Are the Americans Awake? | Hacker News Reader

Are the Americans Awake?

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97 pointsspacebuffer168 comments

I'm perplexed at the implication that we "decided" to have the number of time zones that we do, rather than just acknowledging the reality that the US is a fairly big country. It's cheating a bit with Alaska in the picture, but the US spans about twice the degrees of longitude as Europe, and it would still be solidly "wider" even if you limit to the lower 48 states.

It is "decided" which is correct. With 24 hours a day and 360 degrees of longitude, it should be simply 15 degrees per hour.

The number of time zone that a country has is a political choice, perhaps based on geography somewhat. The size of each time zone is also variable depending on the choice the government makes.

* Look at China for example, one time zone.

* India is the same with one time zone.

* Mountain Time Zone in Canada actually stretches across 4 time zones (-9, -8, -7, -6)

* The Pacific Time Zone in Canada actually stretches across 2 time zones (-8, -9)

* Newfoundland in Canada should be geographically in the -4 time zone, but it choose to do -3.5 instead. If that's the proper value, then I'd argue Maine should be in -4.5 instead of -5.

* France should be in the UTC time zone with a tiny slice in the +1 time zone. In reality it is in the +1 time zone.

* Heck, why does time zones go from UTC-12 to UTC+14? What's with the values above UTC+12?

See: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0eb6e2b279845c866f903...

China's time zone is interesting, mostly a reflection of the fact that like 80% of the population lives in a north-south strip along the coast, largely within one "natural" time zone. The further you are from the east coast, the weirder it is. It may be 7 am in both Beijing and Urumqi, but everyone in Urumqi is still asleep because the sun won't be up for a couple more hours.

The far west of China sometimes uses a local time zone, Xinjiang Time that is two hours ahead. That indicates that two hours is too far for one time zone. I get the impression is that usage of local time is on ethnic lines and may have disappeared after crackdown.

And there's also the decision to use hour-aligned timezones. Why not half hours? Why not two hours? It's very much a conscious decision.

Previous to the rise of the railroad, each place's time was based on solar noon. That is, when the sun was at the highest point. Which worked fine. It only became untenable when you needed to manually maintain and publish a railroad schedule. So time zones became a thing. Initially they were on a per-railroad basis, but eventually they got unified.

But now we have computers to do all the bookkeeping. So if we wanted, we could not only return to the previous approach, but take it further to infinite time zones. Your noon is whenever the sun is overhead for you. Our calendars always include locations for events, so the time difference is compensated for. Google Maps knows that if you're traveling east or west a significant distance to make it to an event, it needs to adjust the time. Etc, etc.

We should discuss this in a zoom call. I've scheduled it for eleven-fleventy χm. Don't be late!

...the need to synchronize global tasks means that either you have easily-offset local times, or you just use UTC everywhere and keep it in your head when local wake / sleep is and refuse synchronized tasks outside those times.

No, that's part of the manual-scheduling paperwork. I get that you're used to it, but we could eliminate it. The dialog would go more like: "I looked at our calendars and put it at a time that seems to work for both of us. Feel free to move it if that's better for you." Which is what I often do anyhow with Google Calendar with shared access (as when we work for the same company) or as with Calendly.

https://qntm.org/continuous

That is a good rant, but I think it's wildly overstated. E.g., The whole notion of a timetable is an early-railroad-era artifact. By modern standards, it's a terrible interface. Them not being viable is great.

I should note that I'm not seriously proposing it. My point is more to get people thinking. Our current hodgepodge approach is extremely historically contingent. I personally believe that there's no good solution to this, just different bad ones.

Knowing the longitude between yourself and the event is enough information. A sundial is always locally correct as well. This could be calculated in Airplane Mode using only GPS too. Longitude 0 would be the universal clock for network applications.

Uh oh. I'm starting to think this is a good idea...

1 hour is easy to remember, makes the math easier, and not so far apart that it creates radically different concepts of time for people on the extreme ends.

With one hour time zones:

* If someone is 3 time zones ahead, they're 3 hours ahead

* There are 24 time zones and 360 degrees neatly divides by 24

* 2 hours between time zones means that within a time zone, the sun rises on one side at 8 am and on the other side at 10 am.

We have :30 and :45 time zones though, no :15 time zone. So that doesn't quite apply.

Doesn't it?

I was explaining why 1 hour as the standard makes sense instead of 30 minutes or 2 hours. The :45 time zones would still be an issue for 30 minute intervals and :30 and :45 are still an issue for 2 hour intervals

But the 1 hour is not a standard, we have many places with :45 and :30 time zones. For example, Newfoundland is -3:30 time zone. Nepal is in a +5:45 time zone.

