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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see a move by state governments to 1) end DST, and 2) formally adopt summer/winter hours, with encouraging businesses to follow their lead.

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This creates a coordination problem. For example, your workplace adopts summer hours and now you have to get to work an hour earlier, but you kids' daycare hasn't. Or, the bakery wants to deliver pastries to the cafe an hour earlier, but the cafe workers haven't shown up yet.

DST perfectly solves this problem -- everyone switches on the same day. This makes life easier for the entire population, and causes slight headaches for computer programmers.

Forgive me, but this reads like "we're avoiding a giant coordination problem by implementing a giant coordination problem".

It would be just as easy to remind everyone that winter hours start on X date as to remind them to change their clocks on X date.

I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours but the latter is a significatnly harder coordination problem. Not all businesses would change you'd end up having to keep track of which things have shifted and which things have not and all the downstream implications of that. Compare that to the five minutes a year I spend setting the handful of non-internet-connected clocks in my house.

(And of course if you legally mandated that everyone had to shift their hours twice a year at the exact same time then you just invented DST with extra steps.)

Seasonal business hours can be posted as any time of day in UTC. DST can only adjust by exactly 1 hour.

Seasonal hours are indeed more expressive than DST. I love when times are indexed in terms of "sunrise" and/or "sunset" such as the parks near me.

But it doesn't mean that it is simpler for regular people to implement in their lives. If every shop, school, and office had seasonal hours that changed at different times of year (even if they were posted in UTC) then trying to coordinate errands would become a lot more complex. This week I have time to pick Timmy up from school and swing by the post office before it closes, next week school shifts later so I can't, but the week after that the post office implements their shift and I can again.

Many businesses already have differing winter/summer hours under the current regime. That is, they change their hours in winter and summer. And often those hours don’t change in any consistent way. They do just fine despite the coordination problem you bring up.

Business hours and human hours change all the time anyway. You have to check in instead of assume. The times that things happen are not and have never been static.

I'd be fine with either DST or summer/winter hours -- they're just alternate implementations of the same thing.

But coordinating a mass switch between summer and winter hours twice a year seems like it would end up being more effort for regular people than just shifting the clocks in their house, especially now that so many of the clocks we use are internet-connected and switch automatically.

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