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  • Hacker News
  • The topic always feels like a typical propaganda push to me; the constant sensationalist articles, people constantly bemoaning it when in reality having to change your clocks by an hour twice a year is the most trivial, irrelevant thing to spend any energy/attention caring about, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the propaganda angle actually is. How does some group benefit from getting rid of it? Or is the negative messaging, creating an us-vs-them argument about even the most random of issues, increasing conflict/division in society, the angle, and they don't even care about getting rid of it?
  • I really wonder about the methodology. The article didn't mention it.

    Did they get several cities to participate?

  • Of all the things that cause obesity and sleep loss, is an hour change twice a year really a major issue?
  • My controversial idea: midnight should be where current 4AM is because 04:00 is the lowest point of human circadian rhythm. Currently we have nonsense like "1AM is technically a part of the next day but for all practical purposes it's still the previous day". Also, 24h clock should be the standard so that we can avoid discussions "is 12AM noon or midnight".
  • This isn’t going to get fixed in my lifetime, and that’s sad. Countries have lost the ability to act.
    by kubb
  • Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?

    Have a look at the sunset/sunrise graph for northern parts of the US https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/seattle

    In Seattle, without DST, sunrise happens at 4:11am. Because of DST, it's pushed back an hour later to a more reasonable 5:11am.

    I am not awake at 4am, I have no use for sunlight at 4am, and I don't want the sun appearing that early. That hour of early sunlight is wasted for me. Plus with DST, the sun sets an hour later, at 9:11pm, a time I am actually awake, and I can actually go outside and use the extra sun.

    And, with permanent DST (which is what many people are advocating for), then in winter sunrise is at 9am in Seattle, which is far too late. I do not want to drive to work in the dark, before sunrise. So I want standard time in winter, pushing sunrise an hour earlier to a more reasonable 8am.

    In both situations (summer and winter), modifying the time via DST benefits me and gives me better use of sunlight.

  • Between this and the "Sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag: evidence from US time zone borders" paper [0], it seems like the issue is the size of the discontinuous jump in time, not necessarily that we change the clocks. So why not "smear" the DST<=> ST transitions by having four half hour transitions, once each quarter?

    [0]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31030116/

  • It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.

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