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Comment by broodbucket | Hacker News Reader

Daylight Savings is nothing but a frustration nowadays, especially in Australia where a) our DST does not quite align with the switchover in the US, but only by a couple of days, and b) out of the four states on the east coast time zone, one of them does not use DST which makes things more confusing.

On a side note, the title reminds me of a similarly interesting bug in OpenOffice.org: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

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> Daylight Savings is nothing but a frustration nowadays, especially in Australia

Except for you know, when it's still light at 7.30pm.

I like light evenings in the summer and am prepared to accept a little complexity as a tradeoff.

People say this, but what's stopping you from going out at 6:30 instead?

And didn't Australia do some last minute DST nonsense like a Latam country, versus planning far ahead?

I never liked the argument that DST gives you a consistent sunrise and sunset time, because it can't. DST can't extend the amount of daylight for obvious reasons.

It's rather like redefining the metre so that everyone is 2 metres tall - you're adding a lot of complexity for not a lot of consistency.

Who makes that argument? Daylight savings doesn't give you consistent sunrise/sunsets.

For example, in Melbourne, Australia, in the winter it will be dark by around 5:30pm. In the summer it gets dark by around 8:30pm. I like having inconsistent sunrise and sunset times (e.g. extra daylight time in the evenings in the summer).

Neither do I think daylight savings extends the amount of daylight. What it does is shift the typical working day so that by the end of it, there are still a few more hours of daylight left. That's what I like about.

That's all well and good, however I don't think it comes close to justifying the complexity.

Ironically, removing it now would only add to the complexity.

> but what's stopping you from going out at 6:30 instead?

It's not about going out, it's just nice still having a few hours of daylight in the early evenings after I've finished work.

...come into work earlier, leave work earlier. It's just an hour.

I sometimes think that people on HN live in this artificial bubble where everyone has same arrangements as programmers or work in startups. There is plenty of posts like yours, or "why don't you just work from home a couple days a week?". Most people work fixed schedules, they can't "go home an hour earlier".

I do live in a bubble. That said, it seems to me that there's nothing stopping, say, a factory, from saying "well now, why don't y'all come in at 730am so you can get home earlier". Seems more elegant than changing your UTC offset, especially if you actually use local time for anything, as now you've gotta account for 25 and 23 hour days.

I guess if a business is in the past where screwing around with the clocks at nighttime is unnoticeable, maybe it's an acceptable solution. But in 2015, DST seems as bad as leap seconds. Perhaps even worse.

>here's nothing stopping, say, a factory, from saying "well now, why don't y'all come in at 730am so you can get home earlier".

John is a factory worker who can't afford a car, so he takes the bus to work. Does the bus schedule allow him to come in and leave an hour early?

Frank and his wife both share a car; Frank has to drop his wife off on his way to work. Can Frank's wife come into work an hour early as well, or does she have to spend 9 hours at work and Frank has to wait an hour before he can pick her up? How about Jerry, who gets dropped off by his friend Lloyd because Lloyd has to drive that way anyways and doesn't mind doing Jerry the favour? Does Lloyd have to start running his daily errands earlier, now?

And don't forget that whatever solution you engineer for all of these people, it can't be too permanent, because we're just going to reverse it in a few months. And then re-reverse it later on.

What you say would apply if I were talking about people who aren't on HN.

We are talking about a person who is using his personal preferences to dictate the life patterns of everyone in the world and characterizes it as a "trade-off".

It's not always as simple as that. Besides it's far simpler from a personal perspective for me to set my clocks forward/back twice a year that move my entire daily schedule forward and back twice a year.

It's maybe a selfish reason, just to get a little more daylight in the evening, but I'm not the only person who thinks this way.

But... isn't that just semantics? I mean, you ARE moving your schedule twice a year. At least according to your brain. That a clock says is secondary I'd think.

No, what the clock says is primary, because it means that's what the people around me are doing also.

If it's only me moving my schedule, then I'm getting up an hour earlier, eating breakfast an hour earlier, starting work an hour earlier, getting hungry for lunch an hour earlier, finishing work an hour earlier, going to sleep an hour earlier etc.

It puts me out of sync with everyone else around me. Yes I'd get used to it eventually as would people around me and then I'd switch back half a year later.

If however the clock moves, then everyone around me is moving their schedule too, and we are in sync.

... until your boss schedules meetings.

