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Comment by edflsafoiewq | Hacker News Reader

What's people's deal with changing clocks? It's never bothered me.

I work in Europe and have colleagues in the east coast of the US. The dst switches happen a few weeks apart so twice a year everyone gets fucked up schedules for two weeks because meetings move with the time zone of the person who created them. We have specialised tooling to notice if computer programs will behave weirdly because a job is scheduled to run during the hour of the night that happens twice/not at all (obviously one solution is to avoid scheduling jobs in local time but if you need to react with the real world where things are scheduled in local time, this becomes harder).

Literally just had this happen this week: We have a standing meeting between NA and London, and I thought we would have to have a talk when they were showing up “an hour late”.

Turns out we all just forgot the offset changed between us.

I messed this up with a call to the US today.

It's bad enough that we have the DST clock change, but the fact that the UK and US does the change at different times truly drives me insane.

Iirc Bush (Jr) did this by changing the switchover time

It’s great; I have a clock that does “auto DST”. The problem is that it does it on the UK dates or the pre-Bush dates. I’m in the US. I therefore have to set it manually 4x/year instead of the 0x/ever as designed.

It’s less the act of changing the clocks and rather the ill effects of losing an hour of sleep and readjusting for a few days of the year.

> DST is linked to a six percent increase in car accidents. The study analyzed 20 years of data and found that DST is responsible for around 28 deaths each year.

https://www.phillypilaw.com/2021/03/15/car-accidents-dayligh...

People really shouldn't fly I guess. Because many of us deal with multi-hour time changes on a regular basis. Going to be dealing with a 5 hour one in a couple of days.

That’s a choice you get to make. I’m sure some people chose not to fly to avoid dealing with it.

You probably have a good reason for it and it's probably going to suck. I don't see why do this to everyone twice a year for no reason.

Jet Lag is a well known phenomenon and if you're changing time zones regularly you probably have a system to minimize it. If you did not you'd likely suffer much more from it.

Also flying is optional, but changing from XST to XDT is not.

i only fly north/south

And that's a big problem for lots of people - I plan on the few days of a long trip to get accustomed to the local time and feel comfortable and well rested.

But just because I'm willing to put up with it when I travel doesn't mean that I want to put up with it twice a year for no apparent benefit.

If I had the option to not have to deal with time zone changes when I travel across the country (or world), I'd vote for that solution. Even if ballistic air travel means I can fly from LA to Tokyo in an hour, the 17 hour (well, 7 hour) time difference means it'll never be a seamless trip even if I can do it in an afternoon. I'm told that if you have the time, taking a cross-atlantic trip to Europe is great because there's no jet lag, you slowly adjust to the time over the course of the travel.

People really shouldn't fly, it's terrible for the environment

People should really only walk. Anything else is bad for the environment. Though really eating is bad for the environment too.

You know what are terrible for the environment? Children. All those plastic diapers and formula bags and disposable everything. https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/sustainable-liv...

"Flying is bad. Walk."

"Eating is bad."

"Children are bad."

The answer, clearly, is to be a pedestrian who eats children.

It's better than the same planeload of people driving there.

Taking individual cars, perhaps. But if you put two people in a Prius you’ll save on emissions relative the the same two flying. Based on [1], flying is roughly 75 passenger-miles per gallon. Prius is 45 MPG, perhaps ~40 under load. So if you have more than one person in your group, better off driving.

The argument could be made that if you don’t board, that plane will still fly and consume the same fuel, but of course the numbers only matter en masse anyways.

[1] https://www.blueskymodel.org/air-mile#

The trouble is Prius is not the best at going over the ocean.

At the scale of a country or even a city, only a few people fly on any given day. When almost everyone is a little more fatigued than normal, the effects are multiplied.

My grandfather broke his hip when he fell off a step-ladder while changing a wall clock. At the hospital, I learned that this sort of thing is not all too uncommon among the elderly, since "changing the time on a clock" seems like such a simple task that it slides right past the conscious awareness of one's own diminished physical abilities.

Makes sense. I climbed on top of a file cabinet to change a clock today, on the way down I realized I should have brought a taller stool. It seemed like a simple excercise but it can be a surprisingly long way down.

