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Comment by capital_guy | Hacker News Reader

I am extremely surprised at all the people who are against this, saying that "Making DST permanent forces people to wake up earlier." I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun. Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.

I am happy to have more sun after I get out of work. It was a breath of fresh air this week getting out of work and seeing daylight.

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I think this is kind of a conflict between those who are morning people and those who aren't. Many morning people would prefer to have that sunlight in the morning. I'm not at all a morning person and I'd rather have that sunlight after work when I can actually benefit from it.

Speak for yourself, I'm a night owl and I find it much harder to wake up in the morning when it's dark outside. Permanent DST would only make this worse in the winter.

Get a timer for your lamp.

I'm the same way. If you haven't looked into it, you might want a "sunrise clock" of about 10,000lux if possible. This assumes you don't have a partner who would be bothered by it :-)

I had one, but it turned out not to be cat-proof.

Seems like you should be able to cat-proof it ;)

Speak for yourself, I’m also a night owl and I wake up when my alarm wakes me up. Then I read on my phone which shines enough glow on me that I can’t get back to sleep. </sarcasm>

don’t care about it one way or other.

Glad that junior devs in the future will have less time related bugs in their code.

I'm a night owl as well but I don't care if it's light or dark out when I get up but driving home in darkness and waking up in darkness is depressing as hell. I like a little sunlight after work to do things, mow the lawn, do some errands, take a walk, etc.

Nah, waking up in darkness is cool.

It's like the day isn't ready to get up yet, just like me.

And driving in darkness is cool. I like all the pretty lights.

There's a third faction: People who believe that it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier (or later) where it makes sense, all without literally touching a single clock.

Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.

> it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier

How would that ever work? I can't think of a single thing requiring near that level of coordination that we are able to do. Automatically changing peoples closed seems infinitely easier.

I understand some people don't like it, but don't pretend there is another way to move everything around. People are barely willing to do it as is.

Why does it have to be a centrally coordinated shift? This is a decision that can be done in a decentralized way.

Outdoor venues already have seasonally shifting time tables. Schools in some places have successfully shifted from starting at 8:00 to 7:30 or 8:30. Shops adjust their opening hours all the time as well.

Because actions in society have to be coordinated and done in a certain order. What happens when suddenly your kids school starts an hour later but you still have to be at work at the same time? Many many things are based on routines at a set time each day that people plan for. If there’s going to be a seasonal change, it needs to be coordinated to not cause massive inconvenience. That’s what DST does.

The argument is basically "if the state-sponsored babysitters change their hours partway through the year it will be a massive headache for parents". But if such babysitting is so crucial to a functioning society, surely society can become a bit less rigid to accommodate it?

The people who really dislike the state don't use the state's schools anyway; this is more like "The post office, the courts, and the banks have done this for decades," so other businesses and individuals also find it convenient to use the same time conventions.

> The people who really dislike the state don't use the state's schools anyway;

Citation needed.

Well, in the Cincinnati area, there's https://catholicaoc.org/schools . They're not free.

Private schools also have start times. Not sure what your argument is.

Yeah, and they can decide for themselves what their start times are.

We don't need 300 millon people to experience jet lag twice a year to save some bougy superintendent the inconvenience of scribbling out a number and writing a different one one time.

Babybsitters? You might want to sit this one out.

To be clear, I think educators should and do serve a much more important role in society than mere babysitters. My choice of words was because so many people are raising the issue of “what about parents with rigid work schedules” as if school only exists so parents can work.

You could force schools and daycare to open and close early. Also do this with public companies. Offer a tax discount on the first hour for companies. I'm sure we can find other solutions.

Another faction would be the developers that have to deal with the time changing. Would just be easier to change at a personal level than changing time itself. Arizona doesn't do alot right but no DST is one big one they do. Times of work/events/appts/etc change, not time itself.

I think you misspelled sysadmins there. My experience is that, at least in the traditional corporate world, it is the DBAs who connect just before midnight to put their precious SQL servers to sleep during the danger time, since who know how the software will behave in the real world. In some places DST dates are often changed in the last minute, wrecking havoc everyone's calendar meetings and inflicting pain on the Exchange servers admins.

That seems a bit silly to me? That's a problem that occurs every years twice; so we should write code to automate it instead of dealing with it by admin hands.

The problem is we have to keep updating that code when the rules change.

Servers which miss that patch break because of various Auth schemes which require clocks to be reasonably in sync between machines.

So you get a bunch of outages whenever the next time shift is post-rules change.

I am less annoyed with DST than I am at how often we are fucking with it and breaking stuff.

I like it when the US fucks with time zones. The more you fuck with time zones, the more likely US-based developers are to just say fuck it, we'll use a library. The more developers that use a library for time zones, the fewer pieces of software that I have to deal with that get this wrong for my part of the world.

(Did you know Australia has 11 possible time zones of which up to 9 are being used right now? It might even be 12. Most people don't, which is why most programmers fuck it up)

> The problem is we have to keep updating that code when the rules change.

