Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it | Hacker News Reader

Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it

andywoodruff.com

119 pointsmmastrac85 comments

I would have liked to see maps of the whole world. I live in Helsinki, 60 degrees North, and the sunrise today is 08:40 and the sunset is 15:33. It's still going to get a lot darker before the solstice.

Quite frankly, at this point it doesn't really matter if it is offset one hour in either direction. But the abrupt change of DST really takes a toll. The timing is also unfortunate, because on the last days of summer time there's still a bit of sunlight after regular work hours, but the change to winter time practically removes the last lit hours from the day if you work somewhat regular office hours.

I would like to see the daylight savings time abolished and going to permanent summer time here.

> I would like to see the daylight savings time abolished and going to permanent summer time here.

Daylight savings time is summer time. Sounds like you would like to run on daylight savings time year-round (as would I).

Ditto. Here in NL the transition from DST to regular time is super abrupt. Yes, a few more hours of sun in the early morning, but it means no light in the evenings at all (sunrise at 8:20, sunset at 16:40 - so heading to work in the dark and leaving the office in the dark, bleh).

> Sounds like you would like to run on daylight savings time year-round (as would I).

Most Europeans (and probably americans?) would definitely benefit from shifting their timezones by 1h and keeping it there. Hell, Central European Time could probably shift by 2h, the timezone goes from Spain to Poland, Warsaw currently gets sundown at 1530! (Lille which is roughly the same latitude gets sundown at a more respectable 1647)

The fun is, that in Warsaw the delta between CET and solar time is much less, than in Lille.

See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2572317/Are-Y...

(Yes, dailymail, but at least they have a nice maps).

> The fun is, that in Warsaw the delta between CET and solar time is much less, than in Lille.

Which is exactly the issue. We don't actually want solar noon at noon because nobody sleeps from say 8PM to 4PM, or 9PM to 3AM.

This is my first winter in Helsinki. Although I was expecting the darkness the abrupt transition caught me by surprise.

I hope the snow people talk about, improving the feel of lightness, comes soon.

I spent spring to late November in Helsinki some years back. The change was abrupt for me as well but snows came early.

When the snows came, it was definitely a different feel. The all night light and abrupt darkness were definitely a different experience.

You can see 60 deg North in that map too, in Southern Alaska. Depending on where helsinki sits in the time zone longitute wise (pretty central in it's time zone ?) you can hover a similar color on alaska and get the Helsinki graph from there.

In 1974 the US basically had DST the entire year to save energy. Being on year round DST would save us the most energy, because most people use energy at night for artificial lighting.

The main argument against it is that "kids have to go to school in the dark." Well you know what? Look at these maps. How many kids already have to go to school in the dark? Why does it matter? Even the kids would rather have more light after school so they can play.

And if you ask a farmer about it, they'll tell you "the animals don't read clocks". To them it doesn't really matter, they get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.

Tangentially related, there are also studies showing that schools that force kids to get up at 6:30 also produce lower performing students because kids stay up late everywhere and then never get enough sleep.

If you want to keep the public school work week, it would make significantly more sense being 9-5 or even 10-6 Monday to Thursday rather than 8-3 Monday to Friday.

We aren't going home to work the farm, and we aren't setting insanely early sleep schedules to get up with the sun to till the fields. These ancient time systems cause legitimate harm for the sake of posterity.

Note that those studies apply to High Schools. Young kids are notoriously early risers.

Here in Ottawa, Canada, they've stumbled on a good solution. To save money on busing, they've staggered the school start times to allow bus sharing. In my area, that means the buses drop elementary kids off for an 8 o'clock start and then pick up high school kids for a 9 o'clock start.

As far as your suggestion of running four 8 hour school days instead of five 6 hour days, I certainly hope you're talking about high school. 6 hours is already too long for my 6 year old, I can't imagine 8 hours.

Whereas ours did the opposite... Pick up the high school students for an ~820 start, run back out and grab the younger kids for a 900 start.

The justification I was given is that high school students need to be home first, as they might be responsible for watching their younger siblings once middle/elementary school lets out.

I'm wondering what the potential for savings is given that only 2.5% of the whole US energy consumption is lighting of commercial and residential buildings. Could anyone estimate the savings?

When I was a kid I went to a country school and lessons didn't start until 9:30, to accommodate dark mornings. If it's better for children, only children need necessarily adjust, provided school is also serving its industrial daycare function.

I get up around 8 and sleep between 1 and 2. So naturally I'm in favour of DST all year round.

Except that in large swaths of the U.S., we spend far more energy on air conditioning than lighting. (Which wasn't the case 40 years ago, when home A/C was much more rare.)