Each of our car clocks have to be changed manually. The clocks on the stove and microwave have to be changed manually. We have 7 wall clocks in the house that have to be changed manually. Our kids have alarm clocks that all have to be changed manually. The sprinkler system has a clock that has to be set manually. Even our garage door opener has a clock that has to be set manually. It is a huge pain every six months.

Do what normal people do and never update those clocks. It’s not like +1/-1 math is hard, and I can’t imagine trusting a manually adjusted clock if I actually cared about the time

> Do what normal people do

[citation needed]

I would think that changing clocks is actually the more "normal" thing to do.

Yea, most people change the clock.

The only clock I don’t change is my motorcycle because I can’t be bothered to use the archaic menu system to update something I never rely on.

That said, it does take me a few weeks usually to update all the clocks as I’ll only do it when it starts to bother me or if that specific clock contributes to me being late/early.

I run around the house updating every clock I can find early on the Sunday morning. I update the clocks on rental cars if they're wrong. I'm not otherwise a super detail-oriented person. Clearly this is some kind of personality test.

That's what I do, and that's a more viable solution than it used to be since I carry a pocket watch (i.e. a phone) with me everywhere I go, and I usually use Android Auto while driving, so my phone's clock is displayed in my car.

But I used to rely on my car's clock to know what time it is, and kept it updated for DST.

I don't change the clocks either. I just add or subtract an hour for half of the year, depending on when I first set the clock.

That's just a workaround.

Yes, it's a workaround instead of changing the clocks, but you say that like it is bad. Adding or subtracting 1 over the course of 6 months takes less time than changing the clocks a single time.

In the context of discussion about permanent DST, then the solution would be permanent DST rather than change the clock or adjust time in your head for 6 months.

In the context of this discussion I was stating I perform the same behaviour in the current environment as the GP who stated they do not change their clocks.

So now you "just" need to memorize a lookup table holding information about time when your clocks was first set. And share said lookup table with any visitors. It sounds super convenient :-)

It is convenient. As you can see on this page, I was simply responding to someone else that I also don't change the clocks - like them. Other sibling posters commented similarly.

I'm sure you remember passwords, next to which the number 1 is quite easy to recall immediately. Don't make it complicated when it is easy.

Why do you have 7 wall clocks? How big is your house? Might be time to just wear a watch.

It was common to have at least one clock per room.

Wall-clocks were convenient, cheap, and provided comfort in the form of not needing to wear a watch around the house.

Interesting. I guess maybe in a different geographic location than me since I've never seen the 1 per room thing around here.

living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, garage?

My question is more so around the need for that many clocks. That isn't common where I'm from. Is it normal to have wall clocks in bathrooms?

People keep their bathrooms in weird ways. The most memorable one I saw had side-by-side photos of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and John Paul II, with little votive candles underneath each one.

It's not typical to have them in bathrooms, but I actually do have a clock that requires manual setting in mine. It's a waterproof clock/radio and it's handy to have in there. Can keep track of what time it is while I'm getting ready in the morning.

It's probably more common to have an alarm clock in a bedroom that you can just glance at. It's also a loud backup for early morning flights.

how do you know how long you been shitting?

Or maybe you’re one of us whose car and microwave clock is an hour behind for 6 months every year…

Yeah I have my microwave set to one time and my stove set to another, so one of them is always correct. However someone else set both of them, I was content to leave them at random times lol

Not 6 months. Standard time is already only 4 months long.

> alarm clocks that all have to be changed manually

Those are still a thing? We just use cell phones for alarms, and the only clocks that need to be changed are the decorative analog wall clock and the microwave which has to be reset after power outages way more often anyway (when we're not just leaving it blank).

We have a red digital clock on the bedroom dresser. Much nicer to glance at without blasting my face with blue light, especially if I see it’s 4:30am and want to go back to sleep.

We try to limit smart phones in the bedroom in general, spend less time in bed in the mornings.

In Poland, trains literally stop for an hour when switching to standard time. Since it's during the night, it's not many trains, but still, people literally have to wait an hour, making their travel an hour longer, because of the time change. It happened to me once, I was robbed of an hour of my life due to this ridiculousness.

Granted, time switching doesn't directly force trains to stop, but I imagine the risks related to the time change or just travelers' confusion is the reason why that happens.

Good thing you didn't fly.

I imagine if the same reasoning was applied to planes, which is weighing against each-other the effects of the transport vehicle stopping and the results of updating the schedule, in this case the latter option would be considered more optimal.

