Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here's a Simple Plan to Fix It | Hacker News Reader

Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here's a Simple Plan to Fix It

theatlantic.com

79 pointschaz79 comments

Am I the only one that likes DST? I think that it has important function of enabling socializing and nightlife in the northern hemisphere.

I was never bothered by it. The switch requires day or two at most. And because certain hours are ingrained in the society fabric as late or early it is just not possible to achieve the same effect with mandating transport and businesses to shift an hour early/late.

It works a bit like central bank monetary policy - it is easier to devalue/strengthen the currency than to renegotiate a few billion contracts.

So it is better to shift the time an hour to have a better utilization of the workday than to have all of the time arrangements changes.

In the summer there is a lot of light that goes underutilized on 9 to 5 workday, but in the winter it is bad for people to start working while dark-ish outside.

if we want to remove DST we have to get rid of 9 to 5 workday. Good luck with that.

Why is it bad to start working while it's dark outside? The problem I have with DST isn't the summer time, but the "normal time". It just doesn't make any sense to me that it's light at 7am and dark at 5pm when you're working from 9 to 5. To enjoy any sunlight during the day you'd have to wake up way early.

This is it, I want to enjoy the sunlight in my free time, not use it all up while I'm commuting and working. A couple of hours of sunlight after I finish working would improve my experience of winter immeasurably.

I am probably part of the minority, but I actually quite like DST: you get to sit outside longer on warm summer nights, and winter days are balanced too. Since that is about the only thing where I feel that DST effects me, I'm really ok with it.

I don't see what the numbers displayed on a clockface have to do with this. Can't you sit outside whenever you like, regardless of the hour number?

No, because working schedules are based on the clock face.

Can you ask your employer to shift the schedule?

Also ask your friends' employers, the restaurants, the fast food joints, the public parks ...

If only there were some mechanism we could use to get everyone to change their schedules at the same time.

Perhaps that mechanism could work by waking up at a different time, instead of changing the time, which causes trouble for those who do not change with you.

I'm Canadian and for me DST is pure hell. Imagine not being able to see the sun either in the morning while you jog before work, or in the evening while you walk home. That is my December, and that is in Toronto, it is even worse in Ottawa. I have one Turkish grandparent and the rest north-western european so it's not even that bad for me compared with say a Jamaican, but combined with the interruption to my internal clock (which is normally very accurate) it really pisses me off.

December is during the regular, non-DST period, though. DST is March-October. So if you don't like the time of sunrise/sunset in December, it can't be DST's fault!

One solution could be to standardize in the other direction: instead of abolishing DST, go to year-round DST, i.e. year-round offset of ~1hr between solar time and clock time.

Ah, you are correct! I keep forgetting that because I think the summer time standard is way better! Who needs sunrise earlier than 6 am?

This is what Saskatchewan did when they got rid of DST.

Oh, come on. You choose to live so far from the Equator, short days are a consequence of that.

Come on up here to the Yukon if you want to see what it's all about.

Here, here. I rejoiced when they pushed the switching times to nov/march. For several years I refused to change my clocks from DST, and just kept living on that time. It was easy enough to do that at work at the time.

Well, here comes 4 months of living in the dark. How depressing.

Why couldn't you just get up earlier (or later) on your own?

> Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour.

I find it hard to take this solution seriously when they can't even get the basic facts right. I'm sure this is some kind of argumentative fallicy but Australia's DST started in October and we put our clocks forward one hour, because we're in the Southern Hemisphere and heading in to summer. This semi-makes the article's point about confusion... but really computers have fixed all that confusion for me anyway.

Europe also changed in October. Not sure why the article claims November 3 "set[s] off an annual ritual" in 78 countries, when most have already changed, unless it's journalistic license in an article only targeted at Americans.

Humans program the computers, though, so the computers can't remove the confusion in places where the human government changes the rules a handful of days before a transition time. For example, this happens every year in Morocco. The entire country must update all their computers manually -- I don't see any way all devices could have correct tzdata in time for the transitions.

Hah, my first thought is "humans also make the government" and I know which one I'd optimize first... sorry about the snark though.

