So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015) | Hacker News Reader

So You Want to Abolish Time Zones (2015)

qntm.org

67 pointsJoshTriplett100 comments

Doesn't China still do this? I believe its one legal jurisdictional timezone despite spanning three or four real ones. And people do what's said here: they run their lives to follow the diurnal clock with some minor variances to talk to the centre. (Beijing)

I run my servers on UTC. No summertime, and I'm fine. Midnight log rolls are in a great time for me living my best life in gmt+10. I am fix things, in core body clock hours.

Yes. It's a bit surreal. The farthest western part of China has a time that doesn't at all reflect the reality outside because it's like 4 hours behind what the clock shows.

Europe has similar issues, no? Most of continental Europe switched to Central European Time by 1940 (yes, literally as a result of German occupation in many cases). Spain is in the same time zone as Poland, Hungary, and Serbia.

I read once that the Spanish nightlife only starts at midnight. That makes a lot more sense if they are on Germany’s time zone.

I think that is more of a Spanish cultural thing than anything time zone related.

I spent some time in Germany, people usually had dinner "very early" there, between 19-20. I've also lived in Spain, where dinner is usually "very late" probably around 21. However they both actually felt pretty similar. The sun sets about 1h 20m later in Madrid than Berlin which would indicate that most of the difference is actually explained just by the difference in sunlight and summer days being a bit longer in Spain, I think it's mostly the perception side of what's late and early that's mostly cultural.

I've don't recall ever having worked with people in Spain but certainly with people living in France and Germany. It really is just a number though at the end of the day. Living in Sweden I'd never take a meeting before 9AM unless forced to, especially during winter.

If you're in a position where you're scheduling meetings you hopefully have some idea of where the participants are located and try to select a time that works for the most amount of people have woken up or not yet fallen asleep.

This will probably become more of an issue with more people working remotely though.

No there are several timezones in Europe, if some countries are in the same timezone it's because Europe is not that big, geographically. Spain was not invaded by Germany and their nightlife probably starts at midnight because they have a nap in the afternoon.

Spain switched to CET in 1940, supposedly in an attempt by the Franco regime to curry favor with Germany. It was France, the Netherlands, and a few other countries that switched due to German occupation (France used to be on GMT as they also straddle the Prime Meridian).

The UK, Ireland, and European countries east of the CET-zone are on different time zones, of course, but CET stretches from Serbia to Spain. That’s not as far as Shanghai to Tibet, but it’s still at least a couple solar hours.

You are right, but the CET is as wide as EST according to this map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/World_Ti...

Is it? I think there’s more difference in longitude between the western tip of Western Sahara and the eastern tip of the CAR than between the far ends of Quebec and Ontario.

Going by population density CET is probably far more disruptive though. The vast majority of the population that lives in EST is, by longitude, between Detroit and Boston, which is a narrower band than between Madrid and Belgrade.

That's a terrible projection to be judging distances with...

East Turkistan: everything was fine until we tried to match India Standard Time

You should know that even UTC+8 is the official time, Uighurs tend to actually use UTC+6 because that's the closest mean time there.

> Even in the best case scenario, it is impossible to retroactively scrap time zones. The past will always exist, and the people who lived there will never adopt your new standard. Nor can all of past history be renumbered. The history of timekeeping will remain exactly as complicated as it always has been, and the zoneinfo database can never be abandoned.

Abolishing time zones is fine for servers and network equipment, if you have multiple things communicating with each other all over the world, it's important to have times you can correlate between log files easily. Just set everything to UTC. Same reason that international aviation and military things all use zulu time.

For humans, not so much.

Obviously the example in the top level post URL is intentionally silly.

Or we could just move everything to Swatch Internet Time (no I'm not being serious here): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

It works for humans too. My company (global workforce) does something like this where every conversation about time is in UTC by default, and it works great.

Each person only has to remember how to convert between their local time and UTC. I can easily say, "I'm free tomorrow from 13:00-17:00," and my teammate can say, "OK. My day ends at 15:00, so let's meet at 13:30."

There are a few time zones that rarely overlap, but usually, if you pick two times, you can cover just about everybody.

The only frustrating thing is that Google Calendar won't let you set your calendar to UTC. You can set it to GMT and rename it, but the event will still move on the calendar based on when daylight saving time starts or ends for the person who set it, whether they want it to or not, and even if that means your recurring meeting shifts for an hour for the other person for a few weeks.

> For humans, not so much.

It works fine for pilots and many other industries populated by human beings.