Does this mean that trains teleport to their expected position during the switch to daylight savings time? If so, the entire world should be in awe of the technological prowess of Poland (and perhaps a bit dismayed at how they apply that technology).

There's a problem with your proposal: What if there's a station, where the train is supposed to arrive at 2:30? Teleporting would make it skip the station, and I imagine it's one of the reasons why trains don't do that in Poland.

What time is the change?

In the US it's normally 0200/0300 to minimize the amount of people actually affected. (When we fall back on Sunday mornings the boozy crowd treats it as an extra hour to keep partying.)

According to the newest ordinance [1] with the "pending" status (not sure what's the reasoning behind delaying this ordinance's effective date until a few days before the first time change, I guess no one knows):

Year 2022 – 30 October,

Year 2023 – 29 October,

Year 2024 – 27 October,

Year 2025 – 26 October,

Year 2026 – 25 October.

Every time it's the same hour 3:00 CET / 1:00 UTC. Which means that the hour 3:00 shouldn't display on the clocks, because the Summer time ended, and so 2a:00 displays instead (the "a" is supposed to be displayed till, and including, 3a:00, after which 3:01 should be displayed without "a").

[1] http://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/DocDetails.xsp?id=WDU202200...

It’s not even about the manual clock changes honestly for me.

I never thought that changing clocks was the pain.

It’s that everyone gets jetlag kinda randomly.

One hour extra of sleep or one hour less. It’s just random, seemingly comes out of nowhere and knocks me on my ass for a couple of days while my body gets used to doing everything the same but an hour earlier or later.

It’s literally the same as jetlag except I don’t have any environmental clues to help my body understand it’s _supposed_ to be doing something different

It’s not even about the manual clock changes honestly for me.

I think that depends on how many clocks you have. My wife likes clocks and we have one in nearly every room, including 2 that are only reachable with a ladder. That's in addition to the stove, microwave, and even the refrigerator and toaster oven have a clock for no good reason. Plus the rice maker, bread maker and coffee maker also have clocks to allow timed cooking (i.e. have the rice ready by 6pm).

Sure. But even if I had to change dozens of clocks: those days of feeling like shit are just not worth it.

If I had to change dozens of clocks but not change my sleep schedule I would do that.

The answer for a few of those is easy: desync them by ±3.5 hours and then let them drift evermore.

If you don't use the 6pm feature it doesn't matter if the time is accurate. I have a rice cooker that's permanently blinking 12s, and two TVs that I have no idea what time they're set to because I stopped updating them for DST and there has been a power outage or two since then.

If you're unlucky and _have_ to have everything in sync then you've chosen your pain, so good luck to you. =)

We use the rice cooker timer regularly, and have sometimes been bitten by not noticing that the clock is off due to DST and the rice is done an hour early (or late). I have a 20+ year old "atomic clock" in my office -- it is always correct since it listens for the DST flag in the time signal - I wish more devices would do that, but I suspect that the low frequency signal (and low power over most of the country) means a bigger antenna than most designers want.

We don't use the bread maker time, but when setting the mode, it shows the estimated completion time rather than duration, so if you want to know how long it's going to take, you need to know what the time is set to.

If there was a way to disable the time completely, that wouldn't be so bad, but I don't like the "set me!" flashing 12:00 all the time on the microwave, and setting it at some random wrong time seems worse than having it exactly an hour off.

It takes weeks to get my kids to adapt to getting to bed an hour earlier. Before I had kids I too was wondering what the fuzz was about.

I had a massive parenting win this week. Normally it's a chore to get my kids to bed before 10pm, but yesterday I had them both asleep by 9:30pm. It was a damn miracle.

Getting the kids to adapt sucks, but my kids are considerably more cogent when they wake up and it's not pitch black out. I don't see next school year going well if the sun won't come up until well after they've started school.

I notice the same. When does school start for your kids? For my kids it starts at 8:15 and that's enough for it to be bright out in the winter in standard time. I guess I haven't really thought about the fact that it might be dark out for most of the morning in daylight saving time in the winter.

We live in SoCal, which mitigates the problem somewhat.