Again, I never said it was the standard. I was saying why 1 hour offsets make more sense than 15 minutes or two hours. I never said different offsets don't exist, I said why they make less sense

And those exceptions demonstrate why it's a bad idea to go beyond hour offsets. It's just added hassle.

Probably because we like round numbers.

But there are half-hour aligned time-zones. Newfoundland is -3.5. It's currently 11:20 am here in Toronto and 12:50 pm in St. John's. Then there's the Chatham Islands of New Zealand with a quarter hour offset at UTC +12:45.

There are also regions where two bordering time zones change by more than 1 hour. At the Pakistani-Chinese border you gain or lose three hours.

Why have time zones at all, and not simply recognize that day and night occur at different times in different places?

This part wasn't a conscious decision, because the reference frame of time and orbital mechanics were discovered long after the practice of timekeeping. We may have a similar problem on a galactic scale some day.

The primary issue is when the day changes in the middle of the local day. Assume everyone adopts UTC. Then in California, midnight will happen at 5pm local time.

  * Friday UTC 2300 = local time 4pm PST  - This is Friday
  * Saturday UTC 0100 = local time 6pm PST  - Is this Saturday?
  * Saturday UTC 2300 = local time 4pm PST next day  - This is still Saturday?

When would Saturday afternoon be? We'd have to change our vocabulary, and I don't see that worth it.

We don't have to change any vocabulary. Noon and midnight happen at different times in different places and that would be fine. We know it's fine, because that's how it currently is in China.

Most servers run on UTC under the hood, and a lot of big organizations have experience already in terms of doing all timekeeping calculations in UTC. It may seem weird, but works pretty well in the long run -- and not having to deal with corner cases like DST or geographical ambiguities around time is extremely valuable.

Have you ever thought about what it's like to live near the edge of a timezone? In a city where half the city uses one time and half uses the other?

"Let's go see a movie Saturday afternoon." "I need this done by Thursday." All these statements are common and completely understandable by everyone. Change to UTC, and the statements are ambiguous. It will confusing for so many people, with no obvious benefit.

China is fine, because the day doesn't change during daylight.

Yeah, computers should use UTC. It's easy for them to convert to/from local time for the user. This is what computers are good at.

There :30 time zones and :45 time zones. Oddly, no :15 time zones.

>then I'd argue Maine should be in -4.5 instead of -5. Maine knows it should be in Atlantic, it just doesn't want to be more isolated from the rest of the country than it already is https://www.pressherald.com/2017/04/27/maine-may-switch-to-a...

I think it should be either a -4:30 or -4:45 time zones instead :)

I'm more perplexed that China decided it should only have 1 timezone. It also decided that timezone should be from the perspective of the eastern coast. When does the sun rise and fall for the western most people?

Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone?

The sun rises and sets at different times according to both latitude and longitude. Timezones only handle longitudinal daylight adjustments. We already deal with plenty of incongruity around daylight.

Why not embrace the variability and let go of the idea that we can predict daylight based on the hour alone? Let people localize the time to discover where the sun is.

timezones don't need to perfectly predict whether the sun is up to be useful. when I set a meeting with a colleague in India, I don't really care whether the sun is up. it will almost surely be down for at least one of us. I am just trying to pick a reasonable time where they don't have to end work too late, and I don't have to start too early.

having everyone roughly align their work day to 9am-5pm in their local time works a lot better than asking every single person in my company for their working hours in UTC.

I don't get how the problem would be harder with a universal timezone. Currently, I have to look up which timezone India is in and find a good time that works for both of us. In a universal timezone, I would have to look up what time noon is in India and find a time that works for both of us.

so the high level problem here is "how can I infer a locale's working hours without asking every individual?"

the current solution is to set an explicit expectation that people work 9-5ish in their local offset.

is your proposal to do the same thing, but the expectation is that people work noon-4 to noon+4, or something like that? I don't see any major advantages to that, but I do see one major disadvantage: solar noon occurs at a different time every day. of all the arbitrary markers to align schedules with, this seems like a pretty bad one.

> is your proposal to do the same thing, but the expectation is that people work noon-4 to noon+4, or something like that?

Yes. Rather than using solar noon at one day, we can look up an average solar noon time. It should give a better idea how people would plan their day. I understand that schedules will be different at different locations, but then 9 to 5 also has that much variation from location to location.

Your solution is the same regardless of the number of time zones in existence. Either way you need to ‘look up what time noon is in India’.

