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Comment by gaur | Hacker News Reader

> DST is actually more comfortable to live with by allowing for more daylight after work hours. It would be better to just switch to DST permanently and avoid the constant frustrating changes.

Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?

It just sounds kind of Kafkaesque... your boss has set your schedule too late in the day, so your solution is to trick him by winding all his clocks forward by one hour.

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>Is adding a permanent 1-hour offset to all of our clocks really a more sensible solution than convincing employers to shift their schedules one hour earlier?

I think you're analyzing it from the perspective of mathematical logic. In an isolated perspective, one employer (instead of all employers), can arbitrarily change the working time as 7am-4pm instead of 8am-5pm because it's mathematically equivalent to the +1 hour DST.

But society wants to coordinate on a bigger scale than that one employer you were able to convince. (Children's school hours, restaurants, tv schedules, customers calling help desks, etc). Also, the math viewpoint ignores the fact that there are long standing cultural anchors tied to specific times such as 9am-5pm[1].

The bottom line is that it's easier to address the coordination problem by hacking the time via permanent DST rather than adjusting everyone's familiarity around nominal times. Changing out the nominal times displayed in glass windows doesn't look easier than implementing DST. Even changing nominal times in the digital realm is a hassle: think of all the recurring meetings in MS Outlook, Google Calendar, iPhones reminders, etc that say 10am-11am. Millions of people would have to change those times to say 9am-10am. Again, leaving those nominal times the same and fixing it more "globally" via DST seems a lot simpler.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=store+opening+closing+times+...

If the timetables are to be changed every March and November, the calendar tool providers will make it easy for people to set up an automatic time slot change.

The point is, for a lot of people (if not most of all), the timetables don't need to be changed. If my working hour is 11am ~ 12pm, DST or no, I will see daylight when going to work and not when coming back. 4am~2pm is likewise.

Your solution sounds like fixing the Y2K problem without updating the software to use 4 or more digit variables for years, rather by making everyone living the 20th century over and over again.

"Easy", "automatic", bah humbug! I take it you have never seen the hoops any date library needs to jump through because of DST. (An example: your scheduled task is at 2:30. When does it run on DST change, and how many times? 0? 1? 2? Guess what: no right answer, just a lot of wrong ones. And that's one of the simplest examples.)

Not just my boss. Every government office, every schedule, every store's hours, every school, every automated job, every scheduled event everywhere.

If you're going to change all the clocks anyways by eliminating DST changeover, you may as well use the better time.

the offset from UTC is arbitrary anyways. it is no more arbitrary to keep it at UTC-7 instead of UTC-8.

> the offset from UTC is arbitrary anyways.

It manifestly is not. Noon on the west coast of the continental US happens about 8 hours after noon in the UK. That's why it's nominally UTC-8, not UTC-5 or UTC+12.

And regardless of how you define time relative to UTC, a permanent DST is a permanent 1-hour difference between solar noon and clock noon.

Timezones are for humans, not to align scientifically with actual sun progress. Many would much rather live with the DST offset permanently.

I really don't understand what people think they're gaining with a permanent DST offset. It's not going to increase the amount of sunlight in each day.

If you don't like the timing of your job (e.g., you feel like you don't get enough sunlight after work), the correct thing to do is talk to your boss or find a different job, not to make people put offsets in their clocks to fool your boss.

Like it or not, there are many things in society that happen at particular clock times and can't easily be changed. I can change my working hours however I want, but I can't change when my kid needs to be at school, for instance.

It's not about the amount of total sunlight during the day but rather how much sunlight is available to you during hours that you are "free" and not working or otherwise busy. It's far easier to just change the standard once than all the numerous activities that an individual might be bound to during the course of the day, especially many that they have no control over scheduling.

For many people (like in government or blue-collar jobs), it's just not as simple as talking to the boss or finding a different job. However I see no reason why they don't deserve a better level of comfort that works for everyone.

it's not about the timing of my job. i could wake an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier.

but then, the rest of the world will have an extra hour in the evening (assuming they continue as they were before), while i sleep.

i am essentially saying that the world should rise and fall based on my preference for where sunlight falls. and the other side would say the same, naturally.

early risers vs night owls. and no solution can make everyone happy.

> And regardless of how you define time relative to UTC, a permanent DST is a permanent 1-hour difference between solar noon and clock noon.

A fact that means absolutely nothing to pretty much any modern person ever. I don't care when solar noon is. I've never met anyone who cares when solar noon is. I don't even know why people would care when solar noon is.

Most everyone thinks of noon in terms of solar noon - they just don't know it. Solar noon is when the sun is at it's highest point in the sky for a given location. So their point was that noon would no longer be aligned with that intuition.

No, they don't. No one cares what position the sun is in at noon. Noon is "the middle of the workday", or "lunchtime", neither of which has anything to do with the position of the sun in the sky.

Solar noon is an outdated concept that is completely meaningless to the vast majority of the modern world. There's no reason we should tie our modern workday to solar noon any more than we should tie our software launches to the lunar cycle or our bathing schedule to the tides.

> No one cares what position the sun is in at noon. Noon is "the middle of the workday", or "lunchtime", neither of which has anything to do with the position of the sun in the sky.

people aren't robots. having lunch outside on a warm day feels good.

That's sort of true. It gets sketchy around the time zone boundaries. Idaho, for instance, is pretty screwy. The west half should arguably be in PST, but instead it is the same as the eastern side.

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