Yes, indeed. But we also have to change what people do manually when the rules change.

remember this is a industry that thinks run fast a break things is a good motto. is it any wonder that the same people that need reminding that name fields should accept non latin character and that passwords should in fact be more than 8 characters would consistently fuck up something that only comes up twice a year.

I used to work with a system that 'conveniently' silently dropped leading and trailing space in its password field (and also just copied the password into an https-URL without any encoding, so no special characters for you). The guys who committed this crime thought that only weirdos like me have such strange passwords..

There were 7 time zone changes in the world last year, and nobody's systems collapsed, most of us probably didn't even know they happened.

That's because every developer and sysadmin with more than a year of professional experience knows that you never, ever, do your own time zone math. You use your system time utils, and keep them updated so that your code reflects the latest laws.

Of course, I hope people aren't implementing time zone utils on their own unless absolutely necessary.

Though, there are devs that work on those system tools. There are also cases where times need to sync and the changing can cause some issues. Stored times should be UTC but where they aren't it can makes some systems use local time incorrectly for a bit on the rollback. I have also seen network libs in games not use ticks for session starts that would be problematic on rollbacks playing at switchover. There have also been flaws in system time utils previously.

Lots of unnecessary potential edge cases, all for an unnecessary time change of time itself except a few places like Arizona.

... and another sub-faction that thinks time-zones are also a horrible idea.

You’re never gonna convince the world to remove time zones. Switch to UTC and now the idea of the sun rising between 5-7 AMish is ruined because it would be 2 AM where I am now. Since the invention of the sundial, time zones have existed in some form or another. Programmers just have deal with it.

The sun doesn't rise between 5-7 AM-ish in many parts of the world.

First, if you timezone is 'right', on average the sun should rise about 6 am. In winter, it rises later, in summer it rises earlier.

Where I grew up in Germany the sun rose as late as 8:20 am in winter. And funny enough, the latest rise in Madrid in Spain is at 8:40 am in winter. That's because Madrid is on the 'wrong' timezone: it's in the same timezone as Germany, but much further west.

(You are right however, that time zones do roughly keep noon around 12-ish. It's just that the band of variation around the world is quite a lot wider than you might imagine.)

> Switch to UTC and now the idea of the sun rising between 5-7 AMish is ruined

And this idea is critically important because?

It alone isn’t. But the notion of the sun rising in the mid-AM, midday being at noon, and the sun then setting in the mid-PM is literally as old as the sundial. There’s no way you’re convincing society that “no timezones” is a good thing.

Right, UTC all of the things!

A reasonable idea, for people living in Europe or Africa.

Also works for people in New Zealand; they just use a 12-hour clock and flip AM and PM.

And stop using the notions of „today“ and „tomorrow“?

Having the date change at lunchtime would be really confusing.

Maybe. Though eg the Jewish calendar changes dates at sunset as far as I can tell, and that seems to work just fine?

That idea has some quite surprising and arguably inconvenient consequences: https://qntm.org/abolish

Most notably, the concepts of "today" and "tomorrow" stop making sense!

More to the point, you cease to be able to predict what people many miles away from you are doing:

It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?

The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.

Now, imagine we abolish time zones:

It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?

It's 6 AM. It's 6 AM in Beijing, in Cairo, in Honolulu, at McMurdo Station, and in Sidney, Montana. I have little idea what anyone in Denver is doing, unless I happen to know that Denver is placed such that their dawn is six-ish hours after mine. But I have no way to express that conveniently, and nobody else thinks in those terms, so I can't build up a database of such information.

At least, not without reinventing something...

It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?

What would I be...

It's 6 AM in London.

Something occurs...

The clock is striking thirteen.

I almost...

DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE!

Consider the lilies of tzdata...

DENHAM'S...

Sorry, got a bit caught up there.

> It's 6 AM in London. What time is it in Denver?

> The way things work now, it's approximately midnight in Denver, or close enough that the safe answer to the question "What is my business partner in Denver doing?" is "Sleeping" which neatly answers the question of what their likely response will be were I to call them now.

Memorizing a timezone offset is basically still what you'd need to do. To know that it's approximately midnight in Denver, you have to have that memorized or look it up.

Once you have that 6 hour number, in a single-timezone world, you'd simply say "ok what were people here doing 6 hours ago?" and you'd have your same answer.

Of course people would still publish those sorts of "conversion tables"/offsets, because people would still have that exact problem! But they'd possibly be a bit more precise than historically - with current computer tech, it might actually be more accurate, e.g. using actual GPS coords instead of broad swaths, so it would be like "Denver is 6.24 (or whatever) hours behind your current location." Let alone how much better that might work for cities in single-timezone China, say.

(I'm personally against this idea, anyway, but that particular argument has never satisfied me.)

> Of course people would still publish those sorts of "conversion tables"/offsets, because people would still have that exact problem! But they'd possibly be a bit more precise than historically - with current computer tech, it might actually be more accurate, e.g. using actual GPS coords instead of broad swaths, so it would be like "Denver is 6.24 (or whatever) hours behind your current location." Let alone how much better that might work for cities in single-timezone China, say.

