I'm surprised at the number of commenters who think permanent DST is favourable to night owls and bad for morning people.
I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST.
In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.
Someone pointed out virtually nobody sets when they wake by the sun. Fair enough. But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep, how restored they are, how they feel when they wake, and energy and concentration through the rest of the day.
Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for clock-time social expectations. As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them. (If the sun makes no difference, why is it already hard?)
Research (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691158) suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment in teenage years will reduce. Even brain development may be adversely affected.
But there will be more shopping (economic activity), so that's ok.
These problems are best solved by addressing the issue itself - that teenagers need more sleep than our maniacal obsession with starting school early in the morning.
That’s a change that can, and should, be made independently.
So the problem with that is school also serves as a safe daycare for children/teenagers while parents work. Everyone wants to blame the puritanical "if you aren't present 8 hours, it's not real work/school" attitude, but it's not that.
It's economics. People can't work if they have to stay home with their kids.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's 99% of the reason for the standard school day/hours. To fix the school problem, we have to fix our out-of-date 8-5 mindset toward work, first.
It has nothing to do about the children. Its 100% because public school has become glorified daycare and kids need to go in early for their parents to work.
Say you're a parent working for Walmart or Amazon. You have to get to work at 8.30AM so the store can open at 9AM. Your kid starts school at 9AM. How are you going to get your kid to school?
Only the far north of Norway has a long polar night, down south the days are short but not much different to many other places. In the north, the winter causes more sleep problems and some low mood/energy. (sources below)
But this is false equivalence as it's studying a different thing. Also it is very difficult to compare mental health studies across countries and attribute differences to single causes as there are so many confounding factors. In Norway there is a good standard of living, a social safety net, cheap healthcare and many other factors that are proven to be beneficial to mental health.
Humans are adaptable but sometime I think it's more accurate to say that humans tolerate different environments. We often don't adapt to them, we cope with them.
> A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.
If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:
"The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently"
I can think of a thing or 50 that Norway does different tk the US that might explain their higher levels of educational achievement and better mental health.
Norway is one of the richest countries in the world – because they have so much oil – and they share the wealth with the people through social security and (mostly) free education and health care.
I think that has much more influence on those factors than light.
The meaning is that permanent standard time is preferable to permanent DST, because it's more important during winter: during summer you get plenty of sunlight no matter what you have on the clock. That is, if we optimize for health instead of shopping.
1. Comparing the US (or any other country) to Norway is not valid because there are so many confounding variables. For one, Norway sinks in oil money and uses that money extensively to fund great social welfare programs.
2. What matters is relative within a country, not between country. The US had the choice between two time zones, and that's the question at stake here (not how the US compares to other countries, or how other countries deal with short day light periods).
As a seattlite, darkness in the winter definitely effects me. This is why I’d rather have the extra hours of daylight when I’m awake, since it increases the chance of hitting a few hours of light without rain/overcast skies.
Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.
Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.
If lockdown WFH has taught me anything, it's that the times that we've set for doing activities day-to-day is totally arbitrary. I work with people across all timezones now, and it's clear that the way that I set the clock is just a pacing metric for the way that my job and the businesses around me give me the freedom to do what I need to do.
If what you're saying is true, schools should start at 10a. We need to have those conversations.
I'm on one coast, my coworkers are on another, we gotta figure out how to sync our meetings. Same goes with when the supermarkets are open.
Most of us are not farming anymore. It's just about having a consistent meter stick to which to adjust our standards.
Sorry, the "farming" myth is one of my ocd triggers. DST is for golf courses and has never had anything to do with farming. Businesses want more daylight hours after office people get out of work to get those people to spend more money. This is the original trigger that caused the golf lobby to push congress to enact daylight savings.
The problem is the "consistent yardstick" actually. People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am". So we change the clock so that their yardstick "8am" occurs at solar 7am and people get out of work earlier. And people now are like "lets keep summer time" which is the exact equivalent of "lets always go to work at solar 7am".
It is kind of weird to me that people are coming out of the woodwork arguing about stability and all sorts of stuff as if a single time setting is somehow worse than changing it twice a year.
