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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together.

The New Year's Eve celebration would be a wave of cheering across the US!

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The coder in me made that: https://geodate.org

I'm the only one using it so there's absolutely no coordination problem, and it's great :3

But yeah use local time for personal time, and Unix timestamp for everything else!

That’s how it was originally. Solar noon was noon.

This made some scheduling difficult as the next city over could be 10 minutes earlier.

What time does the baseball game start? Well, that depends on where you are watching it from.

Obviously what we need is no time zones and one standard time around the globe where:

1 second = 1 second

100 seconds = 1 minute

100 minutes = 1 hour

10 hours = 1 day

100 days = 1 year

...and ignore that light in the sky. Only farmers need to know about that light.

Swatch tried to do something like that in '98:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat is equal to one decimal minute in the French Revolutionary decimal time system and lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds (86.4 seconds) in standard time. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.

There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Meantime (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+01. Unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.

The French Revolutionaries had that. Well, they did acknowledge the primacy of the physical day and year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

There's two lights, Mr. (or Ms.) Smart-Aleck! !! !!!

And who wins depends on how fast you're going while watching.

I could imagine a system where any date or time information coming into your eyes or ears would automatically be translated to your preferred time offset. All you would need to do is decide which system of time you wanted and the computer would ensure you always perceived this. As you speak about time, someone else hears their preferred time system in your voice. Emails and other text-based methods are simple, analog and digital clocks could be updated on the fly with computer vision techniques and machine learning.

So a seamlessly realtime audiovisual AR system that's cheap and convenient for anyone to adopt? Unless and until that ever happens, we're stuck with lower-tech solutions like time zones.

timezone aware Babel fish.

Thankfully now we have satellites and atomic clocks so that there is a consistent time across all places.

No smearing. Just a single time worldwide. Let society adapt. I mean it's all just semantics. Maybe you wake up at 11pm and go to bed at 3pm. Big deal!

"Who is this?"

"Hello Uncle Steve!"

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" Uncle Steve asks, sounding as if he is still asleep.

"Of course I do, and so do you! It's 04:25 on Saturday... everywhere." I add a dramatic emphasis to the last word.

"But do you know what 04:25 on Saturday signifies in Melbourne?"

"Breakfast time?"

I can actually hear him rubbing his eyes.

"We don't centre our waking/sleeping cycle on solar noon, fool nephew," Uncle Steve explains. "We centre the school day on solar noon. In countries above and below certain latitudes, where seasonal variation in the amount of daylight is significant, it's important for there to be the maximum amount of light when children are going to school in the morning, and coming home from school in the afternoon. Here in Melbourne, solar noon is about 10:30 Standard Time, so the average school day is timetabled from 07:00 to 14:00, and a typical working day runs from about 07:00 to 15:00. That means that on a working day, I get up at 05:00, at the earliest."

"Ooogh. Sorry. That's about two hours later than I reckoned," I tell him.

"I know," he replies.

"I didn't know you did that in Australia," I say. "That deliberate misalignment of the diurnal routine. Does every country do it?"

"No. Equatorial countries don't, because they get plenty of light all year round. Temperate countries do, though. The technical term for it is 'daylight saving'."

I blink.

"And 05:00 is when I get up on a working day," Uncle Steve continues. "On Saturdays, I like to lie in. Until solar noon, if possible. That's more than five hours from now."

I'm beaten. "I guess I have no idea what 04:25 on Saturday signifies. It used to be pretty universal, but now where I live it signifies a time to go out and get drunk..."

"And where I live," Uncle Steve says, "it signifies a hangover."

"The same time of day on the same day of the week means many different things to different people all over the world," I say. "Too many to remember them all."

"Yeah," Uncle Steve grumbles. "It would be neat if there was a lookup table for that kind of thing."

https://qntm.org/abolish

Taps name of Uncle Steve: Siri pops up: "Are you sure? Most people are asleep in the location of Uncle Steve, the sun will be up in 2 hours."

When I plan meetings with colleagues around the globe, Outlook corrects my time but it also (in light gray) indicates the typical workday in the meeting planner. Very handy.

Let's invert the argument:

Before abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What are the working hours there? Google tells me it is currently 7:00 to 15:00 there. It's probably best not to call right now.

After abolishing unified time

I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. When are the working hours there? it's 8:00 to 16:00, same as it is here, of course! Same as it is in New York, Bangalore and Hawaii, at the South Pole and on the Moon.

You get the point...