This is keeping (a rationalized version of) time zones in every respect except for how people set their clocks.

In the system you propose, people would operate at the equivalent of 9 AM to 5 PM, except you expect that they'd quote different times (even with fractional hours) to maintain the façade that time zones no longer exist. A business no longer operates nine to five, it's 1:15 PM to 9:15 PM, and people can't just say "Oh, Denver is six hours behind London right now" because Denver isn't exactly ninety degrees west of London.

Ironically, aside from everyone around the world setting their clocks to the same time, that's how time worked prior to the introduction of time zones, so I can't fault you for coming up with that idea.

They already don't make sense when you're trying to coordinate communication with people more than a few timezones away

Which defeats one of the supposed “benefits”: “meeting at 2PM” means the same everywhere.

"Meeting at X" means exactly what it always meant. The only difference made by removing timezones is that you don't need to adjust the time for remote dial-ins. 2PM becomes 2PM everywhere.

If we abolished time zones, it wouldn't make sense /ever/ for people in some parts of the world, even when communicating with people close to them. That's worse.

Why wouldn't it make sense "ever" in any part of the world?

In some areas, standard workdays would span "days". So e.g. a business would need to post its hours as "M-F, 00:00 - 1:00, 17:00 - 24:00". (actually it's even worse as the last 00:00 - 1:00 is on a Saturday)

Or imagine chatting with a friend at 23:00 about plans after you get off work at 1:00 the following "day". "See you tomorrow?"

Or do you reserve "tomorrow" for telling someone at 8:00 that you'll get back to them when you wake up at 16:00 that same "day"?

Today people only have to deal with this when communicating with people many time zones away, but now it's an issue even within a single area!

That's already the case for people very far North/South. Summer/winter become their own day/night at the poles... according to the Sun. If you take a walk around the pole, you can cross several timezones and end back where you started while having "lost an hour" every few steps. Of course, in one of those crossings you "gain a day" so, watch your step!

> People who believe that it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier (or later) where it makes sense, all without literally touching a single clock.

To be fair, isn’t that essentially what DST systems are? Literally the way that a society arranges to have everything start an hour earlier or later at different times of year is to designate dates where everyone sets their clocks back or forward an hour.

Granted, it doesn’t fulfill your “all without literally touching a single clock” requirement, because a few types of common clocks still require manual adjustment, but the complaints about DST aren’t about the hassle of literally adjusting the clock on your microwave, right? The complaints are about the sudden disruptions to one’s schedule, especially the amount of sleep one gets on two specific nights every year—and your proposal doesn’t solve that problem. And if we instead agreed to change, for instance, the operating hours of every business twice a year, surely the physical changing of signage would be similarly costly.

> To be fair, isn’t that essentially what DST systems are?

Not exactly: DST solves for not having to have seasonal/variable schedules.

Without DST, we lose that, and we do actually get to decide, once, how we want to arrange our lives in this new, linear time – implicitly or explicitly.

For public transport (at least here in Europe), we do already have variable schedules anyway.

As students often use public transport to go to school, schedules often have reduced service during school holidays.

Funny enough, for jobs that do schedule around sunrise/sunset (like flying), DST is even more disruptive. Perhaps you used to get a sandwich after your day flight but when DST starts, everything suddenly closes an hour earlier!

DST makes it more disruptive in the evening, but less disruptive in the morning.

The law they passed is exactly equivalent to passing a law that puts us on winter time and starts a new requirement that schools and businesses open at 7am. We're just giving a new name to 8am.

It will all become more ridiculous 20 years from now when popular demand has lead to offices and schools opening at 9am in the winter and people start calling for a new daylight savings time to get more hours of light in the evening.

There are two independent issues that people have with DST.

The first issue is that DST causes general havoc with all kinds of activities that happen at night, by altering the length of the day and creating missing or repeated hours. This is an unintended negative consequence of how DST works.

The second issue is that DST gives day workers jet lag twice a year by altering sleep/work schedules. Here we have a legitimate choice whether we want to change the schedules in the winter or prioritize consistent sleep schedules instead. This negative consequence arises as a result of changing the schedules relative to absolute time, not as a result of DST per se. DST is merely the vehicle for enacting that change.

At least the permanent offset can be worked around easier than the silly DST switching all the time.

For all I care, the US could get itself on UTC, if they don't care too much about their clocks being in sync with the sun anyway.

That would be kind of convenient, but also a bit confusing if you travelled and found the clocks reading a different time than you expected for a particular time of day. The general convention is to have local noon at roughly 12:00, although then you have to deal with zones.

Yes. I'm not actually advocating for putting everyone on UTC.

"if they don't care too much about their clocks being in sync with the sun"

this is pretty important though.

We need both absolute and relative time unfortunately, as a consequence of this messy physically embodied universe we find ourselves in.