This is just the worst of both worlds. Some people are getting up when it's pitch black out for 3 hours part of the year. Some people are getting home 3 hours after sunset part of the year. Two time zones is not fixing anything, it's still sucky part of the time and you still have to know what time zone someone is in to know how to relate to their meeting invitations.

Yes, DST is annoying. But changing to two time zones? How is that better than 4? If you're going to do it, there's really only two ways to do it - either the way we have it now, where everyone can get up at 7am and have it be reasonably light out most of the time.... or have one global time and people might have to get up at 1500, because that's when the sun rises (note that AM and PM would lose meaning, which is also a good thing).

As a developer who has worked on programs that have to deal with time and days.... this would be awesome. As a developer that has international meetings every single workday... this would be awesome. Right now, when we want to move a meeting, we can't say "we're going to move the meeting to 11am" we say "we're going to move the meeting 2 hours later".... because the people at the meeting are in 4 different time zones. It's a pain in the butt.

Note, it's not just about meetings between two time zones, meetings between N time zones is horrendous with the current system.

Now everyone complains they won't know when shops are open... how do you know now? The shop could be open from 6am to 3pm (common for downtown Boston restaraunts that don't do dinner) or 9am to 5pm, or 11am to 10pm (common for restaraunts that don't do breakfast)... etc etc. So, yes, each place would need to define their own working hours, and yes, you'd have to look them up. Big deal. You already do.

>But changing to two time zones? How is that better than 4?

Jet lag for one thing. Flying from LA to NYC currently sets you back three hours. It will wreck your sleep schedule and leave you tired for three days. Change to two time zones, and it will set you back one hour instead, which is essentially the same effect DST has. You might be slightly tired, but you'll recover within a day.

Another benefit is communication. Communicating with people in different time zones is a pain, and the more time zones between you, the worse it is. With only one hour between them, you greatly increase the overlap of when people on different sides of the country are able to communicate.

If you want to propose a solution to the problem, why not have everyone adopt UTC? Every programmer who has ever dealt with time deltas will give you a big hug.

That's called optimizing for the 5% use case at the expense of the 95%. I don't really want to get rid of time zones for the rare instances when I need to schedule transatlantic meetings at the expense of having no fucking idea what time shops are supposed to be open or that people are supposed to be at work without either reconstructing the time zone in my head anyway or keeping a massive table of local custom by region. If I fly to London and look at my phone (which compensates for time zones) and it says it's 1300, I figure it will be similar to 1300 at home in many ways: late but not too late for lunch, during normal working hours, and most everything is probably open. If I'm used to 2100 being that time of day, I am going to fly to London and see that it's 1300 and have no fucking idea what that means, except that back home I would probably be sleeping and thank you very much for that subtle psychological reinforcement of my jet lag, you've ruined my day just because you're a lazy programmer who doesn't want to worry about time zone conversions.

If you fly to Madrid and look at your phone you're still going to need that massive table of local custom by region, or you're going to be utterly baffled when most shops start closing at 13:30 and then reopen in early evening, and the restaurants are all closed at 18:00.

There's no shortage of international differences in opening hours, days and times and time-zones don't really get you very far towards understanding them.

But I would have to know that about Madrid either way. It would at least help to know when those times are relative to the local day cycle.

Time zones give me a few bits of information and knowing about local customs gives me the other bits, but the bits that are encoded in the time zone are bits I can ignore as soon as I change my clock, just as setting your zero helps you work out a physics problem. Instead you want me to worry about all the bits all the time. Why, to make it easier for computers? I thought computers were better than me at handling bits.

"If I fly to London and look at my phone (which compensates for time zones) and it says it's 1300, I figure it will be similar to 1300 at home in many ways: late but not too late for lunch, during normal working hours, and most everything is probably open."

Realize that you're on HN, where I've heard long arguments about why your laptop and/or phone should not adjust the timezone of the device based on location. People who argue with a straight face that "the vast majority of people want their laptop to display their home time when abroad".

It's rare that you have transatlantic meetings, but you fly abroad so often that you can't keep track of when the shops open? (your phone could compensate for that). Do you also flip the fuck out when you fly to Australia and it's goddamn Summer in January?

