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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who likes DST? I love the fact that it's daylight until 9 PM.

> I love the fact that it's daylight until 9 PM.

That just doesn't make sense: it's daylight until sunset, every single day. Whatever force has led people to get up later and later in the day — and thus want sunrise & sunset to occur later in their circadian cycles — will exist regardless of whether we're on DST or not.

Mark my words, if we went to year-round DST then in a few decades folks would want to have a summertime two-hour offset; if we went to a year-round two-hour offset then in a few more decades folks would want to have a summertime three-hour offset.

Just. Quite. Fiddling. With. The. Time. Seriously. If one wants to get up earlier, get up earlier. If society wants to get up earlier, get up earlier.

This. It would be really great if we all just relaxed our devotion to time. Get up when you want. Work your hours (or don't). Eat when your appetite suggests you eat. Go out and enjoy the world in the light, twilight or dark. Sleep when you feel tired (or don't).

I dream of an employer who would understand that I want to come in later and leave earlier in the winter when I feel like sleeping when the sun goes down earlier and have less daylight in the day. Conversely, I'm happy to wake and come to work early in the summer, maybe work a few hours more than in the winter months since I've got hours and hours of daylight to play with.

> I dream of an employer who would understand that I want to come in later and leave earlier in the winter

It's called freelancing :)

It is _much_ easier to change the time than to adjust everything that's set at a time.

You're highlighting the perverseness of time management. At its best it's a giant confusing mess, and that's before we get to all the bizarre business logic that's built up over time.

I actually think it may simply be that we have signs and large printed things with times on them, and it'd be onerous to have to replace each multiple times a year (or make them bigger with a layer of conditionals based on date). Instead, we push that complexity onto the backend and deal with time there. It's certainly easier from the customer and business owner, and we've merely make life much more difficult for the programmers and engineers... which is probably how it should be. It's the job of the technical people to deal with the technicalities, so to me, it seems like everything is working properly.

Still a nasty, messy problem, though.

Can we instead arrange sunlight for 12 hours a day, all year long? That would suit me well.

You can live on the equator, where that's true. It's hellishly hot and miserable, but if that's what you'd like it's achievable.

I wouldn't mind living in Singapore

Many equatorial cities are at a high elevation for this reason.

Also, non-intuitively the equator is not the hottest area of the planet, but rather the tropics (+/- 23 degrees), so you can expect it to be merely hot.

Seems like it would be simple enough to achieve this by altering the number of minutes in an hour depending on the time of year.

I'm for it.

> Seems like it would be simple enough to achieve this by altering the number of minutes in an hour depending on the time of year.

Or just altering the length of the civil second over the course of the year. So a minute would be 60 seconds and an hour would be 60 minutes year-round, but the daytime civil second would be short in the summer night and long in summer days, and vice-versa in the winter.

I like DST. I do not like the DST switch. If I had my way, we'd just keep DST year-round.

(Really, if I had my way, we'd just use GPS time universally. But that'll never happen, while year-round DST is at least vaguely possible.)

Idea made me smile, but what about making appointments? I grant that you usually give a place, too. But to be entirely location independent, my nerd self would probably prefer UTC globally and get rid of timezones entirely :)

GPS time is just UTC but without any leap seconds applied after 1980. It doesn't mean a position dependent time. GPS satellites transmit this, then also transmit the difference between GPS and UTC so that devices can convert it to whatever they want to display.

Now it all makes sense. I adopt your position. Thanks for disabusing me of my ignorance.

Glad to be of service. If you'd never heard of GPS time before, I can totally see how you could understand it the other way.

In Russia there was all year DST since 2011 until 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Russia#2011_zone_bound...)

It was frustrating in December when Sun rose at 9.30am while first lecture in my university was scheduled to 9am.

Growing up in Tromsø, I find little use for it. Sun's up two months straight in summer, and two months in winter we got only a few hours of twilight. And the rest of the year the shift is obviously quite dramatic, day to day.

After growing up like that one develops a healthy understanding of our place in the universe and that a 24 hour clock is just an abstract definition - antiquated in the space age ;)

[ed: just ftr Norway does practice DST - just seems a little silly in some parts of the country IMHO ]

You can't really do a comparison of a place so far north. I doubt there is a need for Daylight Savings Time when you have days with almost 24hr Sun/Darkness.

Alaska tried to get rid of it and change their time zone but I guess public outcry was too much.

http://www.alaskapublic.org/2015/03/11/alaska-senate-passes-...

DST has no purpose whatsoever when the days are of equal lengths, and it only helps when there's a difference between summer and winter days.

Extreme latitudes should benefit the most from any manipulation of the time of day, but they don't, which hints that this whole thing is based on bullshit.

How would an extreme latitude benefit from shifting an hour in the summer? If you're having 24hr of daylight how's switching the time going to help. The purpose of DST is to have daylight last "longer" in the evenings of the summer.

>that a 24 hour clock is just an abstract definition

Growing up at almost same latitude (Murmansk oblast), I can confirm that effect

I hate Daylight at 9PM. Kids need to go to bed because guess what? we still need to get up early and this staying up later isn't helping at all.

Blackout curtains. We ended up going to a fabric store and bying the material so we could make our own the exact size we needed. It helps a lot. (And helps keep some of the summer heat out).

We have those, but getting the kids to the bedroom is still a big challenge, especially when they are outside playing and the sun is out. "it's getting dark" doesn't work. DST is a shortsighted solution to what is not even a problem in my opinion. Why don't the people who hate sunrise at 4am get blackout curtains and leave the rest of us alone. Dealing with sun in the morning is far easier than sun at bedtime.

I'm in Ireland. There's light on the north horizon at midnight. It's daylight till 10ish.

It's hell with a 6 yr old. He hasn't seen darkness in a couple of months. And the older kids still want to stay up till 11.

Why is the bedtime cue "it's getting dark" rather than "it's bedtime"?

Kids don't care about bedtime one bit.

I agree with you. I'm in Atlanta and since we aren't too far from the border of Eastern/Central time zones it can be 930 with daylight. Contrast with Maine it's definitely a benefit, I'd hate to have darkness start so early year around.

I'm also in Atlanta and I can't stand those sunrises around 8 AM at the beginning of November right before the time changes back. Personally I think we'd be better off on Central time here - and in fact this used to be the case.

You don't need a clock to tell you it's ok to go to bed later.

You do when you work at a job that doesn't offer flexible hours.

Yeah, we should just get rid of non-DST.

I would love that.

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