Why exactly doesn't it work for humans again? Can you elaborate?

Irrational attachment to a specific number to wake and sleep on isn't really an answer.

I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM, your local time, and woken up by a phone call from someone in the middle of their day. I used to have a phone with a Seattle area code in the GMT+5 time zone, and the only practical solution was to turn the ringer volume off at night.

The military and aviation are special cases because they're specifically trained to use zulu time for professional purposes in a certain set of circumstances and situations. I'm fairly sure you won't find airline pilots scheduling their family Thanksgiving dinner in zulu time.

The specific circumstances where it does work for humans is where it's known that UTC is the standard for some set of equipment, such as a person looking at a traffic chart for an incoming DDoS and going "yup, looks like that began at about 0300 UTC on Feb 2nd, so it started affecting the customer at 10PM Eastern on Feb 1st"

> I would ask how many times you've been sound asleep at 2AM...

Just want to point out a big problem with single time zone is that you'd have to phrase stuff like this super awkwardly. 2 AM seems roughly equally late at night to most people irrespective of their time zone. Very convenient.

Their example is silly and I can’t get over how silly.

It starts with the assumption that somehow you know it’s 4:25am in another country across the world. How do you know this? Because you are aware there are difference in time of day between one place and the next. Armed with that knowledge you are required to do math about appropriate calling times regardless of whether there are time zones or not.

But it’s even worse than that. Most of us don’t just take a crapshoot and guess whether it’s normal waking hours and shoot off a random phone call. Knowing when it’s a good time to call someone is more important and often you arrange calls before hand via text or email. With time zones the conversation (via text message or email I assume) goes something like this: Q: “When can is a good time to call you?” A: “Any time between 8am and 10am is fine”... now you have a math problem to solve to know when you can call. Without time zones, the answer is immediately clear and relevant to you.

Quite often you don’t even know what time zone the other person is in.

Likewise, businesses can post their hours publicly and people don’t have to do math to figure out whether they can call AmCo in the UK at 9:45.

Do you live somewhere not far from Greenwich meridian? Because otherwise "oh, it's 03am, high noon, time for lunch" or "13h00, bed time" feels awkward to me...

One can argue that's just social conditioning. If you grew up with 3 am being lunch time, then it won't feel awkward. And you'll just accept that everyone in the world has a different lunchtime.

You're right, it is social conditioning; like a warm December in Australia.

If you grew up with 3am being lunch time it won't feel awkward, until of course you move somewhere where 3am is sleep time and then it's awkward again.

A mid-morning switch of date would take a bit more getting used to, but yeah, the time alignment isn't that weird considering we already handle quirks like some cultures having mid afternoon naps

I think switching days in the middle of the workday is the single biggest good argument for time zones. When lunch is is something you’d get used to quick. Having it be Monday before lunch and Tuesday after would be a head F*. It would also screw with date calculations in a big way.

Having the whole of North America on one big time zone would be fairly easy. This is basically what China does.

No, don’t live near Greenwich but I’ve never quite understood why 12:00 is lunch time, it’s just an arbitrary number.

My lunch time is 20:00 Zulu. It’s just as relevant a number as 12:00 PST.

Without time zones part of the answer is obvious indeed but the other, previously very easy (what phase of the sun is it: will you be tired or just waking up during our meeting) completely absent.

Timezone are super convenient and if you dislike it you can take the time at a previous colonizer of your choice, say england, and just use BST time with each other.

Not sure if you are arguing for or against time zones. Here's my two cents.

I work with a team spread over 11 time zones and talk to them constantly on Slack and email. Time zone math is simple: just add or subtract the offset to see if it's a good time to ping them. I know where people are already. Hard to see a problem with this.

The one thing that's really confusing is daylight savings time. That is a mess and should be eliminated, because every major region does it differently. It's a mess even within regions like the US, where the word "capricious" comes lightly to mind.

That require you to know the offset. That's no different than knowing what hour their morning starts.

Kids usually go to school around 8am and that families eat dinner around 7pm. Those times are similar in many places. I try to remember events throughout the day, not just when they arrive at work because I tend to make judgement calls about scheduling people's time based on what I know about their entire daily schedule.

All you have to remember is the offset and everything else fits.

You have to know the offset though. And if it is with multiple people you might even have multiple offsets. There's nothing easier about offsets over differing work times

All you care about is the offset, regardless of whether time zones exist or not. Knowing the east coast is 3 hours ahead of us, I know calling at 8PM is probably a bad idea. You don’t need that intermediate step of figuring out what number is associated with that on the east coast.