Or don't adjust your clock, then you'll just think you're coming in earlier.

Works for everybody.

Put another way, it's taking advantage of light hours in the morning that are otherwise wasted sleeping. In Tokyo it's light outside from 4am in Summer, if you can instead have an hour of that in the evening then that's an extra hour people don't need to turn on their lights.

I was under the impression that people can decide for themselves the times when they want to go to bed and wake up. If I lived in Tokyo, I would likely choose to wake at an earlier clock time, but still at the same offset from whenever local noon may be.

If someone built an alarm clock with a GPS receiver that used the equation of time to calculate apparent solar time, mean solar time, and civil time from GPS time, and if it allowed the user to set the alarm as an offset from local sunrise, noon, or sunset, would anyone besides myself buy it?

I think if more timepieces were more informative about how much difference there is between civil time and mean solar time, people would be less tolerant of daylight savings time. But those timepieces would also have to handle all the time zones plus the multitude of stupid rules different civil jurisdictions use to calculate DST. Hopefully, the wrist-mount computers emerging onto the market will make it possible to create "DST howling outrage generator" applications.

>I was under the impression that people can decide for themselves the times when they want to go to bed and wake up.

That's correct, and most people choose times that are roughly in sync with the people around them. Waking up an hour earlier is less useful if the gym isn't open an hour earlier, or your favourite breakfast stall isn't open an hour earlier etc.

If your life is so strictly scheduled that you can't adjust parts of it an hour or two in either direction, or swap morning activities with evening activities, your problems are bigger than daylight savings time.

Some people work 2nd or 3rd shift, and a few of them even do it by choice. If you think moving things around by one hour is difficult, try shifting them eight hours. Those people still manage, though they often acquire sleep-related health problems and have to deal with more inconveniences in their daily life.

Is that a problem? That is the case here for more than a quarter of the year.

>our DST does not quite align with the switchover in the US, but only by a couple of days, and b) out of the four states on the east coast time zone, one of them does not use DST which makes things more confusing.

Quite a few years ago I was working in WA on a system that frequently aggregated data from servers located in different states when they decided to try daylight savings. From memory it was decided by the WA state government that the state would adopt daylight savings on a trial basis, try it for a year or two, then consider if we wanted to keep it.

For programmers it was pretty much the worst possible solution. Have it or don't have it, don't force us to make sure everything supported having daylight savings in WA and also require the ability to possibly turn it off again in the relatively near future.

Getting annoyed just thinking about it...

I remember when they changed the daylight savings start/finish times for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Had to go though a bunch of machines and manually patch in the new tzfile (this was before config management).

Also remember at one point NZ was having a potential power shortage caused by a drought[1]. Some senior government officials were suggesting bringing forward the start of daylight saving by a month with around 2 weeks notice.[2]

[1] - NZ gets most of it's power from Hydro

[2] - The jury is still out on if daylight savings saves power, especially since different places have low/high aircon usage.

I once tried to work out, based on power usage levels, if DST saves power (it's original purpose in wartime)

At best it's a wash. People all think that domestic lighting is a big power user, but in reality it's things like commercial shopping centres and office buildings that really suck down the juice. And typically those are run on a timer, so the pattern doesn't change (even if the timer is adjusted, the lights,ac and services are on for a fixed period of time).

Any savings for people having their lights off for 60 minutes less is swamped by people switching their AC on when they get home an hour earlier.

I still support DST as a quality of life thing, though.

> I still support DST as a quality of life thing, though.

I was amused at this comment, since i always dread the week or so after transitioning. Invariably my biological clock is screwed up and i'm something of a zombie in the morning at work and the later evening at parties.

> I still support DST as a quality of life thing, though.

The people who die each week after DST changes don't have much of an improved quality of life.

The clock should never change; if people want a different schedule then they should work 0700-1600 or 0600-1500 or whatever.

It probably did save energy once, back when it was first introduced because I doubt most people used electricity for much more than a radio and lighting. Sure the rich likely did, but there aren't that many of them.

Well the idea is from before electric lighting was even a thing, so who really knows? I do wonder if the Russians have it right in their recent abolishment of the system.

As I recall, there was a Windows hotfix at the start and end of the trial, specifically to allow for this change.

WA Govt was very keen on us voting for it, and assumed that with a trial we would get used to it and it would pass. As it turns out, that time it was rejected by the biggest margin so far.

also fades curtains

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