Getting home after dark would mean we'd spend less energy on cooling our homes (and though we still have to air condition workplaces during the daylight hours, we're cooling less cubic footage per person in most workplaces, plus larger A/C systems tend to have economies of scale and be more energy efficient overall).

But now is standard time. DST was invented for the opposite reason - so we could get home while it was still light, have some leisure after work.

Right. Extending daylight savings to extend leisure time makes some sense (although it wouldn't accomplish much in places where the sun sets before 4:30 in winter anyway). But extending daylight savings "to save energy" is counterproductive.

> And if you ask a farmer about it, they'll tell you "the animals don't read clocks". To them it doesn't really matter, they get up with the sun regardless of what the clock says.

Dairy truck drivers do. They'll want to pick up the day's milk at ~6am. Daylight savings change makes dairy farmers wake up before they otherwise would have to.

Honest question: why wouldn't they just get up earlier, instead of implementing a system that affects everyone?

DST is what makes them have to get up earlier. Dairy farmers (or any other kind of farmer) are/were generally against DST, despite the common myth it was created for them[1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-day...

> Being on year round DST would save us the most energy

And if we redenominated the dollar, people could be several times richer than they are now!

Those light map images are based on the premise that 5pm is a reasonable time for sunset, which is something I disagree with.

I like DST because I like light evenings. I can put up with dark mornings, but don't take away my light evenings.

>Those light map images are based on the premise that 5pm is a reasonable time for sunset, which is something I disagree with.

When daylight savings rolls around each year, I always make the same comment: god it feels civilized to be going home when it's still light outside!

At least you live in a place where DST makes a difference. It doesn't help a bit in northern Europe, I'm pretty sure we only do it to keep time parity with central Europe.

Where I live (Portugal), I'd like to have the DST offset permanently. This would mean sad winter mornings but arriving home still in daylight. A fine trade-off for me.

9pm sunset would be great, I sleep at midnight. I'd be able to have some sunlight from 6pm to 9pm, and be able to sleep in the dark.

More than DST, what is enjoyable is not having the sun at the zenith at 12pm. In France, it reaches the zenith is at ~1pm without DST and ~2pm with DST. This makes for nice sunny evenings. I now live in Japan, where it's at the zenith at ~12pm all year long (no DST), and it's ridiculous. Where I am, the sun is up at 4:45am and down at 7pm in the summer. In the winter, the sun is up at 7am and down at 4:45pm.

> Where I am, the sun is up at 4:45am and down at 7pm in the summer. In the winter, the sun is up at 7am and down at 4:45pm.

Was in hokkaido early this month and this was a hellish pain in the arse, the sun was up at 6AM and down at 4:30PM. As far as I could tell, the japanese don't generally start out at 6AM (the hotels I went to had breakfast and check-out no earlier than 7 or even 8 and "rush hour" — where there was such a thing — was definitely after 8)

I used to feel that way, but as I get older, I feel the opposite. It's really depressing getting up in the dark, but I love the effect of Christmas lights reflecting off the snow in the dark. I'd rather it be sunny out both times, but if I have to choose between morning and evening, I'd choose to have the sun in the morning.

I think it is saying 'at least 5pm'...meaning that in winter you'd still get light at 5 PM in winter.

I thought the same thing and then noticed you can change and see the effects for the sunset times by clicking on the the 'at least 5pm' to change it into a select box

I disagree with the premise of this article. I don't care if the sun is out when I have to wake up or not. I dislike doing something incredibly dramatic like changing what time it is and having to force myself into a different rythm because some people might or might not be happy that now there might or might not be more sun in the evening.

>I don't care if the sun is out when I have to wake up or not.

This isn't about what you - or for that matter millions of people - do or don't want to do. After all, if we only did what we wanted to do, none of us would pay tax.

This is about reducing energy consumption by attempting to have people sleep when the sun is down, and be awake when the sun is up.

> This is about reducing energy consumption by attempting to have people sleep when the sun is down, and be awake when the sun is up.

That is very much debatable:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-daylight-savi...

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429

Even if energy can be saved... why not make the companies set different office hours at different times of the year, rather than make people reset their watches? If companies' office hours are not to be messed with, why are the people's lives?

I really cannot understand the logic behind this. People should be free to choose if they want to sleep more when the sun is down, right? And with Capitalism, you should tune the price of energy consumption to make people save more, instead of making strange laws.

>If companies' office hours are not to be messed with, why are the people's lives?

Daylight savings isn't messing with anyone's life, it's changing the arbitrary read-out on a human-invented device, nothing more.

>People should be free to choose if they want to sleep more when the sun is down, right?

Of course, anyone can sleep as much or as little as they please. There might be school and employment consequences to that, but you can still do it.

