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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people hate standard time in winter because the sun sets at 4 or 5, and they want the sun to instead set at 8 or 9 like it does in summer. DST in winter doesn't actually give you the 8 or 9 sunset, it gives you a 5 or 6 sunset (which doesn't get you all that much) combined with moving your sunrise to 8 or 9, which causes its own set of issues most people don't think about.

The last time we went to year-round DST, we stopped almost immediately because people experienced what winter DST was actually like and went "wait, this sucks."

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Obviously(/s) the solution is to change to a sunset centered day. new day starts at sunset so people can get up late and enjoy the maxim number of daylight hours.

I always find it strange how particular people are about the numbers attached a purely astronomical phenomena(myself included, but I am pretty hard in the "let the sun figure it out camp"). If they want more "daylight" hours then get up at a time to enjoy them. But people would rather bend over backwards fiddling with the numbers as if that is going to change how long a day is.

I think that midnight should be around current 4AM because that's the brief moment when party people already sleep and work people aren't awake yet.

Does the night belong to the day it follows or the day it precedes?

Does it become Friday at dawn, at sunset, at noon, or at midnight?

This is all convention and not something that can be decided objectively.

The new day ought to begin at the darkest hour. Opposite of high noon. Which is apparently called 'solar midnight'.

The problem is that work does its best to capture all of my daylight hours.

No, I hate standard time, because in winter the sun sets at 4 or 5, when it could set at 5 or 6, i.e. daylight when leaving work.

I do not care if the sun is up as I shuffle groggily into the building. I don't think I'm alone.

You are not alone according to polling in BC.

I think fundamentally it comes down to energy for me. I have very little energy in the morning so I am not going to harness the pre-work daylight hours to do something outside like taking my dog to the park, biking, or running. For me I don’t actually start feeling energized until maybe 9-10AM.

After work however, I have much more energy to do things outside with the daylight.

Right, but one problem is that people with kids do care a lot that they're going to school in the dark.

> which doesn't get you all that much

After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.

I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.

I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.

I live in Atlanta (western edge of US Eastern time) and permanent DST sounds horrible - the sun would rise at 8:45 in early January. Honestly I'd prefer we be on permanent standard time. Call it permanent Central Daylight Time if you must.

On the other hand, I used to live in Boston (eastern edge of US Eastern time) and those 4:15 sunsets were pretty depressing. Permanent DST sounds reasonable there.

The main driver of people wanting year round DST is so they can have sunlight after work in the winter. Those late sunsets in the summer are awesome too though.

Despite all this I am a permanent DST fan. However I’ll be happy with permanent anything over the current madness

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