Winter in the northeastern U.S. is damn depressing because the sun sets at basically 3:30-4:30pm. If you sleep in on a weekend, you get max 4-5 hours of sunlight (feels like less because the sun is so low and thus long twilights). Kids coming home from school have zero after school time with sunlight.
There is so, so much research showing that night-shift and living out of sync with one's circadian rhythm literally shortens your life. It weakens your immune system, increases your chance of cardiovascular issues, gives you gastrointestinal issues, etc.
> And yet, somehow, they seem to function as humans
I know various people who work in shifts. It's really bad for your rhythm. It takes months before people find a way to deal with the effects. It's worth it due to the additional money they earn, that's it.
It’s a statistic. There is a certain (tiny) percentage of people affected. So that’s what is hyped up by the media, and then people think that is almost everybody.
I agree. Changing times on everyone was always silly. If a group of people want to change the time they go to school or work, they should just do that.
I don't like it when the sun comes up early. Unless you have really dark curtains, then you don't get to choose when to wake up. You wake up when the sun comes up. So if you stayed up late, fuck you, here's some bright sun at 6am.
Oh, and you're coming home for the day at 5 or 6p? Fuck you, here's some darkness. I can't understand how anyone would be against DST.
When it is dark at 5pm is utterly depressing in the winter. This change is huge and I really never thought I would see it in my lifetime and am overjoyed.
I'm against DST because I think if people are going to wake up at solar 6am and go to work at solar 7am they ought to call it 6am and 7am instead of calling it 7am and 8am.
"Work is defined to start at 8am so lets have everyone call solar 7am '8am' so we can get everyone to go to work an hour earlier."
Now "high noon" will occur at 1pm and the middle of the night will be 1am. In Ohio (or west edge of any time zone) the middle of the day will be 2pm and middle of the night 2am. Sunburn zone in ohio? 12pm-4pm.
Changing the clocks is basically a form of hibernation. It makes it OK for people to wake up later in winter by forcing everyone to do the same thing.
I guess any form of coordination is going to be more convenient for some parties than for others. The question is whether we really need to coordinate our entire days to such an extent. Many companies already practise a "core hours" schedule which allows individuals to be flexible about when they start work. This seems like the right approach.
I'm not looking forward to having to make normie appointments on Summer time during the winter, though. Making my way to the doctors at 5am in winter isn't going to be fun.
But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep
Yes, the sun coming up an hour later means less light peeking into the room and more sleep cycle time. Big collective win for night owls.
As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them
Times are changing, literally. Nice thing about all this remote work is you can be a night owl on the East Coast while everyone else is a morning lark on the West Coast. For me waking up is never an issue, I just get moving. But the night owl schedule is where everything naturally settles.
I really don't get what you're saying. Move the clock 4 hours forward and you favor some people; Move it backwards and you favor others. You literally cannot make everyone live in their "perfect sleep cycle." If you feel sleepy "at 2am" this changes nothing for you.
In Norway in December people wake up "in the middle of the night" because sunrise is at 10am: Humans can adjust easily to this stuff, it's just that we like to sleep "late" (as defined by the clock)
I didn't argue for any particular movement or direction, and I agree that any change favours some and is worse for others.
I argued that commenters who say permanent DST specifically favours night owls are incorrect about who it favours, because they (most of them) haven't considered the effect of the sun on sleep quality and daytime cycles.
My view is that most solar-affected night owls will have slightly worse sleep and daytime energy and metabolism, because clock-time social requirements will not change (that's the point of changing the clocks after all). Sunshine after will work will make people happier after work, which is reflected in economic activity, but I think the insiduous effects on health are being ignored. There is some scientific research to back up this point of view.
There are early risers here who don't like permanent DST saying "we're not all night owls like you", believing the change is designed to favour night owls.
There are night owls here who say permanent DST will be great for them because there will be less sun in the mornings to ruin their sleep. That implies they have a choice about when to wake, or they are thinking of Summer. They are in the minority even for night owls, because the change applies only to Winter, when most people are already forced by social requirements to get up when it's dark. There is no light streaming in that early in Winter. Permanent DST will only mean that it's dark for longer after they get up.
