On its 100th anniversary, the madness of Daylight Saving Time endures | Hacker News Reader

On its 100th anniversary, the madness of Daylight Saving Time endures

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56 pointsteaman200070 comments

So far there are only a few comments here, but I am surprised to see they actually have differing opinions. I always thought everyone universally hated DST, especially programmers, but apparently that's not the case at all.

I personally hate it because I'd rather be on DST year round so I get more sun in the winter afternoons.

The majority of programmers should never be directly coding to account for DST but instead should be using libraries (JodaTime, moment.js) that abstract local time differences. There are just too many to keep track of. I'm glad I don't have to worry about code I wrote 5 years ago handling the end of DST in Florida.

Even with libraries, DST creates headaches. Just having an hour of ambiguous time (Nov 4, 1:23am 2018 has two possible meanings in most places) means having to write test cases, parse log files differently and there are areas (e.g. database) where you can't use a library and if you're not able to structure your application to store UTC timestamps, you have to account for it yourself.

Libraries are great at abstracting away a lot of the pain, but some of the complexity will always leak through that abstraction.

As an engineer I always use a library, or set up systems on Arizona time so I don't have to deal with it.

But I often had to work with systems/software made by other people who made a lot of assumptions about dates.

Why Arizona time? Isn’t it easier to use UTC?

I live and work in California, so it's way easier in my head to subtract one hour during the few winter months we're on standard time, and then not have to do any math from March to October.

UTC always requires a bunch of mental gymnastics to subtract 7 or 8.

It’s possible for Arizona to start using DST in the future. Indiana used to not observe DST until 10 or 15 years ago.

I don't think programmers hate DST per se. I think they just hate having to write code that has to support the time change in general. If it doesn't change, it's not really different than just keeping it at Standard Time.

Depends on one's lifestyle a lot. When I was younger I could sleep late so I cared much more about the afternoon daylight. However since I've got a kid I now have to get up before 7am every day to handle all the chores - and so I started caring much more about the morning daylight. Honestly nothing more depressing to me than having to go out of my warm bed into a cold and still pitch dark winter morning. It's just a FML kinda thing...

It's funny...I love waking up in darkness. I like to get an hour of meditation in before I start my day and lighting a candle in a dark room makes that easier. I also love sunrises and sunsets, so being awake before sun comes up means I get to see both. There's something about that transitional light, where the sun's angle has to go through more atmosphere, that I find quite magical.

I can see how having responsibilities that need to happen in the morning would keep you from being able to step back and appreciate those more aesthetic enjoyments, but if can figure out how to find moments within those responsibilities when you can appreciate the beauty, perhaps getting up in the pitch dark won't seem so depressing.

I hate DST because I'd rather be on NORMAL time year round. Having to get up in darkness during Winter would be terrible and there's plenty of light during Summer anyways.

Canadians and Alaskans and most Northern Europeans get up in winter darkness.

I suspect it's something you either get used to or move away from.

I live in Norway so I know. Getting up at 9 allows me to just get up at sunset in Winter. If Summer time was enforced in Winter that wouldn't be possible.

This whole "DST the whole year" thing feels like an early riser conspiracy. Summertime essentially means that an hour is stolen from you.

It’s the opposite. DST shifts sunlight one hour by the local clock later in the day.

It’s not limited to programmers but I’m guessing programmers as a group favor shifting light later in the day.

So you don't actually hate DST, you hate switching between the two? I agree: we should stick to DST forever, more sun at night!

I'm in central Europe.

I sincerely do not understand the problem people have with changing a single hour in a single day during a weekend in the year.

Speaking from my experience of only living in places that don't use DST (Thailand), it was very disorientating to me this year (now living in California). The act of changing the clocks itself isn't difficult (mostly besides the oven everything does it automatically). It's that all of a sudden my perception of the day didn't match the external, agreed upon reality. I'd rather just adjust my personal schedule relative to a fixed time rather than have the time schedule change somewhat arbitrarily.

I understand the very first time(s) may feel weird, but I bet you will get used to it

As someone who lives in the UK and has never not experienced DST. It doesn't get any better.

Are you talking about people adjusting their clocks and their bodies to accommodate the change in time? Very few people have a big problem with that.

The problems arise when accommodating the change programmatically in code. How many times did Apple fuck this up with the first few versions of the iPhone with alarms not going off at the right time?

2010 https://www.cultofmac.com/67254/how-to-avoid-the-iphone-dayl...

2011 http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/13/iphone-daylight-savings-time-...

2012 http://www.iphonehacks.com/2012/03/iphone-daylight-savings-t...

Never had this issue. And again, at least in Central Europe they do the change from Saturday to Sunday when it’s understood that most people have less constraints with tight times and alarms.

Considering that heart attacks rise right after the time change, and other people have sleep issues, I would guess a lot of people have a problem with adjusting their internal clicks.

I agree, it would be like a travel magazine devoting an article of the difficulties of adjusting to the time change when flying from Stockholm to Helsinki.