I too yearned for One Time Scale to Rule Them All, to no avail.

Why? If you know you wake up at 3am to get to work at 4am and get out of work at noon, then go to sleep at 7pm and you do this every single day then who cares that it doesn’t line up with some magical other numbers?

The notion of days (as today, tomorrow and yesterday) does not really make sense without time zones.

It's not so much about today, tomorrow, yesterday or even days of the week. The bigger problem is perhaps with calendar days?

At least if you want your day boundary line up with midnight on the clock.

It would be hilarious to have everyone run on UTC, but have the calendar tick over whenever it's local midnight.

You ever run backups every Sunday at 2am UTC? Does that ever confuse you or the computer doing it’s job? If not, the problem you describe doesn’t really exist.

Ever talk to anyone who works shift work? Sleeps all day, works all night for a few days then has a few days off when they switch to daytime wakefulness? What is their concept of today and tomorrow?

> this is pretty important

But apparently not important enough to permanently use standard time (along with a one-time effort to shift all business hours back by 1, yielding the same solar start of business as permanent DST).

lol they couldn't even force the metric system on us, do you think we'll accept time itself changing?

Well, your politicians just voted to change time itself..

An hour here or there won't make a difference. An 5-8 hr change will get you laughed out of Congress. They have to answer to their constituents come election time, and they know that. Even if it happened it would be undone within two years.

I worked in an mission-critical environment with a traditional 12-hour schedule where the option for this flexibility wasn’t mandated.

Staff dreaded working the fall-back shift because they ended up working an extra hour for free. The union brought this up at every round of negotiations, but were told to pound sand by the employer and asked what they would like to give up instead.

There’s something to be said for the bodies circadian rhythm with the sun and the time their job or school dictates they need to be there

I am a morning person, I'm up at 430-5am every day, and I welcome this change 100%

I take my dogs for a walk and go for a jog after in the dark and I love it. I want as much sun for after work/social activities as possible.

I also love coding in the morning and can't stand afternoon glare. This will allow me more time with windows open before the afternoon glare creeps in (I realize this is house dependent, but still)

How will this allow you to do anything you couldn't do before? It's not like Big Clock keeps you in bed, does it? Does your boss force you to sit in the office until a specific time, even if you started an hour or two earlier?

(Small anecdote: in my first job one of my teammates came in at 5am and left about 2pm. I just thought he's a morning person. But when I asked, he admitted that he wasn't one at all; he just tried to avoid our new boss, because that guy was extremely chatty with him.)

> I'm not at all a morning person and I'd rather have that sunlight after work

Same here - I'm a zombie on autopilot in the morning, and I usually start the day with the mindset of "let's see what kind of problems are waiting for me" (e.g. nasty compliance emails with the subject "ACTION REQUIRED!!!", processes that have crashed or are stuck since X hours, etc..) therefore I have anyway a permanent negative association with the first hours of the day independently if it's dark or sunny or rainy etc... .

On the other hand usually by the end of the day I have stabilized the situation and if I'm lucky I can still go out and enjoy a little bit the sun(set), so the longer that lasts the better for me.

I wonder if HN-people in general (doing mostly IT work?) tend to push working hours towards the evenings/nights and are therefore more in favour of daylight savings?

I am 100% a morning person, but I’m at work inside in the morning. I’d prefer more daylight in the evening when I’m not staring at a screen at work (though I recognize some people start and end their workday later).

I run in the mornings and the change this past week made it ridiculous... I get up at 5:30 and get out for a run by 6:00 and it's not dawn until about 7 AM. I got really used to getting to the nearby beach right on time to see a beautiful sunrise before heading back. Hopefully, it'll pull back soon.

I can say with quite some certainty that it will!

A third group who don't care, they just want it to stop, pick one and stick to it.

I'm not a morning person because I struggle waking up when it's dark outside. So I'm against this because I'm not a morning person.

I don't care about whether there's more sunshine in the morning or not (that's why I have blinds!). What I do care about is the fact that DST introduces needless complexity into the task of keeping time.

I know it's stupid, but I just think DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars. Not to mention, because not everyone observes DST, it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings.

Overall, regardless of your preferences, the world would be better if we didn't have to adjust the clock for no reason.

Making DST permanent in this context means never changing the clocks again. So what was once "daylight savings time" is now just "time" and no more clock changes. Just wanted to make sure you were aware, since your view is actually popular and your wish has been granted (if you live in the US).

You could also say, the US abolished DST but shifter their timezones one slot to the east.

I'm sorry, but I have to nitpick a bit here.

> DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars

While that may make it a hassle, it doesn't make it unnecessary, DST has a real benefit - giving an extra hour of sunlight after you leave work, an hour you couldn't use otherwise as you would either be sleeping or at work. Also being a bit tech-headed here but time sync has been a solved problem in IT for quite a while, NTP and all that :P.

> it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings

We already have to deal with timezones, does DST really make that difference? Can't you schedule the meeting at 4PM EST and whoever is in that area figures out if it's 4PM or 5PM? Also google calendar and all that.