I mean, as a true night owl, my real problem isn't happening when I wake up: it is that when I go to bed in the morning it is extremely bad for me if dawn has already happened, so I would prefer the sun stay down for as long as possible to give me more leeway.
Yes, unless you have some programmed lights to help you wake up. Sleep normally ends as the sun starts shining. If you don't get that "signal", your body will have a harder time waking up, and be more confused about the right rhythm.
I have lived my whole adult life with black out shades and curtains. I grew up very rural and was used to a pitch black bedroom. As an adult I moved to the most densely populated state in the country, and immediately discovered black out shades.
I think I can say this on behalf of most developers who have ever had to fix DST errors in their code: Thank fucking god.
I am shocked that none of our unit tests failed on Monday. One of the first code reviews I did here I pointed out that his tests were going to break in a few months when DST kicked in because his tests asserted that there was a 24 hour gap between two calculations. He responded this code was temporary and it would be gone by then.
There was another PR on a certain Monday a few months later. Told ya so.
> I think I can say this on behalf of most developers who have ever had to fix DST errors in their code: Thank fucking god.
I think it just means for all American developers it's _more_ likely they'll introduce bugs if they cater to an international audience and there's still countries with DST.
DST has always been a good way to get Devs to think about the timezone database. If people start relying on offsets more that's not a net good thing, until the entire world is done with DST.
I was on on a US Navy ship, and the main display clock in combat control had two times - Zulu and a local time adjustable by an hour offset. This was obviously terrible... when we docked off India we had no way to set the correct time!
Agreed. I noticed that a lot of websites only really started supporting Unicode properly once emojis started becoming popular. When Unicode was "just" accented characters, a lot of English speaking devs didn't bother and happily lived in an ASCII-only world.
You're not wrong. I know people in finance and insurance have to deal with these things in perpetuity because they're always looking backward and forward in time. Banks first starting running into the Y2K problem in 1970, because of 30 year mortgages. Which means they've been dealing with 2038 problems for almost 15 years already.
Moving DST is my pettiest reason for disliking George W Bush. Flashbacks to the last few times I had to fix time offsets for some country or state that opted out.
But DST isn't the only situation where time changes. Countries (especially those near the international date line) switch back and forth depending on the current economic situation. Plus if you need to deal with historical data DST is still am important detail.
So your code will still require this logic, it just may be easier to ignore the bugs of a while.
LOL - this is good timing. A bunch of my unit tests just started failing due to the recent DST transition. Luckily our CI build servers are all GMT so it only failed on local runs. But even better if this problem went away altogether.
Unfortunately DST doesn’t just disappear because one country decides to get rid of it. That also creates a lot of weird issues if your program deals with time from the past, you have to know if a specific region, at a given date, was considering DST or not to be accurate with the local time, which can be messy with that type of flip-flop decisions!
I personally am against timesaving switches, but just because the US stops this practice doesn't mean that the issue is gone.
There is nothing to thank for since nothing will change, except for the lack of enforced switches the developers will have to deal with, which may lead to more bugs.
One time I hit this issue was in calculating future time. When the future time does not exist (cause it was skipped), it caused app to fail and require manual cleaning of data.
Important note: "Senator Marco Rubio said after input from airlines and broadcasters that supporters agreed that the change would not take place until November 2023."
After that date we would no longer transition away from daylight saving time. It would not cause an immediate transition. There would be one more transition in the following year to get back onto daylight saving time. So the effective effective date is really march of 2024.
> The Hill article[1] says it won't go into effect until November 20, 2023.
Way too soon. Stupidly so IMHO.
I went through the last DST law change, and it took quite a lot of work in many IT areas. Unixes weren't too bad, but there was all the JREs, databases, etc.
And that's not getting into all the embedded and industrial gadgets.
> The National Association of Convenience Stores opposes the change, telling Congress this month "we should not have kids going to school in the dark."
Wouldn’t it be more “convenient” to have children go to school at a time that is in line with their natural sleep patterns? From the CDC [1]:
“The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that middle and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later to give students the opportunity to get the amount of sleep they need, but most American adolescents start school too early.”
