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Comment by jedrek | Hacker News Reader

The true tl;dr is this: hours are meta-information. Just like 5am is very early in every time zone, 11pm is late. We expect businesses to be open from 8-11 to 16-19, just like we expect everybody to be awake between 11-21.

Now, remove that bit of metadata and we need to figure out how to encode/transmit it again. At the end of the day, we just recreate time zones, with the added downside of removing a common language we have while traveling - Visit SF from the UK and not only are you jetlagged, but you need to remember that every time of the day you're used to needs to be shifted by 8 hours. - and just... talking to people in other time zones.

Right now, if you post a story on HN about needing to get up for work at 4:30am, everybody will understand: this person gets up for work really early! Move to UTC and it means nothing.

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We already have "before sunrise" and "middle of the night" and "after dark" and sunrise and sunset and so on. Most of the time, there's little or no gain from attaching a number instead of using one of those.

(I'm not arguing in favor of switching, just pointing out that we already have the descriptions for times of day)

Depending on the latitude sunset might be when people just start to get off work, or it might be well after dinner. Times have more semantic meaning than just the position of the sun.

None of those are as exact as a specific time. Each of those phrases could be hours long. When you say before sunrise, did you mean 7:00 AM because it's the middle of winter or did you mean 4:00 AM because it's the middle of summer? I live at 37 degrees latitude, less than halfway to the north pole from the equator. It gets dark before 5 in the winter and after 9 in the summer. That's a 4 hours swing, and I'm not even at a very high latitude.

My point was that conversationally, "the middle of the night" gets the point across that you got up early. It wouldn't even matter if the sun were up, it would still get the point across fine.

Pedants that were concerned about the fuzziness of such words could hound the speaker for UTC.

It doesn't. To me, "middle of the night" means midnight to one am. If you meant like 3 am to catch a red eye flight, then I've misunderstood you.

Languages almost always find ways to fill in gaps of how to express something. Often through the form of shared knowledge or idioms.

"I woke up a few hours before the roosters' crow to catch a flight."

It would be awkward to say that today, but potentially less so in some alternate-dimension universal time zone world where it could be a common idiom for "wee hours of the morning". Hours would still have meaning, people at least have the thought that "roosters crow at sunrise". So you got up a few hours before sunrise, whenever that time was.

i think it would be a cool culture thing to be like well i get up at 23 every morning at sunrise. What 0-23 index is your sunrise? Oh sunrise is 13 for you? How cool!

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