Won't people just end up coming up with their own pseudo time zones anyways? If I'm in New York and I'm calling someone in Seattle, aren't I gonna have to just mentally subtract 3 or so hours anyways?

Yes. There's no getting around the fact that the sun rises and sets around the world at different times. What we do instead is get rid of the assumption that everybody works 9am to 5pm local time.

It does require a different way of thinking about time zones. It sounds complicated because it's unfamiliar, but if we ever make the transition, the system would be simpler, less ambiguous, and easier to reason about.

Because this way, when someone tells me "it was 5:00 or 16:00" I know whether it was their morning or evening or around lunch. I do not have to take out map to figure out where they were located to figure out any of that.

I used to want this too, until I thought about what it would be like to have a date/weekday change during waking hours for most of the world. I suspect that would cause even more problems than the timezone headaches.

Why even use time that's linked to the rotation of our home-planet? That's as geo-centric as it gets.

Just count the number of seconds since the GPS epoch in a galaxy-centered inertial frame. This post was made at 1,373,034,914.

A second is one 86400th of a rotation of our home-planet

A second is defined to be exactly the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

I don't see anything referencing any planets?

Well, a second is more specifically defined as:

"the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom taken as an average over 11 samples distributed throughout the earth in order to approximate the earth's inertial frame"

Seconds as used in Coordinated Universal Time are in fact defined based on planets, and earth specifically - because they use earth's inertial frame.

The SI definition of a second, available at https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9...., section 2.3.1, does not reference our particular planet, nor any particular means of measurement, nor does it have to.

In principle this frequency can be measured in any inertial frame. Seconds are not defined on Earth specifically.

> Why shouldn't we have one timezone? Why not have one worldwide timezone?

Your watch hands read '20230710T142847Z', don't they?

No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid. Today is 2023-191. Also my watch only reads 14:28 since the date and TZ are typically implied in watches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

One thing for which I would advocate is removing zero based numbering from hours and minutes. Clocks reading 12:15 for 00:15 is tremendously confusing. Most human oriented counting systems are not zero indexed. One indexed series align cardinal and ordinal numbering which reflects the passage of time rather than each hour being nominally disconnected from a sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering

> No. For one, I use the ordinal date option in ISO 8601 because the whole month and day thing is stupid.

Apart from this being very funny and an interesting idea I have a question: how do you deal with leap years? Many important dates throughout the year (e.g. holidays, birthdays, business quarters etc.) are bound to specific days of months, do you just have to remember that all such days after February are one off sometimes in an ordinal date system?

I appreciate your questions. I will honor them with the same dry humor by responding as if actually using ordinal dates were something many people did.

Leap years: A sidereal year adjustment may occur on any day, there is not a requirement for it to occur on a specific day. Leap years merely have an additional day identifier in the series before returning to 001.

Anniversary events: Again, there is no requirement that the memorialization of a person or event occur on a specific month and day. Many occurrences such as Mardi Gras and Eid using a lunar calendar or the USA's Thanksgiving using the day of week.

If one wishes to commemorate an annual event at the same orbital position as when it occurred, then ordinal dates are more effective since the Gregorian calendar's fourth-year 02/29 throws off any anniversary after the first 1/6th of the year.

NB: ISO 8601 "leap week" instances occur at a different rate than leap years (a more parallel construction would be "leap week" and "leap day"). "[The] 53 week years occur on all years that have Thursday as the 1st of January and on leap years that start on Wednesday the 1st."

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

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

A higher order number than ordinal and cardinal is ratio. We can also express the current day as how far through the year we are. Since today is 192, it represents 52% of a year, the ratio of current day to days in the current year. Below is an example in bash.

  $ date '+%j'
  192
  $ echo "scale=2; $(date '+%j') / $(date '+%j' -d $(date '+%Y')'-12-31')" | bc
  .52

https://qntm.org/abolish

> Why not have one worldwide timezone ... we already deal with plenty of incongruity around daylight ... why not embrace the variability and let go of the idea that we can predict daylight based on the hour alone?

Because it's a useful heuristic in knowing whether someone will be at work or not without having to localize every time.

I actually liked the one time zone system in China when I lived there. It made scheduling work across different cities a little more convenient, and I didn't mind that the sunrise/sunset didn't always exactly line up to what I am accustomed to.

I can understand not exactly lining up, but considering how large the country is and how Beijing is so far east it seems like people in the west would have the sun rise at 2:00 or the sunsetting at 14:00. I don't know this for certain I'm just curious how not lined up it can get at the most extremes.

As long I am not working the same hours as people in the far east of China, I would not really care about what the clock reads at sunset: I'd just get up around sunrise at n o'clock, spend my hours at work and finally go to bed at m o clock. The only difference between n=6, m=22 or n=22,m=14 is habituation. We're used to the former.

