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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a fun statistic! Even if it's pushing the common definition of "sunlight" quite a bit.

Also makes me wonder what fraction of the world population is awake at a given time, and what that fraction looks like plotted against 24 hours of the day.

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https://blog.cyberclip.com/world-population-by-time-zone has a plot of population by time zone; I can't find numbers.

Some quick guesses:

- the most people are awake at around 14:00 UTC. That's 23:00 in Japan (the easternmost big population, at UTC+9 - sorry eastern Australia!) and 6:00 PST/7:00 PDT; most people who would be sleeping are in the Pacific.

- the most people are asleep at about 22:00 UTC - that's 23:00/00:00 in Western Europe (depending on the season) and 06:00 in China, so you get those two big population centers (and India in between them) sleeping.

In Internet Census 2012, there's an animated gif of planet earth's day/night cycle as measured by which IP addresses respond to ping:

http://census2012.sourceforge.net/images/geovideo_lowres.gif

Source: http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html

That's interesting. You can see a difference between N and S hemispheres on the same longitude, e.g. North East USA vs Peru and Japan vs East Australia.

A practical issue- if you have a world-distributed workforce or an international news agency, what's the best geographical location for the headquarters?

London has long benefitted from its position allowing its working day overlapping everywhere from the US West coast to Japan, even if barely at those extremes. Most of the world's population lies between UTC-5 and UTC+5 I believe.

Most of the world's population lives inside the Valeriepieris circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle which is covered by the time zones UTC+5 through UTC+8.

So if you want to be as close as possible to as many people as possible, somewhere in Myanmar would be a better choice than London.

Of course the calculus changes if you also consider how much money each of these people has access to.

Yes, you are not necessarily interested in the population barycenter, but more on the money barycenter

That changes the equation

It's probably one reason why Singapore is a popular location for multinationals to have an office.

Most means "almost all". Your link says about 50%.

I've certainly seen "most" used to mean "almost all", and it appears as though you're feeling a little annoyed to see it used that way because you consider it misleading.

I've also frequently seen "most" used to mean "a majority", though, in which case GP's use of the term is precisely consistent with the facts in their source.

Interesting. I think differently but seems there are multiple interpretations. Of course we feel most people would agree with our version ;)

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-eq...

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/most

“More than half of” is one of the definitions

Looks like most people disagree. ;)

Given India is UTC+5.5 and China is UTC+8, plus many other large countries are outside that range (Indonesia, Japan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Phillipines) I think you need to stretch it a bit

Given OP's 10 hour range, UTC+0 to UTC+10 is almost certainly going to be the 10 hour range that includes the most people. It includes all of Asia, Europe and Africa, and excludes both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

I think it has to be.

UTC+8 is all of China and UTC+5.5 is all of India, and in between are high population countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, so UTC+5.5 to UTC+8 has to be included.

UTC+11 to UTC-8.5 is the Pacific Ocean and has maybe 10 million people total, while UTC+0 has >100 million in UK, Portugal and part of Western Africa so UTC+0 must be part of the range.

That only leaves the choice between UTC-1/2 and UTC+9/10. UTC-1 and UTC-2 have under a million with only a few small islands while UTC+10 has most of Papua New Guinea with 6 million.

It also excludes the west coast. -7 to +9 goes from West Coast to Japan and Indonesia, placing UTC+1 (CET e.g. Berlin) in the middle.

Is that "most of the world's population" in the same sense as "Mohammed is the most common name?"

Well, is it?

Seconding the UK. I live in Edinburgh (Scotland) and I can meet with people from west coast US as far as China with very minor adjustments to my working day. I have natural half day overlaps with east coast US, and most of my day overlaps with major outsourcing locations (except the phillipines, but can be managed with a 1 hour adjustment)

Other people are saying the UK, but if you want the same time-zone plus EU laws/customs/currency, you can choose Ireland.

What are you optimizing for? Once you clarify that your answer will be clear.

- Access to capital? - close to "action"? - Airport hub city?

Overlapping business hours

Are we channeling through internet cabling or magical straight lines?

Does this actually matter? Internet cabling vs magical straight lines would amount to less than 1 second difference, so emails/slack/discord/IRC/etc (basically anything except video chat) would barely notice.

> magical straight lines

Sufficiently advanced technology

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...

Wherever is most legally favorable from the perspective of liability and taxes, probably.

The core

The pressure to be successul must be intense there though

There is a large mantle of responsibility.

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