I think the problem is that people don't understand what "permanent Daylights Savings Time" really means.

If you ask "Would you like the sun to set later in the evening?" most people will say yes. Who doesn't like more sunlight?

If you ask "Would you rather go to bed early and wake up early, or go to bed later and wake up later?" most people will choose to stay up late and sleep in the next day. There might be some disagreement from early risers, but consider when most people choose to sleep during the weekend.

Everyone thinks of Daylights Savings Time as "yay, more sunlight," without realizing it also requires them to wake up earlier, relative to their circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms can adjust once you’ve been on a schedule for a couple of weeks.

Only partially! They're heavily influenced by the time the sun rises. Your body's internal clock is actually 24 hours 11 minutes long on average. The only reason it doesn't drift hopelessly out of sync is that the sunrise "resets" it each day! (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/1999/07/human-biologi...)

What about countries with short sun lights during the winter, and large sunlight during summer?

What about them? (Sorry, not being coy, I genuinely don't understand where you're going with the question.)

These people's Circadian rhythm get messed, and may not follow the same patterns as those who live in more balanced geographical areas, don't they?

Yes, they do! This is also why we have timezones, they help somewhat even when they can't be perfect.

> Your body's internal clock is actually 24 hours 11 minutes long on average

Wasn't that debunked? Just look at what happened to people who slept in a cave for a few days, they came out of it having no idea of how long they were in there, even if they were somehow conditioned by others who guessed their own time. If the body had an internal clock, their estimation would not be off by 17 days out of 40. That's some serious mismatch.

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/science/french-cave-d...

Wasn’t aware of that study, but I do think it’s still pretty widely accepted science we have some internal timekeeping facilities. But if we indeed do not, that speaks even more to the importance of sunrise time in regulating our bodies!

Given enough time, work schedules will adjust to account for the time being an hour off. Considering this, it would make the most sense to have clocks adjusted to have 12pm as Noon.

For folks with seasonal affective disorder, this makes winter even more hellacious.

Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

Buy a wake-up light, then. We can’t force everyone to adapt to other people’s disorders.

Wake-up light doesn't work for everyone (e.g. me).

Not having affected by the light as much doesn't give anyone powers to tell others what to do.

Regardless of whether DST is implemented or not, you will be forcing someone to adapt to other people’s preferences.

That is not a very good argument.

I think for folks with any kind of seasonal affective disorder, having a fixed time on the clock year-round is still beneficial. Take more vacation in winter. Push for slightly more flexible work hours or at least a later first-meeting-of-the-day.

yeah if your employer gives shit. but there are millions of shift workers and they are at their employers mercy.

Disagree. Having the sun set so early is far more depressing than it rising a little later in the winter. I'd rather have a 7am sunrise than a 4pm sunset.

This exactly. Having it still be bright out after your work day is so nice. When the sun has already set by the time you're leaving work, it feels like the day has already ended.

Sunlight after work is a nice-to-have. But for people who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, darkness in the morning means a bad start to the day.

On the contrary, early sunset is little trouble but having to get out of bed when it seems like it's still the middle of the night is hell.

More people are awake at 5pm than at 7am though. Lots of people won't benefit from more sunlight that early in the morning, but almost everyone benefits from more sunlight in late afternoon / early evening.

> More people are awake at 5pm than at 7am though.

"More" perhaps, but probably not by that much? Schools start around 8, most people need to be in the office before 9, and so on. I don't know many people who are able to get up later than 7:30 or so, unless they work from home. And with permanent DST, the sun won't finish rising until after 8 am.

> the sun won't finish rising until after 8 am

This is only true for the northernmost reaches of the US on the darkest days of the year. Portland Maine will see sunrise at around 8:15 on the darkest day, Seattle will have it around 8:30. 99% of Americans will still wake up to sunrise year-round

I live in NYC, which is not that far north, and in the week before DST ends it's still quite dark as late as 7:40.

> I don't know many people who are able to get up later than 7:30 or so

I hardly know anyone who gets up regularly before 8am.

I have black-out curtains, so it looks like the middle of the night at high noon in my bedroom. A sun filled room while I'm trying to sleep would be my version of hell.

Where do you live that DST would make you wake up in the middle of the night? Even in Seattle twilight officially starts around 6:30am at the latest.

It feels like it when it's still dark.

Yeah, but in winter I get up when it's dark and it's dark again by the time I leave work. It's extremely depressing. At least with perma-DST (or BST as it would be here) I'd have some chance of a bit of daylight at the end of the day.

Is this based on your own experience dealing with SAD?

huh? For people that actually experience seasonal affective disorder, the damage is already done by 4pm, your day has already been ruined. People who actually deal with this typically use a SAD lamp first thing in the morning.

Same: I really struggle in winter and the biggest factor, by far, is that it gets dark so early.

Wouldn't quite a few people like this sleep through the sunrise and be happy to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day? I don't see how its any worse for the non-morning people in that group.