You don’t care that Bob is in EST, you just need to know that he’s 3 hours ahead of you.

I’m honestly not super passionate either way. But the argument the author made is fundamentally bad.

If I were going to make an argument for time zones, I would probably start with the fact that it’s fundamentally simpler to think about a day “Monday” starting when most people wake up. Having it change from the 1st of May to the 2nd of May right after lunch would be weird.

Eliminating time zones in the US? Honestly don’t see any downsides. Make on “USA Standard Time” pegged at current central time and I think it would simplify a whole lot of things.

It's frustrating that the article never fully separates 'part of day' from 'time of day'. That is, sometimes we want to know if it's morning or mid-day or night, and other times we want to synchronize at specifically 1:00. These are different things and time zones only help in superficial, inconsistent, and misleading ways (as mentioned in the piece). There are replies on the page that discuss this point.

I feel like this is one of those infomercials where the actor in black and white is super clumsy. Looking up what time it is in Melbourne? Google. Looking up whether the sun is up new in Melbourne? Find a webcam in Melbourne.

Timezones are pretty crude method of figuring out if someone is awake, or the sun is up anyway.

Not to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time.

Or you could download an app like Sol.

Or to your point, there's google (or Duck Duck Go, or Almanacs...)

"Not to mention that with the Big Sur update, you can just go to your Photos app and see where the sun is in real time."..... what?

Where TFA says "Friday [...] 17:00 to 24:00" and "Saturday 00:00 to 01:00", a much better representation, which I have actually seen in the wild in real life, would be "Friday 17:00 to 25:00".

I believe the one I saw (perhaps on some European restaurant's entrance or website; I'm from the USA) actually went a bit further, like 26:30 as a closing time. Beyond that it approaches silly, though.

I want to abolish time zones. The author's approach is absurd though.

Let's return to putting the sun overhead every day at noon. The current time zone nonsense is a side effect of steam trains. This is a much more humane system.

The computers (phones) can handle all the mechanics and can tell us at a glance what time it is anywhere else.

Isn't the problem more acute now that we have more needs for people at different longitudes to communicate? There's about half a degree of longitude between the (non-steam, admittedly) San Francisco and San Jose Caltrain stations, which means solar noon is just about two minutes different. You could, perhaps, say that arrival/departure times are always in local time. But you also have phones and video conferences now. If you have some folks working out of the SF office and some folks working out of the Valley office, are you going to pick one office and have all your meetings start at :58 or :02 in the other one?

Also how does the UX for this work? Does your car's computer tell you that the drive is going to be 50 minutes in traffic, and so if you leave at 6:00 you'll get there at 6:48? (Have you tried to use Google Maps across our existing discrete time zones without confusing yourself?)

Quantizing time zones also means that everyone's on the same modular time, too. I've got a handful of meetings at work aligned to the hour or half hour, and I show up to an open source project's weekly meeting that is also aligned to the hour. I don't know who originally set the meeting and where they are, but I don't care - it's sometime during my workday, and I can block off that hour. But if they live, say, 4h25m away from me (the solar-time distance from NYC ton London), it suddenly turns a one-hour spot on my calendar into a one-and-a-half-hour spot, because I can't usefully schedule something over that five-minute "leak."

... Also, solar noon drifts quite a lot! There is a half-hour difference between solar noon in early February and solar noon in late November, relative to a clock that's ticking at a steady rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time). I guess you can say that computers can solve this too, but now you're suggesting that the second hand/field on your watch is running faster or slower than actual seconds, as your solar timezone slowly shifts. A solar day can be at worst roughly half a minute more or less than 24 hours.

That means that a guy standing about a football field away from me due east or west would have a clock that was running ahead of or behind mine.

It also means that in certain places 24 hours would last several days.

No, but daylight saving time.

This. I understand the need for timezones, but daylight savings time is a joke.

I don't mind timezones at all, I'd rather have the International Fixed Calendar[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Sign me the F up. It'd be hard for a few years, but our descendants would benefit greatly.

We can totally solve these minor issues by forcing everyone to wake up at the same time, let's say, 7, got to work/school at 9, eat at 12, etc? People will complain a bit at first, but they should be just fine after a few days. No more jetlags when travelling!

How do you mean? If you mean "same actual moment", then you'd get jet lag because you'd be used to waking up in the morning and now you'd have to get used to waking up at night. If you mean "same clock time", that's what we do now.