Even more important note from that article: "The House of Representatives, which has held a committee hearing on the matter, still must pass the bill"
I don't think there's any guarantee that they will even take up the bill, much less vote for it. (Hopefully, I'm wrong, because I would love permanent DST)
There's never a guarantee but being a unanimous vote in the Senate and one of the few bipartisan things that can actually pass both houses, I'd say it's pretty likely it will pass in some manner.
I'd kill for a peek into the parallel universe where it was permanent standard time that was likely to get adopted and see how much effort went into researching the ill effects of that choice to convince people with enough FUD to keep daylight time switching going.
Here's the thing: If you're a proponent of permanent standard time, you should be in favour of turning off the switching no matter what. Even if it means daylight time. Because you know what? Your local time zone is changeable. You can lobby to change it. If permanent DST really results in the entire country turning into sleep deprived zombies having spontaneous heart attacks as they arrive at work and crashing into children going to school, then there'll be pressure to change it -- but we will have at least already started the process of eliminating the worse thing: changing twice a year.
I am in favor of permanent standard time, but failing that, I am super happy with permanent daylight-saving time.
Far more important to me is ridding ourselves of the twice-annual insanity of changing clocks. I'd be okay with adopting UTC if that meant our clocks never changed again.
> I am in favor of permanent standard time, but failing that, I am super happy with permanent daylight-saving time.
Ditto. Switching is the issue for me. And it's not because it's all that disruptive to me personally. But it is highly disruptive, and dangerous to shift workers. The fall change in particularly raised hell in the hospital where I worked, since it literally created an hour that occurred twice. Computers can store time in universal time, but a nurse medicates or does a procedure on a patient by clock time, and that duplicate hour and compressed shift increased risk of patient harm, misrecording of data, and overall stress a lot.
I'm reporting from a permanent DST country, and let me tell you something. You'll probably leave your home at dark in the morning and will return again at dark.
Waking before light is very demanding for some people's bodies. I can't sleep past beyond 9AM, but waking up at night is a big no no for my body. I can't wake up, I can't function, and it creates all kinds of adverse effects.
Health is more important than changing clocks two times a year.
No, I'm not simply dreading waking up before sunrise. My body can't function until sunrise regardless of the number of hours I sleep. It's built like that. You might not be suffering like me, but I'm not the only one. Half of our office comes in half-asleep during winter hours.
Changing the time twice a year has never been a big issue for me. Even with a toddler with a sensitive sleeping schedule.
It changes on a Saturday night. It's almost not noticeable. One day a year you get one less hour; another day you get one more.
I mean if changing the times one hour is so bad, what about flying across 3 or more time zones?
While I know that jet lag _does suck_, if changing the time one hour at the least impactful time of week is so insane, it must make traveling very difficult for some people.
I'm not even campaigning for stopping or DST or ST (I frankly haven't thought about this problem that much because it just hasn't mattered much to me), I'm just surprised it is considered "insane" or a huge deal to many people.
At this point your main clocks, your phone and your computer, change themselves for you. Daylight savings time is no big deal really, it's just something to gripe about.
That said, I'm heavily in favor of ending it. It's stupid. But I disagree that permanent DST is less stupid than time changes. I think the idea of permanently having the clock say an hour later than it is is just as senseless or more so than the yearly switch. Just end this madness and be done with it.
Interesting note, many states already use standard time, such as AZ. But, it is against Federal law, for some reason, to use daylight time. Utah, California, and a few others have already voted to switch to permanent daylight time as soon as the federal government allows it.
The states that have this law waiting for the fed asked it to be reviewed.
I wonder if daylight time will be the new standard but your state can opt for standard time if they like.
This passed the senate today but it still needs to go through the house and president. I hope it’s smooth sailing.
Aside: I’m curious why states care about the federal law here but don’t in the case of THC legalization. I think it’s legal with (at least) a medical card in UT and CA.
Just a wild guess, but it may have something to do with the federal government having the sole power to regulate interstate commerce. Which makes me wonder if weed sold in a state has to be grown in that state.
