. With one global timezone, how do I answer "what part of the day is it in New York?" Well, I still have to remember that New York's "timezone" is -4 GMT, and I still have to remember that my local "timezone" is +10 GMT. I still have to do a calculation, but I have to have a mapping of times to the state of the day in my head to know where New York is in relation. It's so much more complicated. It also makes it hard to know "when" a certain place is. Say I arrive in London, and it's overcast. I'd actually have to calculate what part of the day it is, by working off my home time->day-state mapping. That's so wrong.
- muyuu 15y ago

stdbrouw 15y ago

Am I the only one who at least subjectively likes DST? I hate waking up in the dark, which DST doesn't help with, but the alternative, namely moving clocks one hour ahead the whole year through (effectively bumping up a time zone) would make me feel downright miserable. Also, I just love being able to sit outside in the sun until 11 P.M. in the summer. That said, I did just miss a meeting this morning because the EU switches to winter time at the end of October whereas the US switches early in November. Makes it even more confusing.

dreeves 15y ago

I view DST as a clever hack to solve an otherwise intractable coordination problem: getting everyone to shift their schedules to not waste all that extra morning daylight in the summer. As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like that personally but I think that too many people would have a problem with kids going to school in pitch darkness in the winter and whatnot. The theoretical ideal would be that standard business hours continuously adjust so that they always start soon after dawn. That maximizes the amount of after-work sunlight, without sacrificing daytime sunlight. Despite the existence of people who prefer early morning daylight, I think that maximizes social efficiency. Of course it's not (currently) practical to continuously adjust, so DST is a coarse approximation. I do appreciate the ridiculousness of changing the clocks instead of changing our schedules. But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. Think about the massive interdependence: work schedules, daycare, trains, social activities, etc etc. It really has to happen all together en masse or it doesn't work. Whether it's worth the hassle (and, yes, the real cost in lost productivity and sleep disruption) is of course still debatable but I think those declaring it pure insanity haven't fully thought it through. PS: Interesting exception that proves the rule: Arizona opts out of DST because it gets so hot in the afternoon and evening that people actually prefer the early morning daylight.

orangecat 15y ago
But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. I'd think that if all government agencies including schools switched their schedules at the DST point, most companies would quickly fall in line. And ideally lots of companies who currently have fixed hours would realize they don't actually need them. At the very least, stop mucking with the changeover date every few years and breaking millions of software installations.
- dreeves 15y ago
  That's persuasive. You might be right. It's a tough sell though: Come on everyone, time to start waking up earlier! Up and at 'em! Daylight's a-wastin'! (Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of changing my mind! It could never happen without the clock-shift hack.) I agree about not changing the changeover date; that seriously compounds the hassle of it. Any clock that auto-adjusts on the old schedule has to be manually adjusted 4 times per year!

ctdonath 15y ago

All these posts on HN about DST with no mention of impacts on systems? DST sucks on embedded systems, especially when the change dates are changed. Not knowing the local DST standard, or not being able to update fielded systems when legislation changes the DST dates, means a system may be on the "wrong" time for days, weeks or months. Many are opting to abandon automatic time changes for "hour+1" user settings, or ignoring DST altogether. Could be amusing to compute how much worldwide total storage and CPU time is devoted to handling DST.

delinka 15y ago
My opinion goes like this: all computer systems should track time in GMT and not care in which timelines the humans live. Your admin (or his software) in NY can convert to local time when he needs it. Your backup admin in LA can do the same thing. Why a system at this point in tech history needs to keep local time is beyond my understanding.
- delinka 15y ago
  Of course I meant "timezones" and not "timelines" - thank you, autocorrect.
- ctdonath 15y ago
  EMBEDDED systems. There is no admin who can just tweak a field for hundreds or thousands of devices out, not networked, who knows where.
  - delinka 15y ago
    I still don't see why an embedded system cares about timezones. It measures ticks. That's all.

joelmichael 15y ago

Daylight Saving Time is great. It helps us have more sunlight during the spring, summer, and fall. Everyone is happy when it is enacted in the spring and they get to have sunlight when they go home from work. And in the fall, you get an extra hour of sleep. It's win-win.