Not sure about the morning-person thing, but permanent DST would mean that on the shortest days the sun would rise at 9:18am rather than 8:18am. I'd rather the sun rise at 8:18am to help me wake up. I don't have kids, but if I did I'd rather them be walking to school during twilight rather than the pitch darkness of night.

Permanent standard time would have been much better. I live in Massachusetts. We have a lot of narrow roads with virtually no street lights. In the winter, it's common for snow or ice to accumulate. Having kids walking to a bus stop and waiting on the side of the road in the dark for the entire winter is a safety hazard.

You're even on the eastern end of the time zone, where the sunrise is comparatively early. There are bus stops in Indiana too.

Hard disagree on this one. Sunrises in Massachusetts are very early, the latest is about 7am for this time zone. Moving the time zone would push that to 8am. But it gets light substantially before sunrise — there’s a solid hour of twilight. You’re not sending your kids to school in the dead of night.

I don't know why you think I'm lying about this or what I stand to gain from doing so. It's not well-illuminated an hour before sunrise here.

There’s nothing to lie about. You’ve never sent your kids to school in all all-DST winter.

Huh? What does sending them to school in an "all-DST winter" matter? I've sent them to school during DST and then during EST. I know how dark it is before the switch over and after. We're not repositioning the earth.

The light is going to arrive at the same time regardless of whether you call that time 6am or 7am.

This will affect people in northern latitudes far more. For me it would be the matter of 8am vs 9am.

And the sun will set at 5pm instead of 4pm. So what? It's not changing the relative positions of the Earth and the Sun. There's going to be a certain amount of daylight at a given time of year no matter what. How we label the hours is irrelevant.

You are right, the concept of clock time is a social construct. But guess what, you're still expected to show up to work at the same time. Kids still show to school at the same time. How we label the time work starts may be irrelevant, but the time between sunrise, work starting, work ending, and sunset is absolutely not irrelevant.

Work and school are also social constructs and there's no reason we have to maintain some arbitrary start and end time. Why not start "1 hour after sunrise" instead of 9am? It would probably be healthier to tailor our activities to the presence of natural light instead of sticking to an artificial schedule.

This is my preferred outcome. Unfortunately change is hard, and coordination is even harder, so it's not going to happen. Permanent DST is the best realistic option.

One the biggest arguments for dumping the time switch is the difficulty caused by inconsistent switching between North America and Europe. That's a one hour change that everyone knows about well in advance. I'm not sure how those companies are supposed to coordinate anything if all meeting times are now relative to when the sun rises in each employee's location.

They are already relative to when the sun rises in each location. People generally try not to schedule meetings when it's going to be the middle of the night for the other party.

I'm not saying we should do away with the entire system of timekeeping. Just adjust work and school start/stop times to be better synced up with natural daylight.

Things being social constructs always seems to come with an unjustified claim that we’re morally required to get rid of them, as if we’re even capable of that.

Nobody is saying we're required to get rid of anything. It's just that if something is a social construct it means that we just made it up. So if there's a way to change it that works better, it's within our power to change it have it work better. We don't have to just live with the way it currently is. It's not like the gravitational constant or the speed of light or something that is outside human control.

Can’t we agree that time is nonsense, and changing the clocks is a nonsense topping on a nonsense salad?

>Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

Of course, you aren't getting that in either system; even in Standard time the sun doesn't actually rise in the early morning. You're still going to need the wake-up light either way.

With permanent DST, you'll actually get more of a chance to witness the sun in general, as there's a greater span of time that it'll be available for use when you're allowed outside at the end of the workday.

Up in the dark, home in the dark just flat out sucks for the 4 months of the year these conditions occur; minimizing the number of people who have to deal with that and minimizing the number of days they have to deal with that should be top priority.

> Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.

This reminds me of another conversation on HN about color sensitivity in human vision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

I imagine that waking up long after sunrise could affect our sensitivity to certain light spectrums to the point that "night owls" and "morning people" are seeing completely different colors, but calling them the same name.

In other words, two people who wake up early in the morning might both perceive a certain color of orange as "dark / muted", while people who wake up later in the day might perceive that same color of orange as "bright". On the opposite side of the spectrum, the color blue may appear more vibrant to people who wake up early, because their vision is bombarded with yellow (sunlight) in the morning.

Circadian rhythms and all that. The body reacts to sunlight. It's been shown that auto accidents are more common when people wake in darkness as the brain is still spinning up. It's why we use f.lux to help us go to sleep.

> Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.

Uh, yes, that's the point - and many businesses and schools will stick to a consistent nominal time (like 8am) which will now be one hour earlier in real terms.

> [...] which will now be one hour earlier in real terms.

"Relative" terms -- i.e. relative to sunrise. Eliminating daylight savings means that all times are now "real" terms.

Eliminating DST would mean that. But this bill makes DST permanent, which means that nominal noon will forever be "real" 1pm, which means sunrise will always be one hour later than it otherwise would be.

