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Comment by keybored | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I have to say the north of Europe is bad folks. Winters are terrible. You just go to work/school in the dark and come home in the dark. There’s also less snow now than twenty years ago which means even less light.

In the summer it’s light outside for more hours than you are awake. Okay wow, so what? It’s a nice novelty. But it doesn’t make up for it. Not remotely.

Midsummer is a sad time because now I know that I will lose X minutes every day of light.

Using DST is just the extra bit of small cruelty on top of that.

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DST only really makes any sense at mid-latitudes. If you go close enough to the poles it just seems silly to move around that hour - does it really matter if the sun is up from 2 AM to 10 PM or from 3 AM to 11 PM?

DST is completely silly as far north as the Nordics. The rate of change in daylight is so rapid around the equinoxes, that the effects of DST are erased in less than two weeks. It's completely useless.

Screw half measures like DST, as an office worker I have a dream of working in winter from 16:00 till 24:00, sleeping from 01:00 till 09:00 and enjoying my sunlight for the rest of the day. I would fit right in working remotely for a company somewhere in the Far East.

Of course, the worst part is that often in winter we don't get sunlight at all, only a gray-ish cover of clouds in the sky :(

I’m in the Netherlands (around 52ºN) and in my opinion DST is counter productive, especially considering the effects of global warming.

Summers are getting hot, to the point where it’s uncomfortable to be outside while the sun is out. It’s barely tolerable in the shade, assuming you don’t move too much. It only gets comfortable outdoors after sunset. During workweeks this means you barely have any usable outdoor time before you need to go to sleep. It also means your bedroom has little chance to cool down before you need to go to bed. Summer nights are nice when you’re outdoors, but DST robs us of the best hours to be outside.

If we’re going to move the clock in summer, we should move it backwards another hour. It would mean 2 more hours (compared to the current DST) of nice summer nights, instead of extra hours of scorching sunlight. I suggest we call it ‘Moonlight Saving Time’.

I see the problem differently, although in a useless way.

The shortest day still has 7-8 hours of daylight. There's no shortage of daylight, we have too much work.

Shortest day where I currently live has 5h49min of daylight. My childhood home had full month of no daylight. You definitely have shortage of daylight as you move towards poles.

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