I feel like the permanent DST option is a bit stupid in principle since as the other guy says it's about switching time zones and time zones should be primarily longitude based, not I-feel-like-being-in-whatever based because that's nonsense.
As an example France and Spain have no business being in CET/GMT+1 at all. France is geographically entirely in GMT, while some of Spain is in GMT-1 even, I mean what the actual fuck.
Time zones should be based on science, and work/school schedules should be flexible enough that people can decide on a company/institutional level when to start. If you want to start later, start later, don't fuck with the countrywide clock and make timekeeping a nightmare you goddamn idiots.
I think permanent DST makes sense from the biological/physiological point of view. Almost no people go to bed at 20 "solar" time and wake up at 4 -- they have it shifted later, so the "biological midnight" is indeed around 1 or 2 hours after the astronomical one - thus what we call "DST" matches better. This matching also helps against the confusion when writing an email late in the evening (i.e., after astronomical midnight) and use something like "we will meet tomorrow".
It's such a sign of these tribal times that the perfect is the enemy of the great ... the "if I can't get exactly I want, nobody else should get anything either" behavior.
The problem for me seems to be that everything is regulated to exahustion. Let things be more organic and consensus is easier, over time, without forcing it.
Try to force regulations everywhere and then there will be fights and sterile discussion just for the sake of having a regulation, as if it were a must.
Personally, I'm happy that we get more sunlight after work hours but people who need to get up early (especially children who get up early to go to school) reportedly are frustrated with it.
I'm trying to find a pro-permanent-DST article but not having much success with it.
Here's a more balanced take on the issue with psychologists chiming in:
As others have said, B. is the answer to question.
But to add to that, the U.S. has 4 timezones[1]: Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. Each zone has a "Standard" time and "Daylight" time - that is, for the winter half of the year, California is in the Pacific Standard Time (PST), whereas in the summer (B., in your question), California is in the Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). It's a very petty pet peeve of mine when people confuse they two - when they say "Let's meet at 3pm, PST" to mean 3pm Pacific Time, but it's in the summer ~ so 3pm PST would really be 2PM PDT. I know, I know, it's petty... and normally I don't say anything and roll with it... but on the inside I weep.
[1] Note: 4 Timezones isn't exactly correct. There is Hawaii and Alaska of course, and the U.S. Island Territories too. And then there's Arizona, which is permanently on Mountain Standard Time (MST), so when the rest of the Mountain Zone jump ahead an hour to be in MDT, Arizona is still MST, which is the same "time" as PDT ~ is that a different timezone? Oh... and only most or Arizona avoids MDT - most (but not all) of the Native American Reservations in Arizona do observe MDT. WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS TO OURSELVES?!? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, the sun rises and sets when it rises and sets. All this means is that at noon the clock says 1:00pm. It's still noon.
People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality. I don't think it is a good thing.
Why not just make daylight savings time go away and do things "an hour earlier"? You'd literally be waking up at the same exact time, just that the clock will say 6 instead of 7 or whatever. Are we really so far gone as a society that we will go to such great lengths to fool our brains? It's madness.
In India, there's enough span across the globe that east & west have about 4 of sunrise difference in winters; but all of India has one timezones. Offices, schools, everything has summer opening times & winter opening times. Like Summer 7 to 4, Winter 8 to 5
The one hour switch doesn't bother me that much. I didn't even notice this week when the time changed, because all of my clocks adjusted themselves. A friend had to remind me yesterday when I remarked how it was still light outside.
What bothers me is having to wake up when it's still dark outside. The last few days before the DST switch in the fall are always super rough for me, every year. Going through that all winter, every winter... I'm absolutely dreading this!
Society is already optimized for early risers and all we're doing is making it worse. Maybe there will eventually be a movement to switch time zones, but it would take at least another decade.
Personally, as someone with DSPS (Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome), I absolutely love waking up and going to work when it's still dark in the morning. It feels so productive and motivating.
On the contrary, when the sun is already blaring, it feels like you're already running late & behind. Not to mention interfering with already precious sleep.