But it would definitely screw up cultural references, e.g.: a "5pm tea" then can only be understood with a broader cultural context: "UK, 5pm is late in the 2nd half of the working day for them".

It must lead to some interesting language quirks around times of day. For example in the US/Canada if you say "Nobody wants to get a phone a call at 1AM" that means the same thing to anyone no matter where they're from. "I want you at your desk at 9 o'clock sharp". etc.

Officially its called China Standard Time in all the international documents. In local media, its called (in Chinese obviously) "Beijing Time". Its all based on the perspective of Beijing.

> I'm perplexed at the implication that we "decided" to have the number of time zones that we do, rather than just acknowledging the reality that the US is a fairly big country.

Timezones are still a social construct, and decision made. Mainland China is wider than contiguous US, and yet it runs on single TZ.

> Mainland China is wider than contiguous US, and yet it runs on single TZ

That's because a vast majority of the country (and certainly all the politically empowered citizens) live in a much smaller span for which the single timezone is pretty accurate. It works in China by not caring about people to the West.

Well, another example is Spain that is at +1 purely for convenience, to get western europe under single timezone, rather than the +0 that their geography suggests.

Spain is not UTC+1 purely out of convenience. It's because of history

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/11/30/244995264/...

> So on Oct. 23, 1940, Hitler took a train to the Spanish border to woo Spain's Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco.

> But Spain was in ruins from its own Civil War in the late 1930s, and Franco didn't have much to offer. He stayed neutral, but switched Spain's clocks ahead one hour, to be in line with Nazi Germany.

> Ever since, even though Spain is geographically in line with Britain, Portugal and Morocco — its clocks are on the same time zone as countries as far east as Poland and Hungary.

And the country/politicians are thinking about going back to UTC+0 due to all the problems UTC+1 poses due to geography.

> to get western europe under single timezone

Western Europe is not under a single timezone, though: the UK, Ireland, and Portugal are not on CET/CEST.

Under some circumstances "to get" describes an intent for a result rather than an obtained result.

Think about the concrete thing you're suggesting — making people 4 timezones away wake up early just to be aligned with bureaucrats! Eliminating timezones on its own does not make people wake up before dawn. Consolidating timezones while not forcing people into unnatural wake/sleep cycles accomplishes nothing.

You still would have to figure out when people in SF wake up!

Why do you think it accomplishes nothing? Benefits just from communication perspective are enough to consider single timezone.

> You still would have to figure out when people in SF wake up!

Exactly! It is argument against multiple TZs not for it.

Think about this harder! Let's say everyone in the US was on "Eastern Standard Time". You're scheduling a meeting for eastern standard time. You still have to figure out when your San Francisco coworkers wake up, in Eastern Time!

Except without timezones, you just have to remember that SF is 3-ish hours off so people wake up at 11am. If you just had timezones, you wouldn't have to keep this in your head!

I don't understand what is your point.

With single TZ: - I need to learn when people at different location work.

With multiple, perfect TZs: - I still need to learn when people at different location work, and additionally I need to translate (or add TZ to) every clock time when communicating with those people.

Learning when people work is similar amount of work in both cases. You always have to keep at least time offsets for every city or even office. If you have multiple TZs you need to keep them and their offsets in your head.

> With multiple, perfect TZs: - I still need to learn when people at different location work

That's not true — I can roughly assume that everyone is at work by 9am their time. I just need to know their timezone. If I didn't have a timezone, I'd have to memorize the approximate offset of every city in the US.

So instead knowing city -> offset mapping, you need to know both city -> TZ and TZ -> offset mapping, and end up with something worse (because TZ will never be perfect, so offset from TZ is usually worse than "human" offset based on the location).

I really see no benefit.

https://qntm.org/abolish

TL;DR:

People won't wake up at local midnight because the clock says 07:00.

People won't wake up at local sunrise no matter what the clock says.

People will wake up when the people they coordinate with wake up.

If they can't change their clocks to reflect that, the hours they keep will be very unpredictable to outsiders.

> Think about the concrete thing you're suggesting

I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just informing that different countries make different decisions on their TZ arrangement based on their priorities, and the arrangement that US has currently is not just some inevitably from geography.

Independent of how many discrete groups we invent, there is a broader range of times of local solar noon in the lower 48 states than in Europe.

So what I mean is that, because integers are easy to work with, and we've arbitrarily settled on 24 hours in a day, and given time zones exist, the number of them in the lower 48 US states (4 plus Arizona's situation) is pretty far from wild. China's decision is much more of a stretch.

Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, also.

Hardly cheating. They are part of the United States.

Apologies, because I was very unclear with my wording. I didn't mean to imply anything about areas outside the lower 48 being "less American", just that the total population outside the lower 48 is such a small fraction of the total. The US has bases and embassies all around the world which are full of people who are just as American as anyone, but if [1] this article is to be believed, over 99% of Americans are in the lower 48.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiguous_United_States

This gets complicated. State versus non-state, incorporated versus unincorporated territories, etc. Hawaii's an easy "yes" answer. American Samoa isn't by several possible definitions.

I'm not disagreeing with you as I write this, but there are many people who act like Hawaii is some kind of obscure appendage instead of being a state just like the other 49 states.

Puerto Rico is as close to a state as it's possible to be without actually being a state.

>> I consider awake to mean from 8AM to 12AM, you are getting at least 8 hours of sleep, right?

Must be nice to be a millionaire who works from home then stays up late every night. Is this Charlie sheen's jingle-writing character from 2 1/2 men? The rest of the working population gets up long before 8am. Work starts at 8am. School starts at 8am. Most people I know, at least those with jobs/kids, set their alarms for 6am. If I were to guess, the working population of the US will generally be awake between 6am and 11pm.

Or come join the military. 0400 is a very common alarm time. I'm at my desk by 0515 most mornings.

Not the millionaire part, but yeah it is nice. I work to live, not live to work, and your military job sounds horrible, so I'll pass :)

Anyone who cannot tolerate getting up a little early is definitely not what the modern military is looking for. But some of us can make that sacrifice in exchange for going home early, taking proper lunch breaks, and getting paid for time spent at the gym. We hand a unit "sports" day last week. Half of my guys chose to go fishing. And, because it is summer, we have an unofficial "stand down" every other week. And good luck finding anyone still at work after noon on friday. Total hours at work is probably far less overall than the majority of civilian jobs.

This isn't a high school, you don't need to try to recruit here :)

Sure but you have to fight made up wars to keep the rich rich and risk your life in the process.

I mean a lot of people work jobs where they wake up late. Waiters, third-shift+ in general. Plus the whole idea of a "9-5" is that you have a 20-30 min commute so you wake up at like 7:30-8 and get yourself ready and get to the office. A lot of people do 10-6 or even later...its pretty common for white collar professionals to keep odd hours, especially if their job gives them a lot of freedom. I don't have kids but even if I did I would try to enroll them in a district that started later, since waking up kids stupidly early is very bad for them.

6a would have been a better default choice.

I'm happy they thought it was important to address why this information is useful (at least to them), only to then not address it at all.

It is generally accepted discussion forums are more tolerable when Americans are asleep, but they probably didn't want to outright state this for obvious reasons.

I'm not taking a stance on this one way or another, but using the context of Reddit? Yah, that's the unspoken part.

> It is generally accepted

Is it, though?

> I consider awake to mean from 8AM to 12PM, you are getting at least 8 hours of sleep, right?

I've seen IRC bots that monitor people's activity to guess at their availability/timezones.

After all, nobody would be on social media during work hours - right? :)

> given that the USA decided that having 4, 9 or 11 timezones — depending on how you count — was completely manageble on their end

Europe has four time zones, same as the Lower 48, if you ignore overseas territories, overseas collectivities, and whatever other remains of the various European empires. Besides, the alternative is to pull a Mainland China, which spread one time zone across enough land to need four or five of them.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, possee comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

I found Google extremely useful for timezone info. You can write something like "what time is it in Detroit, USA When it's 1pm in Sydney, Australia", or "what time is it now in Baghdad" and it will give you the correct answer. No need to be counting hours etc.

As for "are they awake". I'm not sure it is as useful as "are they off work now"?

I feel that most are awake earlier than 8am. I sure don't want to be but jobs tend to force you up before then.

I agree that waking up early is annoying - I was a late riser myself preferring to wake up as late as 10/11AM when younger. After taking a job that required me to wake up at 5:30 in the morning I got used to waking early and started to enjoy it. The part that was beneficial was waking up on my own at 6:30-7AM on the weekends without an alarm and witnessing the quiet sun rise with birds chirping - it's very invigorating. Paired with some light morning exercise it has become a natural antidepressant for me. Now If I wake up past 8AM I feel like I wasted quality morning time.

Maybe it would be useful to use a bell curve for the population of a given time zone between say 5am and 11am, with the max around 8am. This would cover late sleepers and early risers (and people like myself who had to travel from one timezone to another for work and haven't adjusted).

