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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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