Hacker News Reader

Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the permanent DST option is a bit stupid in principle since as the other guy says it's about switching time zones and time zones should be primarily longitude based, not I-feel-like-being-in-whatever based because that's nonsense.

As an example France and Spain have no business being in CET/GMT+1 at all. France is geographically entirely in GMT, while some of Spain is in GMT-1 even, I mean what the actual fuck.

Time zones should be based on science, and work/school schedules should be flexible enough that people can decide on a company/institutional level when to start. If you want to start later, start later, don't fuck with the countrywide clock and make timekeeping a nightmare you goddamn idiots.

View on HN

Timezones are based on who you do business with, and who you primarily need to coordinate with. Timezones aren't inherently anything, they're purely a measure that humans use to make our lives more convenient. If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

With that in mind, picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school. Picture how annoying it would be if half the restaurants, shops, and businesses in your town were in one timezone, and the other half were in another. These issues are what timezones address, just on a governmental level.

Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful.

> Timezones don't try to be "correct", they try to be useful

This is correct. As engineers we can design the most symmetric and "perfect" system, but at the end of the day, if it's not useful, people will just adopt something else instead.

> If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

There's a good argument against having too many time zones (this article is about continuous timezones, but the arguments are still applicable)

https://qntm.org/continuous

> and not 1440 of them

Well actually there are 96 of them in practice, I think it's tracked in increments of 15 minutes since anything less is a bit meaningless.

Of course in reality it's continuous so there are infinite timezones, but the only practical thing we can change are hours so minutes don't get offset and make planning even more of a nightmare. If we used a more sensible base 10 time keeping one could probably do more.

> picture how annoying it would be if you crossed a timezone line on your way to your (or your child's) school

I'm pretty sure this happens in the US to people on a daily basis? It's the unfortunate reality of living on a rotating sphere that you really can't avoid if you cross country/state lines often.

> they try to be useful

I don't see how it's useful to keep west Spain 2 hours late to their actual sunrise time. It must be rather maddening.

> Well actually there are 96 of them in practice, I think it's tracked in increments of 15 minutes since anything less is a bit meaningless.

I don't think most of those exist, actually. If nobody is observing (for example) +6:45, I wouldn't count it as an actual time zone.

Even :30 tzs are fairly rare, I think the number of :15/45 is counted on one hand.

Nepal uses a 15 min offset I think, but I wouldn't expect anyone to really use that in a practical fashion.

I'd expect it to be used in say astronomical observations, where this sort of thing actually matters and isn't treated as made up or subject to stupid opinions. Or other kinds of calculations that need the sun's position to match more accurately.

> I'm pretty sure this happens in the US to people on a daily basis?

Not really. The time zones are pretty crooked so that the borders go through desolate areas. Only place that really happens is near Chicago.

A lot of people live near Chicago.

The Chicago suburbs of Indiana are in the Central Time Zone; it would take you an hour on I-90 (assuming no traffic whatsoever!) to reach the Illinois border from the Central/Eastern time zone change point, and even longer if you're coming north on I-65.

The time zone change happens even further afield than the furthest exurbs of Chicago. The places there are well and truly rural.

In the grand scheme of things, not really. And most of them aren't crossing into Indiana every day.

Most of NW Indiana is in Central time, anyway, so you're going past the exurbs into farmland to cross time zones.

I'm from western Spain and it's not a problem at all. We just tend to do things later (in terms of numeric time) than neighboring countries. For example, most of us typically have lunch at 14 or even 15, which in solar time is roughly the same as lunch as 12 or 13 in France or Germany.

And of course, it's very convenient to be in the same time zone as most of the EU.

I wish we also switched to permanent DST here, by the way. Daylight at work is useless now that most of us work in offices. I'd rather have it in the evening when I can actually enjoy it.

> If you want to argue hard science, you'll have an uphill job of explaining to me why there should be 24 timezones and not 1440 of them.

Why not just have the time be the current longitude where the sun is at the meridian? The whole world could use the same standard and eliminate a lot of confusion.

We would have to use a unit other than degrees since that would make minutes and seconds (and weather conditions) confusing.

Tell that to China, who should have at least 3 time zones, but have only one - and that's not even "centered", it's Beijing time, which is pretty far east. But yeah, for the people in Tibet and Xinjiang, living in the completely wrong time zone is the least of their worries...

> France and Spain have no business being in CET/GMT+1 at all

Technically of course you're correct (and you'd probably need to include the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg in there), but thousands of people drive across those borders every day. Clearly the timezones need to have borders somewhere, but it's probably easier in practical terms to keep the timezones of adjacent countries synchronised wherever possible. It also makes sense of the very late-night culture of Spain when compared to countries further east, because they're probably eating around the same solar time as the other countries. The one I find weirdest is the western hold-out Portugal.

Portugal is always the exception :)

Spain is in GMT+1 because Franco wanted to be in the same time zone as Nazi Germany https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/14...

Ah another one to add to the pile of things made by nazis that are still in use, along with the olympic torch relay and Fanta.

Pretty small pile lol. Anything else on there?

Jerry cans come to mind, it seems that almost everyone around the world is using the Wehrmacht design.

On the one hand, yes.

On the other hand, clock time is entirely a social construct whose whole purpose is to coordinate social and business activity, so it should be specifically designed around social customs in order to serve that purpose.

One requires one entity, the US government, to make a decision. The other requires millions of entities to make a decision. For this case, the government making the decision makes more sense IMO. Every restaurant, coffee-shop, supermarket etc, doesn't have to do anything (they're already on DST). Everything is already happening. Deliveries are already scheduled for opening hours etc... Your suggested way would require millions of not billions of little coordinations.

That said, every old non-updated OS is going to F up once this happens.

The thing is, they'd F up no matter what change was made to the daylight saving rules. At least this time we have the hope that it will be the last time we have to worry about it.

Lol, timezones are made up in the first place. The way we count time is made up. It's just an abstraction layer for coordination with other people.

I'd prefer we did away with timezones all together and just globally switched to utc. The primary function of time is for communication and that would be easier after a transition period.

It's not going to change what the sun does.

https://qntm.org/abolish

> time zones should be based on science

alright, prove to me that time zones exist without getting metaphysical

Reply on news.ycombinator.com