Aha, but those two concepts would now be the same!

If we got rid of timezones and everyone wakes up at the same time, while it could eliminate jet lag, it also means some people will be going to bed with the noon sun streaming through the windows and it makes an afternoon picnic less fun when you have to use a flashlight to see anything in the dark.

Actual sunlight is an important input to the human circadian rhythm.

You want people to completely ignore sunrise and sunset? And force some people to be awake entirely during the night?

Good luck with that.

People only suggest those things because they think they are not going to be the ones awake at night

And if we go by UTC, that means the British, and whoever they share their longitude with.

Which makes me think if the British Empire lasted another century or so, they might have very well tried to do this!

What a silly argument. "I want to call and it's 4:25am there". Except, how did you find out what time it was there in the first place? You googled " current time in Sydney".

No one memorizes UTC offsets for every time zone (especially not the weird 30 minute ones). They look it up.

For example, my brother lives in Japan. When we talk I often ask what time it is there and what the offset is. I don't remember it and do the math in my head.

Without timezones I would know what time it was in Japan but I still wouldn't know if it was night or day. But I could go look it up the same way, "daytime hours for Sydney".

This whole argument is based on the premise that I know what time it is somewhere else, which is silly, because you still have to look it up.

Yeah I’m not sure there’s any of us one time people who are in favour of the weird social norm of expecting others to know when to call them and booby trapping their own sleep to yell at you if you get it wrong.

The uncle Steve’s of the world learning to set their phone’s do not disturb up after receiving a bunch of mid sleep calls is a benefit of one time zone not a critique.

Couldn't we just strategically position some gargantuan mirrors in outer space so that the entire planet is always sunlit?

No, Earth would fry. This would also kill non-trivial part of fauna (and possibly flora), even if we ignore additional heat. Possibly that would mean Global Extinction Event.

Wow! Never mind!

timezone conversion is the bane of my existence.

I wish everyone just understood ms since Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 UTC.

Are you counting leap seconds? (UNIX does not!)

Leap seconds shouldn’t exist IMO. It’s going to take long enough for leap seconds to throw off our actual perception of time that by then, most of humanity won’t be living on Earth anyway.

Do you?

Yes

Let’s abolish time itself. We’re all too busy dealing with space, no one has time for time.

Discussed at the time:

So you want to abolish time zones - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 - Jan 2015 (124 comments)

This always made more sense to me in conjunction with what we currently have. https://www.newearthtime.net/

The explanation of this on the old website was much better, but the new one looks much nicer and is more open.

Time zones make sense, because the alternative was solar time -- and you have global transport networks that have to account for being at a particular place at a particular local time. Time zones massively simplify solar time.

DST can fuck right off though. You need a complete history of the DST laws in any locality in order to determine when a given local time is in UTC. It's nuts, and we don't need it. The Japanese get along fine without DST.

UTC makes more sense for global transport logistics that essentially run 24/7. time zones are just an additional opportunity to make a mistake here.

Yeah, but time zones are way better than noon = solar noon wherever the shipment is.

But they still need a localtime conversion so they can pick up and deliver packages during local business hours.

Solar time for human-centric activities can return now that digital assistants run our lives. At the very least, we can have two dimensional time zones around major metros. I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day, as I have evolved to expect. Machine-centric activities can stick with UTC.

>I would like the sun to rise at seven am every single day

Unfortunately the Earth's orbital mechanics refuse to conform to this whim. The sun may rise for only a few hours at some latitudes, or not at all. Wouldn't it be much better if we all used a universal concept of time and only 'solar noon' plus the duration of day changed as we travel?

> Solar time for human-centric activities can return now that digital assistants run our lives.

Preposterous. What percentage of people have digital assistants "running their lives"?

So umm...when swatch tried this...it bombed pretty hard :-P 'beat time' got beat :-P

I understand it's trying to present issues with abolishing time zones framed as a story about calling your uncle, but in this brave new world with no timezones, if you wanted to know whether you can call your uncle and he will answer can't you just call him and find out?

I look up the timezone first so I don't call when he's likely to be sleeping. My parents phone will ring 24 hours a day if I call them, I don't want to call them during their sleeping time. I know the offset to use when they are at home, but when they spend a month in europe and I want to call, I'd still like to know when to call without calling first to ask them if they are awake.

I think this is fixable with technology. We just need a mode your phone can enter while you're asleep such that calls are gated by a system that allows trusted users to ring the phone after a reminder that this is a bad time, and simply silences all other notifications or rings.