Maybe most of people having regular office hours. But between retirees, unemployed, shift-work, small kids, stay-at-home parents, and other irregular hour lives its probably difficult to say when most people are awake

Since the invention of the lightbulb and most people no longer working in agriculture the sun has lost its place in society. Our schedules have changed. I'm old enough to remember when supermarktets closed at 6 because women didn't have jobs.

Shouldn’t he have said “awake from 08:00 to 23:59 or 00:00,” instead of “08:00 AM to 12:00 PM?”

It's also not unusual to write 24:00 when that's the end time for something.

9am on the west coast and it's still at 54%- pretty sure it's broken

I was so confused with the 8am to 12pm. You mean 8am to 12am :)

It assumes most Americans go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8. What are we, Spaniards?

I've been up since 4:30. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nakty4Qzc1g

Why does this mention Threads of all things.... a week in we're worried about when to post on Threads? Site is DOA without any network effects from hashtags or whatever....

I’m not a Meta fan by any stretch, but calling one of the fastest growing products in human history [1] DOA seems a bit disingenuous, or at least premature.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-twitter-rival-threa...

I find it kind of strange to call Threads DOA, especially from lack of hashtags which haven't been relevant on Twitter for years.

Hashtags coupled with the algorithm are super important to network effects and getting tweets out there beyond just your followers. Connecting community beyond just some follows is important to network spread and also discoverability.

Threads has no discoverability. And endless crap/unrelated accounts being forced on you with no clear way to say you're not interested in them? (why would Mute be the solution to that?) It's DOA.

Fastest growing means little when the accounts were already there.

>And endless crap/unrelated accounts being forced on you with no clear way to say you're not interested in them? (why would Mute be the solution to that?)

This is how discoverability is down now. Hashtags have been a huge red flag on twitter for years.

I've always been a fan of working with Zulu time. I work with people spanning 12 different time zones. If we could all work on GMT or Zulu I would be a lot happier trying to scheduled meetings and deployments. Zero ambiguity, especially considering DST and traveling.

Love single-purpose sites like this. time.is is in a fairly similar vain, and I use it regularly to see/convey time to people.

Usually in the form: '8pm Dallas time' or something like it. Really takes the complication out of DST, especially.

My doctor said I should sleep until I feel rested, there is no arbitrary number.

Doctors say a lot of stupid stuff like "cartilage can't be repaired, it doesn't matter how much sugar you eat for tooth health, lifting weights is bad", etc. The number is 7-9 hours. The funny thing is that if you get 5 regularly, you won't feel tired, you will just be slow, sick a lot, and unable to put on muscle mass.

Speak for yourself - when I get less than 6 hours for more than a few days in a row I am very tired by about 3PM.

I would argue that if you keep that up for a couple of weeks, you will be slow and have all the aforementioned issues, but you won't notice that you are sleep deprived anymore.

The website claims Reddit is banned in some European countries. Which countries?

Not reddit. Threads has chosen not to expand to Europe until they have found out how the "import all your data from Instagram" stuff holds up in court.

He means Threads, which is not released outside the UK

Legitimately useful. As someone working remotely I'm always wary of waking US colleagues up with my unimportant notifications.

I'd definitely use a '% of team members online' Slackbot

If you have notifications configured in a way that wakes you up, that's your fault.

Slack lets you mute notifications.

> I'm always wary of waking US colleagues up with my unimportant notifications

Some notifications are important.

We should have 1 timezone for the entire planet. Having the same time be different times at different spots on earth just makes things more confusing and causes problems. When I coordinate between timezones I don't even use time, I use delta time (for example "The call is happening 22 hours from now").

https://qntm.org/abolish

This isn't how real people talk. These are bug people from outer space. In real life a normal person would just call and the call would go like:

"Hey I was calling for X"

"Oh I'm busy now. You should call back around HH:MM"

"Okay, I'll do that."

> you are getting at least 8 hours of sleep, right?

Lol. No.

Betteridge's law?

This site takes into account that Americans get there 8 hours of sleep though some quick googling revealed that the average American only gets 7 hours and 13 minutes of sleep. Just want to preach to those not getting there 8 hours, getting enough sleep really gives an enormous boost to mood, creativity, productivity and health. Give it a try :-)

I recently started sleeping more and the changes in my life have been unbelievable

I am

- procrastinating less

- having less headaches

- coming up with more creative solutions at work

- being more attentive and present in social interactions

- ACTUALLY FEELING HAPPY AGAIN

I don't know how much of this is placebo, but ever since the corona lockdown started here in Germany, my sleep has been completely messed up. For the last two years, I felt like a zombie, like I was kinda living my life but not really there. I came to a point where I said to myself "I can't remember the last time I was actually happy or enjoyed anything".