It's all arbitrary anyway. There's no natural law of the world that something called an "hour" exists and that a day is split up into 24 of them, or that the hour called "12" is the one that necessarily corresponds to solar noon (or midnight).

For the four months a year that Standard Time currently operates, sure.

In the end, almost all persons wake-up time are dictated by the rise of the sun. Not in the sense that you always rise with sunrise - that makes less sense the more north you go, but that the day rythm is highly dependant on the rythm of sunlight. People are strongly opposed to wake before sunraise, so most time schemes try to minimize that, without having darkness way too early. The typical day schedules are arranged with the idea, that the sun is highest not to late after noon. Permanent DST will have an obvious consequence: times will shift. Work and schools will start and end an hour later. You won't get more sun after work. TANSTAFL

How are you not getting more sun after work? In the winter the sun is always setting way too soon compared to summer.

The far east coast sees the sunset at 4:18PM on the winter solstice. Most people aren't even off work by then.

Time schedules are heavily influenced by the sun rise in winter. Thats the biggest bareer in the time schedules. People have problems getting up long before sunrise. That is, why traditional time schedules try to minimize this around the year while balancing of course with the sun set times. Permanent DST most likely will mean that schools and jobs start one hour later and consequently end one hour later.

In large parts of the country for large parts of the year, school starts early enough that parents in student have to wake up before sunrise.

They’ve pushed back start times in decades, I doubt they’ll do it now.

Also many many jobs with standard hours (not talking about 3rd shift, or the guy who makes the donuts) start at 8am, which in most of the country is early enough that you have to wake up before sunrise in the winter.

i think I'll just work an hour less in the winter. nice being on salary sometimes

I totally agree. That extra hour in the evening after work/wherever in the winters is actually quite pleasant, and having it artificially taken away when the clocks go back pretty is pretty gloomy.

I am against it, because there will no longer be a time during which you do something and still viably claim to have never done it. I have never eaten a Tommy's burger with chili-fries (except between the minutes of 1:00 and 1:59 during fall back). I can account for 24 hours of every day (except spring forward) of every year.

Ok, I'm actually for it.

You can still get born on Feb 29th to age slower.

All of this could be moot if China pursues/completes its plan of putting artificial "moons" up to provide 8 times the light of a full moon. Then it would be relatively light all the time.

G.O.A.T. analysis right here

well that just seems like the worst sort of idea. lets just totally screw over nocturnal animals

We had a series of town-hall meetings about it at 11 AM on Tuesdays, and nobody objected.

I've been working from home for 7+ years, and I mostly let the sun wake me up. I never would have been able to do that in the winter when I was commuting, but it is very nice.

I am totally in favor of this though, I was ranting about it to a friend on Sunday.

normalize work starting two hours after dawn.

(i think i'm only half joking)

also then just move everyone to GMT for the hell of it.

They mean 1 hour earlier relative to the sun cycle, and they are correct. Because the sun strongly influences our circadian rhythm, this is the correct frame of reference, from a health standpoint, not wall time.

If you get up at 8 every day, you're getting up ~2 hours after dawn (depending on date/location). When DST hits, 7 becomes 8, and you're getting up ~1 hour after dawn.

I would love having more sun after work, but I don't know that it's worth the tradeoff of safety. On the shortest days the sun rises at 8:18am for me, so I usually start biking to work shortly after sunrise. On DST that sunrise would be 9:18am, well after my daily standup time. I'd be biking in twilight, if not nautical night. I already hate biking in the dark for safety reasons, I'd probably start driving more.

I don't know what part of the country you're in, but some of us are already making this tradeoff with the current setup. In NYC, a typical winter sunrise is shortly after 7am - before many people are riding to work, myself included. A typical winter sunset is well before 5pm, so the entire evening commute is dark.

When the days are very short in winter to begin with, and you spend a third of them out and about, someone somewhere is going to be out and about before or after dark.

They’re probably in the PNW. In the PNW winter, days are extremely short, there isn’t much you can do to have daylight on two commutes when there’s such short days. We in the Northeast would have much better centered days in DST year round though.

You are supposed be to be lit up like a flashing Christmas tree anyway. I don't know why my fellow cyclists insist on rolling the dice when nearly everyone on the road is texting or having a screaming match with someone on their phone.

As a daily bike commuter, I have the opposite problem. I never bike to work in the morning before the sun rises (not even close), but in the winter the sun is setting before 5pm which leaves my entire ride home in darkness. Having more light in the evening would help a lot.

It also seems to me like your job starts a bit early in the day, relative to most tech jobs anyway. If I get in before 10 I'm usually the first one there in the morning.

Count me as one of those against it.

I'm all for not changing our clocks anymore, but DST is stupid. If you want to get up earlier and have more daylight in the evening, great, do that. If you want to get up later so it's not dark when you leave in the morning, sure, makes sense. And if you want to change your schedule as the year progresses to adapt to the seasons, I'm with you.