It would be confusing having the day change in the middle of the afternoon. I'd get to work on Monday but leave on Tuesday. If I told someone I'd do something on Wednesday, what would that mean? All the solutions I can think of are complex, thus negating the benefit of switching to UTC.

I like the "Zulu time" system used by pilots and the military. A time like 12:30 is understood to be local time, while 0730Z is unambiguously UTC.

It's only confusing because it's different from what you've been doing your entire life. The solution (hypothetically, as this will never happen in our lifetime) is a different paradigm. You could say, "I'll get that to you by COB Wednesday", and it's understood by custom that "Wednesday" means "the workday that began on Wednesday". But more likely is that you'd say, "it'll be on your desk by 06:00 on the fourth." Speech patterns would adjust.

> Speech patterns would adjust.

It isn't even hypothetical. The speech patterns of all English speakers who spend a significant amount of midnights awake have adjusted precisely like that.

There was a lovely looped animation of the world's online activity over the course of 24 hours. Can't find it right now, but I'm pretty sure it was on HN. It really exemplified how daytime no longer relates so much to the presence of the sun in the sky as it does to the level of physical alertness and electronic communication. High noon is more like the median longitude of human and network I/O than it is solar noon.

Swatch Internet Time (1998): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

How would that help? It would just make things worse.

Now instead of knowing your local business is likely to be open from 9 to 5, you have to look up the conversion factor for wherever you are.

Unless you also propose people go to sleep at the same time throughout the whole world.

Well you need to know what timezone you are in and change all your clocks anyway ... And nothing prevents you from changing your clock to the old local-time-zone.

I spent a year and a half working on a calendar application and timezones were by far the most complicated part of the application.

I agree that a lot of things would be easier it everyone used UTC without timezones. In England you might go to work at 09:00, while someone in California might go to work at 01:00.

When you setup a meeting, you would just need to say, "The meeting is at 04:00", which might be mid-day for California and really freaking early for London, but everyone would know that right away without doing any offset calculations.

Actually, this is a fabulous idea! Today people must communicate time+zone to understand when an event will occur, unless people are assuming the local timezone. The thing is, little business is just local now. Think about the process for scheduling meetings between coastal groups, time+zone information must always be communicated.

I suspect all the time zones are really costing us more work than than they benefit us.

Actually, I'd say that most business is still local. And making everyone wildly redefine what their even most simple definition of what a calendar day is doesn't seem to be useful.

I suspect the number of people who share the perspective of programmers working across international teams is a lot smaller than the programmers think.

Ever hear of someone missing a meeting because it was scheduled for 2:00EST and they thought it was 2:00PST? Ever see an email from an employer, or hear the news reminding you to change your clock this weekend? It's not a programming problem, programmers are just more keenly aware of it.

And it's not really a "problem" at all. Just an idiosyncrasy. Like imperial units.

I think a much better idea would be to give UTC time in addition to local time as a standard practice. That way everyone only needs to memorise their own offset, instead of looking up what a particular acronym means every time they need to. (And probably forgetting, if they don't do it that often).

A lot of clocks are smart enough to change everyday. You could have 6am at sunrise the whole year.

totally agree with that. I'd say one of the main reasons it hasn't happened is there are way too many software/operating system patches to roll out and would cause way too much chaos.

Any software that supports timezones, already supports the UTC. You just have to tell it to use a 0 tz offset.

I suspect, it is more of a wetware problem.

> Frequent travel between the coasts causes jet lag, robbing employees of productive work time. With a one-hour time difference, bi-costal travel would become almost effortless.

Jet lag is caused by traveling significant distances east or west at angular speeds moderately close to the earth's angular rotation speed; you'll see the sun rise or set quite a bit sooner or later than your circadian clock would've expected.

The unexpectedness of whatever time the wall clock at your new location tells is only a side-effect. Tinkering with the clock will not make the jet lag go away.

Really? I thought jet lag was based on your sleeping hours, not the sunlight hours. Does that mean I can get jet lag just by opening or closing a set of effective bedroom window blinds?

As someone who has worked alternating day/night shifts for several years, I can anecdotally say that going to Amsterdam a few weeks ago from SF completely and utterly kicked my ass, and then getting back was worse. Much worse than alternating day/night shifts in the same week. I was not nearly expecting anything like that.