The difference is that as soon as you know what time it is in Melbourne, you know if you can call Uncle Steve. Regardless, you have to know where the sun is, because that determines whether or not Uncle Steve is awake (most likely). But it’s much easier to find his timezone offset and figure that out than figure out if the sun is up there (which incidentally, timezones actually allow you to do).

It’s much easier if noon is noon around most of the world (obviously it gets more meaningless the further north and south you get), as opposed to always having the same time and having to figure out where the sun is.

This is why one world timezone is a terrible idea. It makes some calculations simpler, but it otherwise royally fucks with how humans work, and humans are much more concerned with where the sun is.

All of that assumes that we would still be using old-fashioned phone calls.

Why, when analyzing some proposed future "improvement", do we assume that everything else will/must remain unchanged?

The general case with civilization and technology is that progress happens when multiple factors improve independently but happen to complement each other in tandem.

Society is already moving away from blind phone calls. People no longer seem to appreciate calls that aren't announced via text beforehand.

In the "future", everyone would/should have rich presence and status messages to see when one is asleep, busy, or available, and interact with them accordingly.

Live posting private information, like whether you're currently in a vulnerable state like sleep, would be a huge safety concern for many people. Making this data non-public would completely defeat the purpose.

Plus, how on earth is constantly updating your status more convenient than changing the clock twice a year? Who is actually going to bother to do that? What problem does this solve exactly?

• It doesn't need to say "sleeping", just "away", "busy" or "offline" like on most messaging services now and since forever.

• Sleep/availability detection is already automatic and can be improved.

• Extra details don't need to be public, only shared with [specific] friends. Unexpected calls from unknown contacts wouldn't be welcome anyway.

Interestingly I found the comments of that linked page convinced me for the 'single timezone' argument.

Particularly the comments by MichaelSzegedy and Tab Atkins.

So instead of the time there you’d look up the sun position. Not worse just different.

It is worse.

It changes the meaning of time that we all use to communicate.

Why is solar position so important compared to ability to coordinate simultaneous events across wide geographies? It would be much simpler to have a globally consistent definition of time/simultaneity and treat other things (like solar position, working hours, etc) as scheduling constraints.

We put up with crazy things in an attempt to match solar position. The meaning of time we all use is flawed when I can hop on a plane and go back to yesterday. That's quite inconsistent with the accepted definition of time as unidirectional.

I agree, though it would make New Years Eve less fun away from the prime meridian. Probably worth it.

I talk about morning, noon, afternoon, evening, and night. Those are solar concepts and need not be related to the clock.

Edit: originally said they need to be related which is opposite of my intent

They have to be related because that’s what humans are concerned with. Timekeeping is meaningless if noon for you means the sun is up and noon for me means it’s the dead of night. What purpose does that serve? Timekeeping is all about where the sun is, because humans still have sleep/wake cycles, and most people obviously want to do things when the sun is up.

Noon to me means the sun is directly overhead. When I travel the clock time of noon changes. Noon is traditionally 12:00, but it need not be. I care about local noon because adjusting my life around the local sun is a useful thing - it is very difficult to not be awake when the sun is up and sleep at night. Even if you travel a long distance you body will want to adjust to local sun patterns over the course of a month.

That’s the definition of different.

Where's the fun in that!?

I want to watch the software world burn while I demand that the wall clock on my phone shall start going backwards once I go west faster than ~1000mph.

Or, head to one of the poles, and amble slowly about for the same effect. No need to go supersonic at the equator.

No. Deprecate hours and minutes altogether, change to Greewitch Meridian degrees and minutes. This will help with leaving the old system and makes more sense semantically, even though it's essentially an equivalent system.

- What time is it now? - It's 258 degrees and 15 minutes. (5:18pm)

That's just begging for "Celsius Time" and "Fahrenheit Time"

Switch to a 24 hour clock while you're at it. am and pm no longer make any sense if they're not used to refer to a local time.

No no no. Metric 10 hour clock!

To make adaptation easier, allow me to propose the one true global time system, Internet Time (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

You can start today: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

“The insane software developer in me wants to just smear the time across the US uniformly and do away with timezones all together.”

I think China has that. Why not do it world wide? The math would be much easier.

Also let’s get a 10 hour day with 10 minute hours. Ideally I would have a 100 day year but the sun probably won’t cooperate.

It fucks over the minorities living in rural China.

It screws over everyone in China not living on the coast, since the one-true-time for China is Beijing time.

Somehow this calls to mind why Detroit is in the Eastern timezone, because the companies there wanted to be in step with the one-true-time of New York City.

http://nighttraintodetroit.com/2017/07/28/why-is-michigan-on...

China only has a single timezone, and it's nearly as wide as the IS.

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