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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

Daylight savings and time zone shenanigans are among the most pointless and frustrating intrusions of government fiat into software. Even if you mitigate the complications by converting internal representation to vanilla UTC and epoch time, you still have to deal with the fact that many clients are a complete mess when it comes to correctly communicating the intended time.

The cost of dealing with this greatly exceeds whatever marginal value is hypothetically being realized by adjusting the clock every several months. If there was a global standard for how this is handled it would be one thing but in practice the adjustment of clocks is arbitrary and somewhat random by country. It is a waste of resources.

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Depending on how far north (or south) you live, daylight saving is arguably worth the hassle.

Where I live, in winter, without daylight saving it would be dark until 9.30am or after in the mornings, meaning all the kids need to go to school in the dark, which is more dangerous.

Then at the peak of summer, it would probably still be daylight until close to midnight.

The closer you are to the equator, the less swing there is between the number of hours of daylight between summer and winter. Even between the very north of the UK and the very south there is an appreciable difference.

Being from the very far north of the UK mainland the changes in time were always welcome. We still went to school when it was cold and rainy but at least it wasn't dark (though it was on the return trip). In the summer being able to play outside until 10.30pm was awesome.

I wonder what the psychological differences would be if daylight saving was abandoned and whether there might be a real economic impact. I spent quite a bit of time up in the Pacific NW of the USA and a sunny day in February lifted everybodies spirits. I hesitate to say that the work that got done was better but certainly the mood at work was a lot more congenial.

If you live up north, adjust the local schedule instead of the clocks. If kids are waiting in the dark, move the start time to later in the day. If it is light out at midnight shift your schedule so you go to sleep after 12:00am. If you are living your life based on the position of the sun, the numbers on the clock are going to mean something a little bit different everyday anyway.

Time is supposed to have a relatively consistent meaning, and we jump through a lot of hoops to give it an inconsistent meaning. Schedules are much more fluid and easy to change with little external side-effects.

People will need to learn to partially decouple their routine from the numbers on the clock, but that seems like a much simpler/cheaper problem to solve than our current time mess.

Can you imagine how much more difficult that would be to program for? Instead of (relatively) easy to parse timezone rules you have some kind of awful, locale specific agreement that that event you scheduled for 9am monday every week would actually occur at 8am half of the year?

I'm not sure if you are serious, but I don't understand what you think would be involved. If you remove the time inconsistencies from a calendar, any decent calendaring app will solve the scheduling problem you are left with. Scheduling is a data entry problem. It is a problem we have with or without timezones and dst changes.

That would be ideal, if everyone worked on GMT and just started work at different times, rather than the same time in a different timezone.

Technically we could all do that now anyway, just start using GMT rather than our local timezone :)

We actually used to do this at school, where in the winter we moved sports to be after lunch and then had afternoon lessions at night.

We basically had a summer and winter timetable.

I don't think the total time spent by developers dealing with Daylight savings time comes anywhere near the time spent by people adjusting their clocks. Assuming there is a minor benefit per person there are 7 BILLION people and it adds up.

If, 1 billion people spent on average 10 minutes 2 times a year for 50 years ~1.9 million man years was spent adjusting clocks.

For one developer that thinks this is a bad thing, there are multiple millions of people that benefit from DST. Is it pain in the ass? Of course! Is it still necessary? Yes, in places outside the industrial world.

The governments could do a better job of keepung things predictable, but overall it is easier to teach a very small percentage of (hopefully) intelligent developers to deal with the complexity, than the uneducated masses.

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