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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

DST is an example of how stuck in our ways humanity can be. In addition to the evidence in the article there have also been studies that have shown increased car accidents, lost productivity and all kinds of other problems caused by the cognitive impact of a whole society trying to wake up earlier then their body is expecting.

As far as energy usage is concerned I could see the argument being true if we could pick when the time changed each year to correspond with temperature fluctuations. But since weather tends to vary from year to year and we change the time on a set day the effort seems moot.

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The nicest thing you can say about Daylight Savings these days is that it's a national way to coordinate seasonal schedule changes: not for environmental/energy reasons (the numbers don't support it) but to place additional daylight where people are using it (the evenings after work).

If people like Daylight Savings Time better than not, the real solution should just be to change normal work hours from "9 to 5" to "8 to 4". But that would be difficult to pull off as a culture without guidance, and the idea makes way too much sense for Congress to pull off. So we'll muddle along. At least we have the technology now that work schedules are likely going to be more flexible in the future, instead of less flexible.

If you ask me, though, we should just declare Daylight Savings permanent, then add another layer on top of it every year, until the entire country is using GMT. :)

Yeah I never understand why people argue for permanent DST so it can be lighter in the evening all year round. Is it because we're all stuck in the mindset that work has to be from 9 to 5, and your favorite show has to come on at 8pm?

Absolutely. And who gets up at 4am? It puzzled me that it was dark in Tokyo by about 8pm in the summer, until I realized that the sun rises at a ridiculously early hour there. Great for fishmongers, not so great for modern business workers.

Yes! I also noticed this in Tokyo, I think they are just in the wrong timezone altogether. :)

Not just work. Store and restaurant hours. Movie times. TV schedules. UPS pick up times. Everything.

If everyone has to shift their schedules earlier you might as well just change the time, that way you save people from having to scrape off and repaint their store hours on their glass front doors.

That was always the reason for DST.

Anyone who wants an informed opinion about DST should read David Prerau's book "sieze the daylight" / "saving the daylight" (its US and UK publishers gave it different titles).

http://www.seizethedaylight.com/ http://www.savingthedaylight.com/

Who the hell is responsible for much of the DST insanity?

I think most people on hacker news would agree DST is insanity.

People who like light in the evenings during the summer. Especially when one lives far East in a timezone. Though personally I'd be perfectly happy with New England having say, double Daylight-Savings year round. As a compromise, move to Atlantic Time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

If you scroll down to the "Politics" section, DST was implemented as a way to save coal during WWII.

The point though is that the argument that it saves energy is questionable at best. Frankly, any legitimate defense really hinges on the argument that people prefer it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

I think most people on hacker news haven't seen the sun in years :grin

I don't agree that it is insanity.

People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend not to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the equator, and if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't vary too much.

If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.

I've heard the arguments from people close to the equator that the curtains will fade and the men will get their morning erections while they are on the bus, etc. Of course it is different there in the sub-tropics.

If you accept that time should not be completely local (i.e. the local church tower clock is set to noon, as it used to be) and not completely global (i.e. we all run on UTC and Tuesday begins at 00:00:01 which happens to be late afternoon in location X) and so that we arbitrarily assign time zones according to the rotation of our planet, surely we can also adjust the time zones depending on the path of our planet around the sun.

Well, if it works for the locals, that is. Insanity seems like a strong word.

> People who live close to the equator or in the middle of time zones tend not to see much point in DST. The day length doesn't vary much at the equator, and if you are in the middle of a time zone then the offset doesn't vary too much.

> If you are closer to a pole or at the edge of a time zone, the offset is not ideal around the solstices. So, DST is welcome for many.

I'm not quite sure what your argument is.

I can tell you that here, above 60˚, it's light enough the entire summer anyway (as in, it's only dark for about 2 hours a day), and in the winter the added light is too early in the morning but it gets darker earlier in the afternoon. Today, for example, the sun was up at 7:52 and down at 16:14 (4:14pm).

I suspect it's most useful for people around 35-45˚.

You probably aren't sure about my argument as it is not aimed at you. DST is useless at the equator, and useless at high latitudes. However, it's useful at middle latitudes, and that point is often missed by many. I would agree with 35-45˚.

I also live above 60˚ north - today I had 2 minutes less daylight than you :(

I think some of the negativity towards DST here is due to failure to consider the local needs of other people. I guess that's my argument. The day is important, and you know the importance of things more when they are gone.

Some people don't really care about daytime and nighttime at all. To them, the DST is just a mindless insanity.

The reason it isn't working for you is more to do with your position within a timezone, rather than your latitude.

If your noon is true noon, then shifting the clock forwards will balance the daylight hours towards the afternoon and away from the morning.

If your noon is badly skewed from a wide timezone, then you'll get the problems you describe (too much light in the morning). Your problem is longitudinal, not latitudinal.

Isn't that the reason why the change happens on Sundays so that you can sleep in and get accustomed to it. People travel a lot now-a-days across multiple timezones and get to work directly from the airport. I can't believe that one hour shift on a Sunday is a huge impact

As a former frequent business traveler, I can tell you it is amazing what even one timezone will do to you with regards to sleep. I reside in the CST, and traveling to the west coast would take me a few days to acclimate, and then I would fly back home to only fly to the east coast the next week.

Don't underestimate the impact of how a single hour of time can impact the brain. Two timezone differences to the human body can be huge.

If you have the luxury of being able to sleep well regularly then an hour here or there can be accommodated for without terrible disruption. However, a lot of people work more than 40 hours a week, and have significant commute times as well. Typically what ends up suffering is sleep. When people are chronically sleep deprived shifting an hour earlier can have a huge impact (e.g. going from 6 hours of sleep to 5, or even 5 to 4).

Also, sleeping in on Sundays doesn't help. By definition if you don't use the new time to control when you wake up on Sunday morning then your sleep schedule will not be adapted to the new schedule at all. All that will be different is you will have a stronger incentive to go to bed an hour earlier due to the time on the clock, though your body will still be set to fall asleep and wake up an hour later.

Forget embedded systems, cisco routers seem not to handle time zones well. I ended up with a discussion about timezones with one of my network guys and he admitted it was much easier to set the system time on cisco devices to GMT then it was to make the daylight saving switch. They don't have complete timezone databases apparently.

The crux of my conversation with him is that it matters where you are just as much when you are. The fact that America is two weeks off from the rest of the world caused no end of annoyances these past two weeks. It also ended up with lots of debates about how "wall clock time" has little do with the actual time especially when talking about past or future.

(Think 4pm in London 5 moths from now, what time will that be in NY? What about Brazil? Is that the same time of the day if it's 6 months from now?)

Too many internal systems have an incomplete vision of what time means to them and it rarely holds up. I could go on, but I leave it with this. If you can help it, store points in time in a unix timestamp (or at least UTC) and avoid having to write scheduling software.

Why would a router need to know what daylight saving time is? I just use UTC for everything with servers...

Case in point: me and some of my coworkers have wasted a good several hours this last week just dealing with having a system which was stuck in the old (pre-2005) DST period.

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