The real problem is that we have this weird idea that our whole society has to operate synchronously. And hey, I get it, some groups of people do have to coordinate with each other. An assembly line won't work if people show up whenever. But most people aren't in that situation and even that assembly line doesn't have to be synchronized with all the other assembly lines in the country. Heck, it might even be a good thing if we didn't all drive to work at the same time...

We have to agree on what time it is so that we can coordinate, and as long as we're doing that, let's agree on something that's not a lie. If we're going to meet at noon, the sun should be straight over head, damnit.

Both standard time and daylight saving time are arbitrary. Sunrise and sunset times shift throughout the year based on multiple factors. It would be unreasonable to try and mandate a time system that always made 12:00 exactly when the sun is directly overhead.

Timekeeping systems are meant to coordinate human activity, yes, but if you're calling daylight saving time a lie... then so is standard time, and all other timekeeping systems, for that matter.

And depending upon whether you are far east or west in a timezone, they are functionally identical.

"If we're going to meet at noon, the sun should be straight over head, damnit." Absolutely.

Oh man - this was my position as well for a long time.

And then I realized that you can’t even count on “high noon” meaning much at all, DST or not, because using solar noon is basically the same thing as having arbitrarily many timezones for each unique longitudinal point on Earth.

Now I’m tempted to go full UTC and to hell with all of it

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/01/this...

https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/6920/why-do...

> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun.

I try to when I can. But you are right. Most people's lives revolve around work. For most of human existence, our lives revolved around the sun. Now it revolves around a job.

>For most of human existence, our lives revolved around the sun. Now it revolves around a job.

I blame our corporate reality as much as the next guy but tbh even without work most people's lives don't exactly revolve around the sun. Or else the clubs on the weekends would be empty

> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun.

people with dogs. Dogs don't care about clocks and they will totally wake you up so they can poop and have breakfast.

Huh?? I always get up with the sun, even when I go to bed at 4am, I always wake up first thing. It's pretty annoying

> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun.

So you don’t know why farmers, laborers, gardeners, contractors, garbage men, etc? There’s a long list of jobs where there’s practical reasons to start work when it gets light outside.

Also, numbers on a clock are arbitrarily assigned. Arbitrarily changing them doesn't change anything fundamental.

It's not like life is radically different on the east and west sides of a time zone either.

I'm a morning person (sometimes), and I love being up before the sun is up. I get a great sunrise view out of my front windows.

> Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.

Or whatever time that their toddler(s) tell them to ;)

Isn’t this just some random Twitter account? There isn’t even a link to a real source

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-tha...

> The change would help enable children to play outdoors later...

The change would help enable the executive class to play golf after work hours...

> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun

Well now you do

I do everything in UTC, don't use daylight savings, and I do set my wake up time based on sunrise

Clearly you must understand you are in the minority and most of the world have jobs requiring a set start time.

And once you partner with another you must now hope you both can be afforded that luxury of a job.

Despite working remotely since 2008 I'm married to someone who works at a hospital and must be there by 7am. Getting woken up and trying to fall back asleep is much worse than just going to bed with her and waking up with her to get uninterrupted sleep.

Add on kids to that equation who must be at the bus stop at a certain time and the number of working households who can wake up with the sun is minuscule.

> Clearly you must understand you are in the minority and most of the world have jobs requiring a set start time.

This sounds like internet forum flamebait. "Clearly?" I have a relatively consistent job start time around 9am on most days which I think is quite possibly the median start time of all jobs and is well after sunrise.

> I'm married to someone who works at a hospital and must be there by 7am

I would hypothesize that the majority of people are not married to people who need to be at their jobs at 7am.

For those that do, I imagine sunrise is not really much of a factor anyway, they will probably be getting up before sunrise regardless.

> I would hypothesize that the majority of people are not married to people who need to be at their jobs at 7am.

BLS collect data on this in the 'American Time Use Survey'. According to https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2015/article/night-owls-an... 29% of people are working at their main place of employment at 7am on any given day. 52% are at work at 8am. The time use survey doesn't distinguish though between people who are at work at 7am coming up to the end of a night shift vs those who are at work at 7am at the start of a day shift.

Regardless, it certainly gives the impression that households where at least one working adult has to be at work by 7 are not freakish outliers. The reality of construction, retail, cleaning, healthcare, childcare, transport and many other common lines of work is early starts.

Many of these jobs aren't early directly because they line up with daylight, though - they're early because they need to get started before the rest of the workforce begins its day, because they exist in service of it. So if we all agree 'well, sure, lawyers can put up with a few more dark mornings in December', we're implicitly also deciding 'and baristas can have dark starts from October through to March'.

Probably a good part of these people is just being selfish.

They completely ignore the increased suicide rates and other effects the switching of the clock has. It even affects the cows of farmers. It has negative side effects for millions of people, but NOOOOOO, those poor people who need to get up earlier, they'll be having a much harder time!

I'd rather have only two hours from coast to coast. Of course they want to make us all get up earlier all year long.

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