> Really? I thought jet lag was based on your sleeping hours, not the sunlight hours.

But sleeping is a daily thing, and the day is based on the rhythm of the earth going round the sun. There's more to it than just missing some sleep (or getting some extra).

> Does that mean I can get jet lag just by opening or closing a set of effective bedroom window blinds?

1) No. Because closing the curtains does not make the sun go down. Next time you open them, the sun will still be behaving according to your mind's schedule (Assuming you weren't on a plane when you closed the curtains).

2) Yes. The above is not completely accurate. If you live in the dark (or with red light only) your day rhythm will drift by +1 hour each day. Do that for a week, come out of your cave, and you'll have a jet lag (without having flown).

The article claims to fix DST but only offers a solution for the US. That's uncharacteristically insular for The Atlantic.

We had a bill to fix the summer time problem in the UK. Actually they weren't going to eliminate the time change they were just going to move to European time (GMT+1), but that would have been almost as good.

Unfortunately some stupid Scottish MPs filibustered it (I didn't even know that was possible here). Now I work in an effectively windowless office and only see the sun for half an hour each day. :(

Yes. We should change summer time because you work in an "effectively windowless office".

Its not only done for reasons of energy efficiency; I'm sure theres UK research that says less children die in road accidents as they are going to school when it's light, not when its dark. About to run out so can't look up reference now.

Also the author goes on about people commuting or arranging meetings across time zones and how annoying it is for them. I get that, but I think actually the vast majority of ppl almost never do that.

From the previous article linked on HN:

> Downing's research also suggests that studies of increased traffic accidents and injuries, which variously support or condemn the practice of daylight saving time, don't really show enough of a difference to be statistically significant in a nation where more than 30,000 people are killed in traffic accidents each year.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131101-when-...

By your argument, DST should be suppressed entirely.

If there are less accidents going to school during the day, then the switch in March to DST means that in many places people will go to school when it's still dark, which sucks..

In many places, people go to school/work when it's dark regardless of whether DST is in effect or not.

I would also wager that the risk of being hit by a jetlagged, drowsy driver offsets any dubious benefit changing the time twice a year might have.

I always enjoyed this video to show how crazy DST is! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84aWtseb2-4

There is nothing simple about this plan. Here's a simple plan to fix DST: stop observing it.

Time zones solve a different problem than DST. Abolishing one shouldn't affect the other.

Well I agree with you. And I don't get why people want to overcomplicate this thing. People suggesting fewer time zones or even a single timezone (like UTC) in response to DST issues are just making it less likely to ever get rid of DST. When there are too many options, it confuses the issue.

Here's one change which will harm nobody:

Make DST chances apply on the same day everywhere in the world.

This will solve most of the troubles with scheduling international conferences and international flight schedules. There would be summer schedule and one winter schedule, and that's it.

First, get what can can be achieved easily. Then push for more radical changes.

Edit: Also stop the spring clock change from being on Sundays. That's just dumb.

Due to how the sun revolves around the earth once a day time is very much about where that unshielded nucular reactor, as pushed by angels, is in the sky. With time zones we have a huge approximation of where that is, unless you live in Greenwich then you can be pretty certain that the glowing thing is not directly above your head at noon. So time zones are a compromise.

Given that everyone has a smartphone these days (well, the people that matter), why can't we go back to the pre-railways 'sundial time' and have always accurate, infinitely variable time? For instance, move across the room and the time will be ever so slightly different?

We could then have UTC more widely recognised and used for international importanty stuff. Obviously we would also have to get the phrase 'Greenwich Mean Time' to be used instead of this faceless 'UTC' mnemonic.

With this system there would be a lot more small talk chit chat about time, you could plausibly arrive a minute or two late and 'not realise the time'. Time could be vague yet oddly accurate at the same time. It would be a whole lot of fun.

Moving to this new 'n' zany system of timekeeping could be easy. All the scientific and computing community are on UTC already so there would be no change for them. A little deal could be done by the smartphone makers so that the default time shown was 'sundial time', auto updated by GPS, wifi or other geolocation. UTC could also be shown side by side, prominently so you could easily get the time in either system depending on your need. A special app, not installed by default, could then show retro 'timezone' time after you clicked through a few dozen menus. Obviously this would be laden with skuomorphic design but functional if you really wanted this legacy time system.