You can also drive a car as fast as you please - but there might also be consequences to that.

> Daylight savings isn't messing with anyone's life, it's changing the arbitrary read-out on a human-invented device, nothing more.

If you work or have kids in school, you need to adjust your sleep pattern to match the readout on that human-invented device. Look at small children and retirees: DST does not affect them because they wake up whenever they want to. Seems to me that the root problem is that businesses and schools demand people arrive at work the same time regardless of sunlight conditions. It's stupid that billions of people change their measuring devices twice a year instead of just having businesses pick "summer hours" and "winter hours".

Amen. DST feels a lot like trying to combat obesity by changing the kilogram, so that everyone weighs the same. It doesn't affect people's actual weights, just like how DST doesn't affect the amount of daylight we receive.

It does, for you personally, if you sleep through that daylight or are stuck inside for most of it.

>Daylight savings isn't messing with anyone's life, it's changing the arbitrary read-out on a human-invented device, nothing more.

a human-invented device that affects when you're supposed to show up at your desk if you have a "normal" job (9-5)...

That argument holds no water. Changing a readout on many human invented devices will drastically impact people's lives (bank account balances, work schedules, directions to the hospital, etc).

Power meters that record the time when energy is used rather than the "dumb" ones that just record total usage are still relatively new.

Still, the author makes it sound like this would some kind of crazy thing when it's the reality for a lot of people in the world.

My complaint with DST isn't so much about when we have to get up, but about what it does to commuting with respect to sun position.

For anyone who lives to the west of their job - and that seems to be a lot of people - and has relatively normal office hours, you're going to go through a time period in the spring and fall where the sun is in drivers' eyes as they're commuting. In the morning, just after the sun rises, it will be blinding drivers going east, and in the evening, before sunset, it'll blind drivers going west. Given the geography, there's not much to be done about that. If we just wait a couple weeks (for any given person), the times will progress enough so that they'll no longer be affected.

But when you throw DST into the equation, it resets progression of sunrise and sunset times. After we've made it through those couple weeks where the sun is in your eyes, suddenly the time change hits, pushing the time back into your commuting drive again.

Thus, the number of days I need to spend in dangerous driving conditions, with myself and other drivers partially blinded by the rising or setting son, is more-or-less doubled by DST. It seems to me to be a significant safety issue.

I highly recommend wearing sunglasses while driving. This does not eliminate the sun issue, but it helps not just deal with the sun but also those few seconds of temporary blindness when you get reflections.

That said, the most useful thing I found was to change my commute around glare issues.

DST or not, good polarized sunglasses are a great idea. It helps not just for the direct sun in your eyes, but also glare reflecting off other cars, pavement, etc. Don't go spending $100+ dollars on it, you can get something good for under $30.

I don't like sunglasses, so I had windshield tint installed instead: http://i.imgur.com/Npc7z1D.jpg (not my car, just a sample)

Careful, that's illegal in several states.

As someone who lives in India (no DST) but interacts frequently with people in the USA. I hate it. Maybe it was rational before mass globalization, but now that many of us interact regularly across time zones and national borders it complicates time, which should be sacrosanct.

Bear in mind that the USA is at higher latitude, so day-length variations are far more pronounced as you approach the solstices.

Opinions about DST vary, perhaps reflecting how a person's "internal clock" functions. Biological differences play a role, some people are natural early risers, others tend to stay up late. I'm in the latter category so I strongly favor DST, but I can see how others might hate it.

It's exacerbated living north of the 45th parallel. Officially we get about 16 hours of daylight/nighttime at the solstices. However, it's actually much worse than the raw data suggests.

Living in the shadow of hills to the west, among tall trees, in a rainy climate with frequent heavily overcast skies, after DST goes off, by 3:00PM the sky is already dark. No wonder a lot of people around here look forward to March and return of DST.

The morning effect is minimal, winter sunrise comes quite late. At year's end it's after 7:50AM, so it's dark on the way to work no matter what the weather and DST would not make the morning commute any dimmer.

OTOH >16 hours of summer daylight is amazing and delightful. The place just comes alive. While we can't legislate the seasons, keeping DST longer than we do would at least be a small token of compensation.

5pm is a horrible time for sunset. When are you going to play catch with your kids?!

When do I play catch with my kids? In the summer time. In the winter, I go skating with my kids after dark, which works well under the flood lights.

Living in one of the places that doesn't do DST, it's always struck me as bonkers to go through that twice a year.

Ugh, waking up at 6:30 AM. I've done it once, never again. I refuse to work for a company where I have to wake up at 6:30 AM to get to office.