So I've been trying to take better care of my health and fitness overall, and sleeping better is one of the thibgs I started doing

I've found that no matter how much I sleep it doesn't affect what people usually report. Last night I was lucky if I had 5 and with 8h+ I feel the same, I do the same.

Yeah, I've had the same experience, I will say I'm slightly more productive at work, but am I about to give up an hour or two of rare leisure time every day to be more productive for my employer when my current performance isn't an issue? No thanks.

Have you tried doing it over a long period of time? I found that my mood and general well-being only started to improve a week after consistently sleeping 8 hours. The effect wasn't instant, and in fact, when I sleep 8 hours after a few days of only sleeping a few hours, I notice that I wake up feeling horrible and very tired

8+ might be too much for you.

My sweet spot is around ~7 hours. Less than 6.5 and more than 8 makes me feel the same, but if I manage to sleep around 7, it's completely a different story.

I drink 3-4 cups of coffee daily, maybe that smooths things out :)

No, it won't, honestly.

I was drinking 2L/day at my peak, while I was sleeping 6 hours a day (Ph.D. corrections). It gives you awakeness, but the not the concentration of a well rested mind.

Nothing replaces sleep, since your brain flushes its toxins through your spine to be expelled from your body.

Sleep is underrated and deprivation of it kills you slowly.

I work way better with half a mug of coffee (a Starbucks tall) and proper sleep than two Ventis and not enough sleep.

> Nothing replaces sleep, since your brain flushes its toxins through your spine to be expelled from your body.

You mean you don't want those delicious Alzheimer's-related beta-amyloid plaques? For shame!

Not everyone's that lucky genetically. I go to bed at the same and I can get out of bed whenever I want and yet I can't get 7 hours let alone 8 hours. And no I'm not the type who can be refreshed with less than 6 hours of sleep (those are the genetically lucky ones).

Sleeping 7 hours instead of 8 gives you ~30 extra waking hours a month. I always get caught up on that, for better or worse.

What good are 30 more hours if they (and the others) are less productive, more irritable, and overall less enjoyable? Why not just sleep 3 hours a night and get 150 more hours every month?

People need different amounts of sleep, and the same person needs different amounts at different times. Just aim to get what you need.

Well one thing people never seem to openly mention is that sleeping that extra hour a night only makes me more productive for my boss, and doesn't really improve my life more than 30 extra hours of doing whatever I want. I don't think, for most people, that single hour of sleep will be the deciding factor of anything

You're the one talking about the job/boss, not me. You can be productive at things at home too!

And sleeping 6 instead of 8 you get ~60 hours. Also, imagine how much time you can save by not going to the gym!

However, not being able to do anything productive at that extra awake hours except being groggy and battling with concentration problems while grinding down your health has no benefits.

So be awake less, do more with less effort, have a longer life.

On average I sleep around 10 hours. I've never felt like I'm missing out, until now perhaps.

Like all things human this is general guidance - people should really find a lifestyle and routine that works best for them.

For example, I have “type 2” “bipolar disorder”. I put those in quotes because the DSM diagnostic criteria doesn’t really match me and that’s the closest diagnosis anyone has come up with.

Anyway, I’ve been able to determine my optimal sleep is six hours of QUALITY sleep. I do roughly one hour of fairly intense exercise daily and when it’s time to sleep I fall asleep nearly instantly - I’m exhausted.

I’ve noticed if I sleep less than six hours consecutive nights I tend to tip towards my version of hypomania. If I sleep more than six hours I tend to tip towards my version of (extreme) depression. This isn’t specific to me with my illness, it’s fairly well known that sleep regulation is one of the best things you can do for these kinds of conditions.

My best routine was when I went to sleep when it was dark and woke up when it was dark. I went to sleep at the same time every night. What was amazing was that I would wake up at the time every morning, within like 10 minutes. Then at the time to sleep, I would be too tired to keep my eyes open. I wish I would have documented this better, but I believe it was close to 8 hours (a little more or a little less.

My thinking was that waking up when there was light, would mess with my sleep. The light might wake me up earlier than I would otherwise, acting as sort of an alarm clock.

It's just hard because it meant that I was sleeping at like 8PM.

Can't you just darken the bedroom, or use a sleep mask?

Could you share your source please? I am getting conflicting results. The recently released American Time Use Survey 2022 [0] has it closer to 9 hours. Those 9 hours also include "naps and spells of sleeplessness."