The world is already hyper-optimized for early risers. For once, let those of us who don't naturally fall asleep until well into morning hours enjoy a perk! :-)
I suspect you will have a much easier time convincing your employer to have more flexible working hours than convincing the US government to change time zones.
You can compare longitudes within a timezone. China is on one big timezone, and if you're out in Xinjiang "8am" means something totally different from in Beijing. I live in Chicago, which is about as far east as Central Time goes. You could compare to western Kansas. If one of us is "daylight time" by the sun, the other is "standard time", more or less. Or hell, about an hour straight south of me (Indianapolis) it's on Eastern time. Same longitude, same latitude, but one city is ET and one is CT. There's a comparison to look at as well.
> If permanent DST really results in the entire country turning into sleep deprived zombies having spontaneous heart attacks as they arrive at work and crashing into children going to school, then there'll be pressure to change it -- but we will have at least already started the process of eliminating the worse thing: changing twice a year.
What I don't get is why it's so hard for people to just say "ugh, 5pm is already dark so we should start an hour earlier and go home at 4pm" or whatever.
Because there's a social expectation to be available for meetings until 6PM to have more crossover with my Pacific time coworkers. I will not be able to convince any of them to get up at 4AM just because I like my evening time. They will all remain after 1PM ET so that my CA coworkers have time to drop their kids off at school in the morning.
States can already turn off the switching by selecting permanent ST. This bill simply adds permanent DST as another option. It doesn't not force anyone into permanent DST.
I agree, but schools need to get ahead of this, and plan for a later start to the school day, before this takes effect, because we already have firm data on the fact that the school day already starts to early, and permanent DST is going to make that worse. Personally, I'll just shift my 7:AM to 4:PM day to being 8:AM to 5:PM. But my wife cannot do that. She'll be stuck at 7 to 4.
> I'd kill for a peek into the parallel universe where it was permanent standard time that was likely to get adopted and see how much effort went into researching the ill effects of that choice to convince people with enough FUD to keep daylight time switching going.
You don't need to kill anyone. You can just travel to AZ or HI, neither of which changes their clocks for DST.
Back in '08 when the US dates of DST changed, I was working on a Java-based enterprise software product with a relatively large install base. It suddenly became known to a lot of customers that timezone tables are part of the JRE, and simply updating the OS wasn't enough to get proper time calculations in Java. It was a very stressful time getting customers with many different versions of Java across dozens of platforms properly updated. A lot of customers were running ancient versions of Java that were well past EOL, but we still helped them out.
Needless to say, I'm very happy this might finally happen. I do not, however, envy whoever is now supporting that software. I'm sure there are folks that haven't touched their systems since the last DST change.
Considering how frequently time zones around the world change, any OS or software that doesn't auto update them from a standard list at this point deserves to break.
Sure, but I'd imagine on lots of threads discussing exploits, there are a lot of experts commenting, "Considering how frequently systems are exploited, any system that doesn't require Internet functionality shouldn't be on the Internet".
"Auto update from a standard list" - please point me to this standard list. Note - I need to know for a given user at a given location what a millis from epoch equates to in local time, for times that could be before or after this change, so I need timezone conversions AND what dates they were in effect for. I also need some SLAs, and ideally someone I can pay; not much, but enough to feel confident I can get support and/or that it'll be around a decade from now.
Ooof, I remember that. At the time I was writing shipping logistics optimization software for LTL shipping, and many clients were using ancient warehouse inventory systems (lots of data uploads over ftp, etc) that couldn't easily be modified to account for the time change, uh, change. Very painful.
Huh. These days most systems I work with just use a shim into the system timezone tables (I just checked the Qt docs, as that's my preferred way to develop cross-platform apps).
I think the landscape has shifted since the US rules were last changed in 2007. It was awful for pretty much everything that needed to be timezone aware and not just show some local time to a user.
Dates & times were not yet even part of standard C++ (some support started in C++11). Boost got your part of the way there, but it's IANA timezone db support was thin. (It could handle current timezones, but not historical or future). I think MS even support IANA timezone db support on Windows somewhere. Windows' ability to handle historical timezone changes was also pretty limited, and the actually history provided was pretty slim.