It used to be that school start time went by the age of the student. So, high school kids started first, elementary school kids started last. Based on studies showing that isn't ideal, Massachusetts schools have started changing that around. So, grades 3 - 5 start earliest now at 7:30, which means getting up around ~6:30 to eat, dress, pack, etc. and get to the bus stop for a 7:10 pick-up. Standard time doesn't make it all sunny all morning, but it gradually rises as we're getting ready. It's really dismal when DST is still in effect. I think geographically, the northeast US should be in the Atlantic timezone, too, so that doesn't really help matters.

I never understood why Michigan was on Eastern time. It’s literally called “the Midwest” and yet they’re on the same time zone as NYC. Little fun fact: Michigan actually has two time zones; the westernmost portion of the upper peninsula is in the central time zone.

I really wish we’d end these shenanigans and just operate everything in UTC. How many human lifetimes have been wasted writing code to handle timezones and conversions? We live in a global economy, it’s time to start thinking like one.

My highschool started at 7:0something. It was dark when we started and we didn’t have much light after either in the winter. They made all sorts of claims about how this was somehow helping prepare us for “the real world”. I’ve worked in tech since my early 20s and these days I wake up around 8am, but when we were going into the office for the past decade I’d almost never get in before 10am, and all of us in software jobs in Silicon Valley get paid more than those making the decisions at the school districts. It’s sad how out of touch they were and continue to be.

My cat does not seem to be aware of the arbitrarily changed numbers on my clock being different than it was last week when she's hungry and ready for breakfast.

Yeah, we even have the technology for clocks to adjust themselves automatically. Which is great when everything goes according to plan. The thing is, sometimes it doesn't. I woke up awfully confused last year when I noticed my cell phone's clock (thus my alarm clock) did not agree with my microwave's clock. The time change was not supposed occur that weekend, but somehow the mobile provider confused the UK with Canada (or so the story went). Even without that error, there was always a risk of someone showing up for work early or late due to the time change simply because they were not paying attention.

I never really cared for the time change. Even though there was a time when I would have preferred one over the other, at this point I would be happy enough to say "good riddance" regardless of which is decided upon.

> Yeah, we even have the technology for clocks to adjust themselves automatically. Which is great when everything goes according to plan. The thing is, sometimes it doesn't.

I’m all for KISS but the fact that we can’t get software to do do this reliably says much more about software quality than anything else. This just isn’t complicated. We’re not talking about calculating across timezones or accounting for leap-seconds or anything like that. Just add/remove an hour on two specific days of the year.

Two specific days times at least two locales, because the UK and North America do it on different dates… and it’s all too likely that there are a few more variations.

There's evidence that accident rates and health issues increase by a significant margin right after the clock change that causes a reduction of night sleep by 1h. The book "Why We Sleep" makes a really good argument about it all, and is a generally great book.

All the comments ignore the fact that until the industrial revolution people didn't sleeps a solid 8 hours a night, as in the past people used to practice polyphasic sleep. People used get up in the middle of night a socialise for a few hours before having their second sleep.

Most people have complete control over when they go to bed, as they choose a particular time to go to bed.

My dog learnt when she would get fed until her first daylight savings shift when she'd get all clingy and whiney for an hour wondering why dinner was late.

It's a nightmare with young kids, let me tell you

I usually realised that DST is on/off a few days after it happens because people complain. Otherwise all my clocks just adjust themself, I wake up whenever my alarm clock ring and that’s it. I never understood the hate for it.

Yeah my sleeping is no where near regular enough to be worried about a forced hour lost or gained.

I think the same logic that gives us different timezones would suggest summer hours (or in the limit, a continual shift) though - so perhaps we should just go the whole hog and have GMT (or whatever, doesn't matter) as a fixed global time!

It's fine for adults, but kids and pets do not go by the clock, they go by the sun. It's a challenge to get them to switch.

DST attempts to go by the sun. It attempts to make some fixed morning time follow sunrise. It just does it in an extremely coarse way.

As a programmer it can create a lot of frustrating issues, especially time management around the shift which creates weird gaps in time.

It never bothered me. This new deal won’t bother me either. Apparently other people have an awful lot to say about it though.

I think in an earlier life when I was commuting to fairly specific hours, I'd have cared a lot more--both about changing times and EST/EDT. These days I'm really pretty flexible and don't commute so it doesn't much matter.

I just enjoyed a nice short weekend thanks to DST. Horrible

It's hell for families with kids (in my experience).

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