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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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