Since its hackernews I think its fair to comment that I hate it because it makes the already difficult time programming even more difficult. Now I don't just have to save timezone somewhere but also the offset (to be full proof) of the time. How about the UI? Does anyone know of a timepicker UI pattern (I haven't seen any) that allows you to input the duplicate hour during DST > ST switch?

I don't have to suffer through this change but it seems like something that will affect people's rhythm a lot and make them mess up things twice a year. What would be the health and other cost of that would be?

Hmm just thought about it and looked it up. It seems that people use ~10% their energy budget in lighting. So I don't see even in terms of energy usage that being worth it? Specially since using better lights would have a much more savings.

[1] https://nplainsnorthernnotes.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/gra...

>fool proof?

There is nothing to love about DST. It just messes up sleep cycle and daily routine. When you will have small children you will understand.

The flip side is having an extra hour of daylight in the evening to be able to go outside and play catch/whatever with your children.

There's no "extra" hour of daylight. The sun doesn't care how we set our clocks.

If I get home at 7 and it's dark then it doesn't really lend itself to going outside.

In daylight savings I still get home at 7 but now there is an hour of daylight left.

So even though there is still the same amount of daylight in the day, due to the rescheduling of the work day with respect to daylight, there is an extra hour of daylight in the evening

Wouldn't it be easier to redefine office hours so that people can go home at 6, instead of redefining everyone's concept of time?

Nowadays I work for myself, so yes it is easier to redefine my office hours. Changing the office/school hours of all my friends/family/children however is not feasible.

It really is an all-or-nothing sort of proposition. Can you imagine for example if half the businesses in an area ran on 9-5 and the other half ran on 8-4? You would get far more chaos than the minimal disruption caused by DST.

Now you might argue that society shouldn't be run based on the whims of people who want daylight in the evening, and you'd have a fair point. The counter to that is that likewise it shouldn't be run based on the whims of people who don't.

Luckily I live in a democracy and if, based on the will of the people, the state government where I lived decided to rescind DST then so be it and while I wouldn't like it, I would accept it.

However, I would wager that the majority of people where I live prefer daylight savings and so having it is the will of the people.

Read before you reply. Imron says "in the evening" :-S

If "the evening" refers to the period when the sun sets, then DST doesn't change anything. You still have so much daylight, no matter how you set your clock.

OTOH, if your kids wake up with the sun, DST is awesome. It means that they wake up slightly less insanely early in the summer time, and makes it slightly easier to wake them up for school at a reasonable time in the winter.

I live near Melbourne and if there wasn't DST, in mid-summer the sun would rise at 4:30am. Pass.

Even with British Summer Time the sun rises at 4:30 in the summer here in Scotland (and we're not that far North) - what's the problem with it?

The biggest flaw with this visualization is that it doesn't allow you to expand DST to the entire year, or increase it to double/triple/quadruple DST. I assume that it would simply be too heartbreakingly beautiful to witness it, and it was withheld for our own good.

In the US

aaa there we go, someone else disappointed to read the article and scroll down to see the interactive map is a map the US only...

Russia had continuous day light savings time from 2011 to 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#Daylight_saving...).

"However, many Russians in the north complained about darker mornings in winter." So they went back and permanently adopted winter hours (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29773559).

Permanent DST - aren't we just arguing to move the prime meridian 30 degrees to the west and pushing everyone's time zone out?

Or would it just be easier to get everyone to agree to go to work an hour earlier?

Where I live we have no DST. As I live at the eastern edge of the time zone, the sun comes up at 4:30 am and is all done by 7pm on the summer solstice. It's a stupid time zone. But efforts to get DST implemented have been very difficult and strongly resisted from people living further west.

Deleted comment

Did you read the end of the exact same sentence as the one you posted: "but I’m a geographer and must always disagree with any and all spatial claims, by anyone. I live in the same time zone where I grew up, but the sunrise/set times are almost an hour different between the two places."

> but I’ll grant that waking up before the sun is miserable

Uhm, where I live this is inevitable most winter months. I don't see any problems with it and seldom hear anyone complain.

Bah, if we want to start work, say, an hour after sunrise we can just do that now. We can trivially make an alarm clock that calculates sum position at a particular location. There is no technical reason that we need to argue over changing local time some even number of hours when we can do it exactly.

I hate DST for a whole other reason: politicians "changing time" seems like a ridiculous idea to me. I think office/school hours should sometime opt for a summer/winter schedule instead.

But then I would also not mind to have the whole world on the UTC clock instead of timezones :)

The interactive graph part isn't loading for me due to some HTTPS error

You probably have HTTPS Everywhere installed.

are you on a new dell?

The entire idea of daylight savings time is idiotic. In a thousand years we will be looked back on and they will sneer at our lack of intelligence for adopting such a silly ritual.

Always hate it, why? It kills people.

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