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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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