:-) I’m somewhat sympathetic to the complaints of parents with young children but as someone who travels about 100 days a year, almost entirely to different and often distant time zones a 1 hour change isn’t even really on my radar.

As someone who travels a lot, do you think timezones are valuable or do you think there would be value in everyone adopting UTC?

This is a good question and I guess there are pros and cons. This would certainly simplify schedules and meetings between different time zones. On the other hand, it would totally screw up our understanding of when things are supposed to happen, specially when traveling. Like as in: it is 3am, is it time for lunch now ?

My biggest question anyway is how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.

> it is 3am, is it time for lunch now?

Why can't you eat when you're hungry?

Why can't you go to sleep when it gets dark?

A better way to manage when things should happen is to create a schedule which could be defined in UTC. I don't think the time zones really solve this problem.

For example, I might assume that I can eat dinner when my plane lands in my destination around 8pm. But when I look for a local restaurant, they all close at 8pm because it's a smaller town. I still need to look at the hours of operation for that business.

So I can't really make assumptions based on the local time anyway so why do we need to adjust them.

> how we will manage time once we become a multi planet species.

Excellent question! We would probably need to remove the concept of "days" because that is relative to the current planet.

Time zones are valuable. They let me easily convert to local time which gives me a pretty good immediate intuitive feel (modulo differences in customs) for the types of activities appropriate to that time of day.

Mind you. I screw things up. Just did it with a meeting the other day. But with electronic calendaring it’s not too bad.

Added: when traveling, time zones let me change my watch once and I immediately more or less know time appropriate activities that more or less correspond to what I’m used to at home.

I must ask: I do not have children. Do young fellas go crazy over a change in 1 hour or what?

My kids are a slight pain in the ass for a few days after “spring forward”. Despite all attempts to ensure plenty of sleep, there’s always increased fighting, crying and - like today - increased physical clumsiness that results in a 6 year old skinning his hands and knees on the sidewalk.

Better yet, why not change your clocks slightly, every day, following the changing sunset/sunrise, to fully optimize each day? It'd only take 5 minutes a day to do all of my clocks.

I think most of the people who have a problem with it ( me included ) don’t mind the act of changing clocks, but dislike the effect it has on the sun. In my case I love sunny evenings and nights, but don’t care if it’s dark til 8am. Others would prefer to always have more sun in the AM and forgo the late evening rounds of golf...

I can understand that.

To be fair, it isn't really that big of a deal. However, it wouldn't be that hard to stop playing around with the clocks either.

I'm in Northern Europe and the early onset of afternoon darkness in winter is too real to not complain about it.

But that's the problem, right? The extra hour of sunshine we get thanks to DST in the spring & summer is exactly what most people want to get rid of.

Not really. People don’t want to change clocks. And I doubt anyone really has an issue with long light evenings in the summer. But at least some number of people, especially in the North, don’t want it to be pitch black in the winter when they’re getting up, kids are waiting for school buses, etc.

I didn't mean that to be the main point but yes, I would prefer DST.

Moreover if you are used to changing timezones due to travel, this makes absolutely no difference.

The main reason to dislike it is because it's pointless. There are all sorts of pointless-but-not-too-onerous activities that we could have the government impose on society, but that doesn't mean we should.

The ritual of DST mostly seems to survive because people are convinced it must be good for something. Otherwise, surely we wouldn't be doing it...

> I sincerely do not understand the problem people have with changing a single hour in a single day during a weekend in the year.

Other than the fact that it's a colossal waste of time for everyone who has to do it, and it kills people? Every year, people will be dead the Tuesday after the time change who would have been alive had the time not changed. Also, of course, it's not a single day — it's twice a year.

It only kills people in autumn; in spring many live to see another day.

Not true, according to an NIH study:

> There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034). There was also a significant increase in number of accidents on the Sunday of the fall shift from DST (P<0.002). No significant changes were observed for the other days. A significant negative correlation with the year was found between the number of accidents on the Saturdays and Sundays but not Mondays.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/

I think you're being silly, but I don't quite get it.

No, I'm not being silly: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/

> There was a significant increase in accidents for the Monday immediately following the spring shift to DST (t=1.92, P=0.034).

https://lifehacker.com/the-truth-about-jet-lag-and-how-to-ov...

https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-topics/jet-lag-and-sleep

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/jet-lag/

What are you trying to say with those links?

I’m not sure why we ever moved off year-round DST as we used for a few years in the US. Yes it makes for dark winter mornings in the North. But, honestly, there’s not a lot of sunlight to spread around in Boston or Chicago in the middle of winter anyway.

I think the common complaint was it was too dark for school aged children waiting for the bus.

I'm not saying this is a super valid complaint, it's just the common one.

I live in Boston (42°N) having grown up at 52°N, which may sound extreme to East-Coasters but is hardly exceptional by West-Coast or European standards.

