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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

What does this mean in terms of short-term, real-world effect in the US?

Nothing. The guy who runs tzdata will be busy. Various things that hardcoded DST will break in six months. Hundreds of millions of people won't have a sleep disruption in the fall. Other countries may follow suit. Etc.

Please tell me there is more than one person

You may be surprised to see how often that database is updated. Timezone changes in random places throughout the world are not that uncommon.

http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/

https://www.iana.org/time-zones

Daylight Savings has real effect on the northern states than southern states.

One of the arguments for Day light savings change is that -- it would still be dark during the time kids go to school in winter, early spring and late fall, many places in US will not have Sun rise at 8:00am. No matter how much we may be removed from the nature -- our wakeful hours are directly impacted by Sun rise and Sun set. On the other side, there are discomforts in moving the clock twice a year across the board.

Maybe the middle States, but in the northern states you go to school in the dark and get home in the dark.

What northern states, Sesquisaskatchewan?? In any case, you make up for that with the fifteen hours of daylight in the summer.

Seattle, Washington for sure. We are further north than a significant portion of the population of Canada.

That at least makes some sense.

It means software updates for all the things!

Does non OS software usually need to care about timezone?

Hopefully, that we never have to set our clocks back in the fall.... or EVER AGAIN.

Please let this pass before "fall-back"

Nothing. The House has yet to act, and we don't know if Biden would sign it.

Would this impose any action on individual states or would this only give them the green light to implement it?

Doubtful. Arizona already opts out of changing their clocks.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/623...

Currently, states can only choose permanent standard time, not permanent daylight savings time.

The west coast states’ legislatures already voted to go permanent daylight savings, so presumably this bill would allow them to.

I don't see anything specific about Arizona in the bill. I wonder if they'd just be permanently one hour different.

hmm why wouldnt Biden sign?

The House undoubtedly will opt to keep standard time permanent.

The committee negotiating a unified bill will settle for a compromise of keeping standard time for 8 months of the year and daylight savings time for 4 months of the year on odd years and reversing the proportion during even years.

There will be intense discussion about whether to do anything special for leap years. After several months of back and forth, someone will point out that there are also leap seconds and leap microseconds, leading to further debate.

The bill will lapse.

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