[0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

I didn't put any effort in my source. I just googled for 'average sleep time Americans' an quoted the featured result. It wasn't really meant as a statement just a silly segue in to telling about the benefits of sleep. Both sources didn't really make it clear whether this is the time sleeping + trying to fall asleep, or actual sleep. I myself unfortunately take a full hour to fall asleep and wake up at 4 for at least another half an hour. Anyway, it is good to include nap-times because these do count towards your total amount of sleep. It doesn't have to be continues.

Yes, but if I stay up late I can mindlessly doomscroll through the dregs of reddit, so who can say which is better, really?

Depending if the amount of sleep has a normal distribution in the USA using the average instead of the median skews the results.

Their 8 hours...

"8AM to 12 PM" think you mean 12 AM unless you go to bed at lunch :)

If it's meant for Europeans just use 24h time. 00:00 to 8:00.

* 8:00 to 24:00 (or 8:00 to 0:00)

There is no 24:00. It goes from 23:59 to 00:00

Of course there is. Just because it doesn't appear on common clocks doesn't mean it isn't a valid time. To quote page 15 of ISO 8601:2004 (the newest version available on libgen):

> hour is represented by two digits from [00] to [24]. The representation of the hour by [24] is only allowed to indicate the end of a calendar day

And Page 17:

> NOTE 1 Midnight will normally be represented as [00:00] or [24:00].

> NOTE 2 The end of one calendar day [24:00] coincides with [00:00] at the start of the next calendar day, e.g. [24:00] on 12 April 1985 is the same as [00:00] on 13 April 1985. If there is no association with a date or a time interval both a) and b) represent the same local time in the 24-hour timekeeping system.

> NOTE 3 The choice of representation a) or b) will depend upon any association with a date, or a time interval. Representations where [hh] has the value [24] are only preferred to represent the end of a time interval in accordance with 4.4 or recurring time interval in accordance with 4.5

Note 3 is just wrong. 00:00 is the start of the next day. Otherwise, your previous day would now be 24hours + 1second. "representations" is just allowing people to do things incorrectly and having everyone else accept them.

It's not an extra second, a clock might go 23:59:59 - 00:00:00 - 00:00:01 or 23:59:59 - 24:00:00 - 00:00:01. Both are equivalent and have the same meaning, with the only difference that 00:00:00 belongs to the new day and 24:00:00 belongs to the old day (despite both being the exact same moment in time). Of course clocks choose the former for simplicity, but for stating the end of an interval 24:00 can be clearer and preferred.

24:00 has no duration, it's only an instant in time. The same could be said about 11:34 of course, as long as you assume 11:34 to mean 11:34:00.0000000000000000000000 and not the interval from 11:34 to just before 11:35.

Not that it's the same thing, but have you ever seen Japanese TV schedules? They go up to 26:30 and beyond regularly. I think this stuff's pretty arbitrary, at best.

If you're awake from 00:00 to 8:00, you're probably a vampire ;)

Also known as "being on night call"

Even then, you don't usually sleep 16 hours a day…

Meanwhile Americans have no equivalent website for 'Are Europeans asleep yet?"

Because they don't care.

They do! They can hide their cookie banners and not get caught.

Scheduling meetings with Americans tend to get a little worse than expected, because they apparently think 9 - 17:00 is when you should be working, and not 8 - 16:00. So rather than having an afternoon meeting, you get to have a late afternoon meeting.

I think I can find more people in Denmark working 7 - 15:00 compared to 9 - 17:00.

West Coast American here. Since I have to work with so many people from Europe, Israel, India, etc., my calendar looks like an impacted colon from about 8:00 AM PST to 11:00 AM PST, then I have all this free time after that to do "work". The problem is that erases things like "I'm going to hit the gym in the morning" and "I'm going to get this document polished up before the first meeting of the day". And when 11:00 finally rolls around, I already have decision fatigue and have burned up the most useful of my braincells for the day, so everything else suffers.

This is absolutely not to say "Europe Bad", it's just a lament that as a diurnal species, time zone issues suck.

No no I can absolutely relate, it works the same the other way around. Once that 18:00 meeting rolls in my head is done, but it frequently becomes a question of whether or not I'm mildly inconvenienced in the late afternoon, early evening, or if my American colleagues are massively inconvenienced in the morning. In that case it's normally better that I just jump on that meeting from home.

It's the same questions. Europeans rise when the American's do so they can be online at the same time.

My phone has that weird habit of going into silent mode in the night.

A more refined website would ask: Is the US East Coast Awake? Is the US West Coast awake? An even more refined website would ask: Is it East Coast Rush hour now? Is it West Coast Rush hour now?

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