While I have no doubt should the DST change be made permanent will cause all sorts of issues with software (I mean, there's plenty of software, especially in embedded that still doesn't take into account the 2007 change), I personally welcome the end of a twice yearly switch. Which direction, I don't really care. I just want the switching to end.
It's probably because Java promises "write once, run anywhere". If you rely on the system timezone tables, you might have a different set of timezones available from one system to another or the rules for the same timezone might differ. And then code would behave differently on different operating systems.
If instead you ship timezone tables with the Java Runtime Environment, then you can promise that (by default) the code will behave the same.
It sucks that it creates extra maintenance burden (and lurking problems people may not be aware of), but that's the price you pay for decoupling.
I remember this too. The major difference is things auto-update more frequently, and people have higher bandwidth connections. So it's less of a problem that 14 years ago, luckily.
I am extremely surprised at all the people who are against this, saying that "Making DST permanent forces people to wake up earlier." I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun. Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.
I am happy to have more sun after I get out of work. It was a breath of fresh air this week getting out of work and seeing daylight.
I think this is kind of a conflict between those who are morning people and those who aren't. Many morning people would prefer to have that sunlight in the morning. I'm not at all a morning person and I'd rather have that sunlight after work when I can actually benefit from it.
There's a third faction: People who believe that it should be possible for a society to agree on things just starting an hour earlier (or later) where it makes sense, all without literally touching a single clock.
Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.
I am a morning person, I'm up at 430-5am every day, and I welcome this change 100%
I take my dogs for a walk and go for a jog after in the dark and I love it. I want as much sun for after work/social activities as possible.
I also love coding in the morning and can't stand afternoon glare. This will allow me more time with windows open before the afternoon glare creeps in (I realize this is house dependent, but still)
Speak for yourself, I'm a night owl and I find it much harder to wake up in the morning when it's dark outside. Permanent DST would only make this worse in the winter.
> I'm not at all a morning person and I'd rather have that sunlight after work
Same here - I'm a zombie on autopilot in the morning, and I usually start the day with the mindset of "let's see what kind of problems are waiting for me" (e.g. nasty compliance emails with the subject "ACTION REQUIRED!!!", processes that have crashed or are stuck since X hours, etc..) therefore I have anyway a permanent negative association with the first hours of the day independently if it's dark or sunny or rainy etc... .
On the other hand usually by the end of the day I have stabilized the situation and if I'm lucky I can still go out and enjoy a little bit the sun(set), so the longer that lasts the better for me.
I wonder if HN-people in general (doing mostly IT work?) tend to push working hours towards the evenings/nights and are therefore more in favour of daylight savings?
I am 100% a morning person, but I’m at work inside in the morning. I’d prefer more daylight in the evening when I’m not staring at a screen at work (though I recognize some people start and end their workday later).
I run in the mornings and the change this past week made it ridiculous... I get up at 5:30 and get out for a run by 6:00 and it's not dawn until about 7 AM. I got really used to getting to the nearby beach right on time to see a beautiful sunrise before heading back. Hopefully, it'll pull back soon.
I don't care about whether there's more sunshine in the morning or not (that's why I have blinds!). What I do care about is the fact that DST introduces needless complexity into the task of keeping time.
I know it's stupid, but I just think DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars. Not to mention, because not everyone observes DST, it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings.
Overall, regardless of your preferences, the world would be better if we didn't have to adjust the clock for no reason.
Making DST permanent in this context means never changing the clocks again. So what was once "daylight savings time" is now just "time" and no more clock changes. Just wanted to make sure you were aware, since your view is actually popular and your wish has been granted (if you live in the US).
> DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars
While that may make it a hassle, it doesn't make it unnecessary, DST has a real benefit - giving an extra hour of sunlight after you leave work, an hour you couldn't use otherwise as you would either be sleeping or at work. Also being a bit tech-headed here but time sync has been a solved problem in IT for quite a while, NTP and all that :P.
> it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings
We already have to deal with timezones, does DST really make that difference? Can't you schedule the meeting at 4PM EST and whoever is in that area figures out if it's 4PM or 5PM? Also google calendar and all that.