I can assure you there's plenty of sunlight here at midwinter, it's just poorly utilized.

Fair enough. I do winter hiking and the like. It’s just hard to get much sunlight outside of a typical work day.

All you people living in the US complaining about DST thinking only you have a problem with it.

Well, guess what, you wouldn't have imagined a tiny fraction of people on the other end of the world too have a problem with it.

When DST is in effect, engineers supporting US from India work from 5:30pm to 2:30am. When DST ends in November the guys have to work from 6:30pm to 3:30am. And this is just for east coast. Granted it is just one hour. But it does make a lot of difference when the travel back to home takes 1hr and by the time you are trying to fall asleep, the Sun is shining bright outside the window.

And I have worked in this manner for 5 continuous years in continuous night shifts until I shifted recently to one of the (very few) companies who have day shift jobs in my area of specialization and simultaneously not having a shitty pay. I used to hate going to office between November to March, no matter how much I did like my job and the technology. And so I used to treasure those work-from-home days.

Edit: Added formatting, correct error and added some context.

  engineers supporting US from

It would be best to re-onshore such roles back to the USA and thereby spare you such annoyance in the future.

I was trying to find something to illustrate the practical implications of this, but couldn't find exactly what I wanted so came up with this:

                               Toronto                      San Francisco
                      Sunrise             Sunset     Sunrise              Sunset      
    June 21 (DST)     5:00~5:36 am  9:02~9:38 pm     5:16~5:48 am   8:34~9:06 pm  
    December 21       7:15~7:47 am  4:43~5:16 pm     6:52~7:21 am   4:54~5:23 pm 
    December 21 (DST) 8:15~8:47 am  5:43~6:16 pm     7:52~8:21 am   5:54~6:23 pm

The ranges are for civil twilight [1] which is basically the time it's still bright enough to see outside.

[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/civil-twilight.html

And the flip side is that, absent DST, sunrise would be at 4am on the summer solstice in Boston, rather than a marginally more civilized 5am with an extra hour of sunlight after normal work hours.

Every six months, the same damn thinkpieces are written.

It's really not something I've ever found myself bothered by. I've only learned in the past few years that some people actually have a problem with it, to the point of calling it "madness" apparently.

Really people? This seems to be more a symptom of complainers needing something to complain about and clickbait machines churning than anything else.

Yes. And people complaining about their kids not being able to adjust to it (kids grow up, they'll learn to live with it eventually ;))

I really hate when people complain that they get to sleep 1 hour less. The switch is always during the night of saturday to sunday, who cares?

We decided the solution to specific problems (like kids waiting for the school bus in the dark), was to move the goal posts for everyone, instead of having specific institutions make their own seasonal adjustments to their schedules.

Let's throw the whole system out and start over. 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour. :)

Switch the clocks once, halfway from 11 to 10:30, and be done with it forever. :/

If you could stack rank the problems of the world, it would become clear that there shouldn’t be time to write articles complaining about daylight savings time.

Or we could just get rid of daylight savings so we wouldn't have to complain anymore.

Given the massively increased percentages of death, injury, lost productivity, etc that's associated with shifting the clocks around twice a year, I would say it's a pretty big deal and worth addressing.

a healthy dose of skepticism might be in order if you think there are massive increases in death. I’ve seen the articles too, but please, throw on a skeptics hat when you read them. Easy enough to fudge those statistics to say whatever gets you in print. Think about it reductively next time your boss calls for an early meeting - is he trying to kill you? Negligent because of the massive risk of death you now face trying to get to the office an hour early? It is all a little absurd.

The biggest study I have an issue with is the heart attack one.

If you're to the point that losing an hour of sleep triggers a heart attack, DST didn't cause your heart attack. Daylight savings time rescheduled it from Wednesday to Monday.

Edit: I guess that was apparently in the original study, it just doesn't make it into most pop coverage of it.

"The overall number of heart attacks for the full week after daylight saving time didn’t change, just the number on that first Monday. The number then dropped off the other days of the week."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heart-daylightsaving/dayl...

"Skepticism" might apply more if we were dealing with clickbait, but when you compare the "benefits" that DST provides with the misery that it causes, eliminating it is a no-brainer.

http://www.sleep-journal.com/article/S1389-9457%2800%2900032...

https://www.gwern.net/docs/melatonin/1996-coren.pdf

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140329175108.h...

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/94/5/1305/?nl=nytnow&em_...

..and many more. You'll note a complete lack of sensationalist articles in the above links.

Keeping DST amounts to self-flagellation. Much like the existence of the penny, it's a thing that has few legitimate reasons to exist and many more legitimate reasons to be burned to the ground.

It's also a little absurd to think it has no impact at all.

Do you have a source for that? Because massively increased percentages is a pretty bold claim to make without a source.

Meanwhile the aviation industry said "to hell with it" and doesn't even use time zones, let alone DST!

DST is so disruptive to my children's life and thus my life. I should move back to Arizona. Curse you DST!

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