Seriously, the only thing more painful for me this week than reading this comment, was signing up to reply. Between three and sixteen letters my ass!

> Given that everyone has a smartphone these days (well, the people that matter)

Really? The only people that matter are those with cell phones? When I was growing up, and even last night, I was told by local news to set my clock back an hour. They've actually been telling me since Friday night, which is great because I rarely watch the news and don't subscribe to cable.

Yes, I have a cell phone, and yes it's a smartphone of a recent generation, and no I don't like it that much.

> With this system there would be a lot more small talk chit chat about time, you could plausibly arrive a minute or two late and 'not realise the time'. Time could be vague yet oddly accurate at the same time. It would be a whole lot of fun.

Great! I'll be in Belgium this week. Standup at the normal time?

>The only people that matter are those with cell phones?

People in the poorest countries in the world have cell phones... so yes, you can assume a cell phone.

Assuming a cell phone and indicating that only people with a cell phone are important are two different things.

And your cell phone doesn't tell you it changed times, it just changes it for itself.

>Assuming a cell phone and indicating that only people with a cell phone are important are two different things.

And the original post was the former, so it all works out.

>And your cell phone doesn't tell you it changed times

Is that needed? Well it's easy enough to add that feature.

I retract my earlier comment about the most painful thing I've read this week.

Well I am glad that I have managed to get someone to sign up and contribute!

I do enjoy writing with my tongue firmly in my cheek when a story is either a 'first world problem' or if it has been discussed to death many times already. Hopefully I brighten someone's day, even if scores of others mod me down!

Anyway, welcome from lurkerdom to contributordom!

Australian summers are a great way to experience the advantage of DST (though obviously only some states choose to do it). Even the early hours of the morning are bright and warm, and enjoying dinner with the sun setting late into the evening adds such a lovely ambience. I think, here at least, it does more good for our culture (tourism and the like), than any other reason.

I'll never understand DST. Why On Earth change every clock in the country (and inthe process create bizarre things like missing hours and redundant hours) twice a year when we could simply change working hours and habits?

Okay, so today the bank opens at 8:30. Tomorrow it opens at 8:31. The day after that, 8:32. (or whatever, I'm sure my numbers don't match the progression of day/night cycles exactly).

That's why.

Ya, sure, I'm being silly, you say. But when do we shift, how many different opening times should shop have, is each place going to do it differently or will it all be legislated (good luck with that)? It would be a nightmare of logistics. "The babysitter needs to start leaving at 4 because her evening job just shifted time, but we aren't shifting for another two weeks, leaving the baby unattended...."

DST is already enforced by law, so enforcing a different system shouldn't be too complicated...

Wouldn't it be easier to change what time you go to work than to change the clocks?

I for one think the entire world should switch to one time zone...

Switching efforts are painless, so I would ditch DST in a moment.

Timezones, on the other hand, make more sense (it allows all businesses start at the same nominal time in all time zones).

However for me personally (as owner of a business that runs accross multiple time zones and as a person living on Internet), the most convenient would be to give up time zones too and use UTC only.

I like the late hours of sun you get with DST, but I don't like switching. I'd be happy with a permanent change to DST. I don't understand the desire to have it get dark before 5:00PM in the winter.

I complained about changing the clocks an hour twice a year.

A friend agreed. But he suggested that it would be less disruptful to the human circadian rhythm to change the clocks by 10 minutes every month.

I'm pretty sure he was joking...

I just wish it was always light at 6PM when we go home. As soon as we go back an hour and it's dark at 5PM, it's like no-one can drive anymore.

I might have dreamt this but I thought daylight saving in the UK was also a 'safety' aspect for children going to and from school.

This is interesting though I'd be curious if diverging from solar time would be as easy as the author claims.

Nah. People mostly live offline and have to interact with people in their community and region.

why is it "on" in the summer (for northern hemisphere)? I'd think we'd want to 'save' daylight for the days. There's no need to 'save' it in the summer - there's already plenty.

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