I still don't want to get work calls in the evening, and can't take social calls at work. I suppose we could all configure geo-fences, or manually set the phone to whichever mode since we're all working from home.

Of course the first thing I'd do is write a script to automatically switch modes at given times, so I don't have to. Then I'd share that script with my friends, and obviously what I'd have recreated is a timezone.

Maybe this could be automated, like break a country into contiguous regions grouped by sunrise and sunset times, then each phone can geolocate to figure which time-region you're in.

Then it can set your waking and sleeping time based on time-region.

This could be further extended by having the devices overlay a new set of times over the universal time, where, say, 12:00 is normalized to be lunch time. Then when someone says "meet me at lunchtime", everyone (even if they are visiting from out of the area) knows he means 12:00 and they don't have to consult their phones to find out that lunchtime in that area is 17:00

And then, if someone says "Well I hate in summers when I have a lot of daylight in the morning, I want more daylight in the evening, let's change our clocks in the summer", then everyone shoves him out of the room and never talks to him again.

I get your joke, but what I'm describing solves a problem even in our current reality as well as solving the problem in the "No time zone" reality. This lets you allow specific people to interrupt your sleep so you can catch important calls while missing unimportant interruptions.

Who does?

> Who does?

Every once in awhile you run into a developer who wants to, because it would make developing apps that deal with time easier. It's a laughably parochial perspective, but it happens.

Parochial seems like the opposite of what it is.

It is parochial but probably from a different perspective than your parent intended.

The universe does not actually have universal time. We're stuck on this little ball of rock, so this could actually work for Humans on Earth if they wanted it to. But you couldn't do this if your civilisation is much bigger.

The zones we have now are arbitrary though, imagine if there were twice as many, or half as many, it wouldn't really change anything right?

It wouldn't change anything except make the math a bit harder. There are actually timezones that are offset half an hour from the adjacent one, like Newfoundland, and it works just fine.

I am imagining a 1000 years form now the rest of the solar system is trying to get earth knock off this bullshit timezones plus daylight savings time and just use UTC like everyone else

> The zones we have now are arbitrary though, imagine if there were twice as many, or half as many, it wouldn't really change anything right?

They aren't arbitrary. They're a compromise/trade-off between several conflicting goods (e.g. aligning the clock to solar time and using time for regional coordination). If you change their number/size on goal will get worse and the other better.

> Parochial seems like the opposite of what it is.

Parochial in the sense that he's advocating major societal changes based on his narrow interests as a software developer.

It's like if I went on a foreign vacation, and after some communication difficulties, saying the whole world should drop their local languages and standardize on English because I'm an English-speaker, and, by the way, a common language would make international commerce more efficient. The proposal is mainly a selfish one to slightly reduce my costs at massive cost to others, and my non-selfish (non-parochial) "reason" for it is prioritizing a minor use-cases over far more common ones.

If we abolished local time/time zones in favor of universal time, it'd just get re-invented again.

At least two people do: one's an economics professor, the other is a physics professor.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/universal-time-zones

Reasoning is pretty shaky tbh. If the idea is to give everyone a time that is suited for them, the most likely thing would be for everyone to revert back to using the mean solar time for their precise location, not to all converge on one time zone.

Yeah, this would make it hard to communicate with people, if even your next-door neighbor doesn't use quite the same clock you do.

Timezones are a trade-off between using your exact mean solar time and a common clock: adding/substracting whole hours is not too difficult, and you're never more than 30min from your mean solar time (that is, unless you get forced in the wrong timezone, like in China where they traded one for the other).

it's made for some engaging discussion around the family dinner table.

At least 1 person in every discussion about time.[1][2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416230

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416110

I want a time gradient. Sun rises at 7am everywhere everyday. If you want to make plans with people you just use the internet to sync time.

I hope you don't assume that sun rises everywhere every day.

I love the sun cycle visualizations (and everything else) on timeanddate.com.

Almost the most northerly place I've been:

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/norway/tromso

The most equatorial place I've been:

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/singapore/singapore

The most southerly place I've been:

https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/argentina/buenos-aires

The consequences of making the sun "rise" at "7 a.m." in each of these places would be pretty confusing! (But especially in Tromsø.)

I tried converting from Earthdate to Stardate (98791.48) but then realized "what" Earthdate?

Luckily in our future Capitalist 2.0 society everyone will be aligned to the "shift" they work around UTC, of which there are 10 but they are coded in binary for simplicity.

2015

Added above. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com