Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

For northern states it almost doesn't matter, the latitude completely dominates the length of the day.

However I am irked at 'noon' being so far from solar noon year round, that's about the only solid reason to go back to 'standard' time so that at least in the median of timezones that time is approximately the same.

Southern states? Just let people work 8-4 instead of 9-5. This problem is entirely manufactured by trying to change the ruler rather than the prescribed mark points on it.

View on HN

I live in Montana and would very much prefer to keep DST permanent because it means that I come home from work with light. Currently in deep winter when we are on standard time I get up and it's dark and go home and it's dark.

Light at the end of the day is useful to me because I can go for a walk around dinner, I don't care so much about it being light in the mornings when I'm getting ready for my day.

So I think making DST permanent for northern states would be a good thing.

The counterargument is that morning needs light more than evening because morning schedules are more synchronized than evening schedules and morning road conditions tend to be worse than evening road conditions.

So in the morning you've got the highest concentration of cars plus you've got kids walking or biking to school.

The school day is shorter than the work day so coming home the kids don't overlap with the workers. There is more time variation in when people leave work when they arrive, and many will do errands between living and driving home, so the cars are less concentrated.

Morning also has a higher chance of having worse road conditions. In the evening there is a chance the sun has melted ice patches that formed overnight. There's a chance that the day's traffic has cleared some paths in snow.

Back when I worked an office IT job, one year I asked my boss if I could come in an hour earlier in the winter (and leave an hour earlier after work). I had evening chores to do with my animals on the farm, and I needed the daylight after work.

What no one knew was that I just kept my watch on Daylight Savings Time and lived happily ever after. It was glorious. I saw my coworkers struggle with "jetlag" when the switch to Standard Time occurred, and when it went forward again. But I never switched. I kept that up for three years, and I highly recommend it. (I also got a tonne of work done in the hour before everyone else arrived to work.)

I'm irked in general by the lack of attention given to solar time. If I ever get into Android hacking, it'll be so I can replace the system statusbar clock with a solar one.

I made a CLI utility that prints percent through the solar day/night that people might find useful: https://github.com/riley-martine/sundial

I'm somewhat puzzled why so much attention is given to solar time. Why is it so important to have 12:00 be noon and match the time of day the sun is at its peak?

I'd much rather use UTC everywhere and eliminate daylight saving time. Because I'm currently UTC-5, it means the average workday would be 13:00 to 22:00, and noon becomes 17:00, but that seems no less arbitrary than 08:00 to 17:00 and 12:00, respectively.

Local noon (when the sun crosses the local meridian) orients us in time and in space. In time, because it marks the day being half-over. In space, because you can use solar alignment to lay out buildings and other structures in a north-south direction, or simply to navigate your locale.

It signifies a good time to eat lunch and the proper direction to orient your belly for an afternoon nap in the sun. :)

One of my screens at work is a full-screen UTC clock with seconds. But I added the solar altitude (in degrees) to the bottom of the display, just so I could easily track how close I am to sunrise or sunset. Solar azimuth would be more clock-like and make it obvious when the sun was culminating, but there's lots you can do when you program your own dashboards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com