SeoxyS 15y ago

I'm Swiss. Back in the day, the Swatch group had an experiment where they tried to invent a new unit for time. They came up with the `beat`, also known as Swatch Internet Time. The unit represented a 1000 beat cycle centered around midnight on the Swiss meridian, ie. UTC+1. There'd be no daylight savings time. All in all, it's a really cool idea, and I owned a watch for many years that reported beat time, but it was essentially useless. This is perhaps the most gigantic of chicken-and-egg problems, the mere fact that it is currently useless ensures that it will forever be useless. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

edzme 15y ago
Love the metric system. While stuff like this is cool it's too bad it'll never catch on.
randall 15y ago
Beats were actually used in a dreamcast game called Shenmue. Talk about useless trivia.
StavrosK 15y ago
There would also be no timezones. I have that watch, it's cool.
- mseebach 15y ago
  No, there will always be timezones, even if we call them something else. Even on swatch time, I still have to keep track of which one-hour window I can schedule a multi-continent conference call in, because my colleagues in New York aren't going to be in the office three hours before sunrise, no matter what their clocks say. Also, with no timezones you lose the language to speak about time. Now "he usually gets up before 2pm" means one thing, and "gets up before 4am" means another. If you abolish timezones those statements become strongly location bound, to the extent where I imagine people would start to develop language based on local time, such as "he sleeps into the early afternoon". The majority of people live each individual day inside one (perhaps two adjacent) timezone. The system should support that by far most common usecase.

ricardobeat 15y ago

Still don't buy it. The article that it points to, where it's said that energy consumption is reduced by a mere 0.2-0.5% is talking about total consumption - in my understanding the most pronounced effect of DST is a reduction in peak consumption. In peak hours (around 6-7pm, when everyone is getting home), the extra energy is provided by coal plants, which are expensive and polluting. A 5% reduction in peak consumption might mean that dozens of coal plants are kept shut during that time. And even a 0.5% reduction is huge when you talk about a whole country...

dave1010uk 15y ago

Here's my comment and the following discussion from a while ago about having just one time zone: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528354 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2528354

exDM69 15y ago

Greetings from 60 degrees northern latitude. We just turned our clocks back an hour a week ago. That means that there's an hour more sunlight before I wake up and it's dark by the time I'm out of work. I have to say, I don't really like the arrangement of daylight saving time. Today the sun rises at 07.52 in the morning and sets at 16.14 at the afternoon. It's going to be getting worse for two more months and that means it's 4 months before it's any better than today. For a six month period most of my life is walking through these orange tunnels that appear when sodium lights illuminate wet asphalt and concrete. The first symptoms of limited sunlight exposure are starting to show around this time of the year and supplemental vitamin d has to be taken or wild mood swings start to appear. When I used to live at a student campus, I had a period of "hibernation" every winter. I lived an ascetic lifestyle in the one square mile around the campus and the uni. I only left to go home for xmas. I re-emerged when the catkins started appearing on the willows. In these latitudes, it would make sense to be in permanent daylight saving time ("summer time"). During the summer and the winter there's really no difference since the sun is practically constantly up or down. It's the fall and the spring that make the difference. And if anyone knows of good software engineering career options a little closer to the equator, drop me a line :)

sophacles 15y ago
Have you considered going to a tanning bed? I have heard this works very well, improving mood and general outlook during the dark times. I plan on doing this 1-2 times a week when the winter gets going hardcore here as an experiment. In reading up on this subject, just a few minutes is all that is needed, the point is not a tan, just exposure to UV and brightness.
- log6 15y ago
  Let's see how your mood is when diagnosed with skin cancer! Not that I would wish it in anyone, but intentional exposure to damaging UV when there are safer alternative treatments for SAD does not seem like a sensible course of action.
  - sophacles 15y ago

drdo 15y ago

I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that we should stop with DST, or the whole timezones thing for that matter.

T_S_ 15y ago

While we're at it... 13 months, 28 days each = 364 days Plus 1 or 2 special days at the beginning of the year. Much easier to figure out the day of the week for your next meeting. We could name the 13th month Jobsuary, or you pick.

joeyo 15y ago
Eastman Kodak used this calendar internally for over 60 years. They called the extra month Sol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

WalterBright 15y ago

Go all the way and everyone switch to GMT!

shaggyfrog 15y ago

> You can also thank railroads for time zones—geographic swaths of the globe set to the same hour. Or, more specifically, Sir Sandford Fleming. http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10182 http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10182