I think the problem is that people don't understand what "permanent Daylights Savings Time" really means.
If you ask "Would you like the sun to set later in the evening?" most people will say yes. Who doesn't like more sunlight?
If you ask "Would you rather go to bed early and wake up early, or go to bed later and wake up later?" most people will choose to stay up late and sleep in the next day. There might be some disagreement from early risers, but consider when most people choose to sleep during the weekend.
Everyone thinks of Daylights Savings Time as "yay, more sunlight," without realizing it also requires them to wake up earlier, relative to their circadian rhythms.
Disagree. Having the sun set so early is far more depressing than it rising a little later in the winter. I'd rather have a 7am sunrise than a 4pm sunset.
I think for folks with any kind of seasonal affective disorder, having a fixed time on the clock year-round is still beneficial. Take more vacation in winter. Push for slightly more flexible work hours or at least a later first-meeting-of-the-day.
>Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.
Of course, you aren't getting that in either system; even in Standard time the sun doesn't actually rise in the early morning. You're still going to need the wake-up light either way.
With permanent DST, you'll actually get more of a chance to witness the sun in general, as there's a greater span of time that it'll be available for use when you're allowed outside at the end of the workday.
Up in the dark, home in the dark just flat out sucks for the 4 months of the year these conditions occur; minimizing the number of people who have to deal with that and minimizing the number of days they have to deal with that should be top priority.
Wouldn't quite a few people like this sleep through the sunrise and be happy to have an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day? I don't see how its any worse for the non-morning people in that group.
I imagine that waking up long after sunrise could affect our sensitivity to certain light spectrums to the point that "night owls" and "morning people" are seeing completely different colors, but calling them the same name.
In other words, two people who wake up early in the morning might both perceive a certain color of orange as "dark / muted", while people who wake up later in the day might perceive that same color of orange as "bright". On the opposite side of the spectrum, the color blue may appear more vibrant to people who wake up early, because their vision is bombarded with yellow (sunlight) in the morning.
Circadian rhythms and all that. The body reacts to sunlight. It's been shown that auto accidents are more common when people wake in darkness as the brain is still spinning up. It's why we use f.lux to help us go to sleep.
> Everyone I know wakes up whatever time that their work tells them to.
Uh, yes, that's the point - and many businesses and schools will stick to a consistent nominal time (like 8am) which will now be one hour earlier in real terms.
In the end, almost all persons wake-up time are dictated by the rise of the sun. Not in the sense that you always rise with sunrise - that makes less sense the more north you go, but that the day rythm is highly dependant on the rythm of sunlight. People are strongly opposed to wake before sunraise, so most time schemes try to minimize that, without having darkness way too early. The typical day schedules are arranged with the idea, that the sun is highest not to late after noon. Permanent DST will have an obvious consequence: times will shift. Work and schools will start and end an hour later. You won't get more sun after work. TANSTAFL
I totally agree. That extra hour in the evening after work/wherever in the winters is actually quite pleasant, and having it artificially taken away when the clocks go back pretty is pretty gloomy.
I am against it, because there will no longer be a time during which you do something and still viably claim to have never done it. I have never eaten a Tommy's burger with chili-fries (except between the minutes of 1:00 and 1:59 during fall back). I can account for 24 hours of every day (except spring forward) of every year.
All of this could be moot if China pursues/completes its plan of putting artificial "moons" up to provide 8 times the light of a full moon. Then it would be relatively light all the time.
I've been working from home for 7+ years, and I mostly let the sun wake me up. I never would have been able to do that in the winter when I was commuting, but it is very nice.
I am totally in favor of this though, I was ranting about it to a friend on Sunday.
They mean 1 hour earlier relative to the sun cycle, and they are correct. Because the sun strongly influences our circadian rhythm, this is the correct frame of reference, from a health standpoint, not wall time.
If you get up at 8 every day, you're getting up ~2 hours after dawn (depending on date/location). When DST hits, 7 becomes 8, and you're getting up ~1 hour after dawn.
I would love having more sun after work, but I don't know that it's worth the tradeoff of safety. On the shortest days the sun rises at 8:18am for me, so I usually start biking to work shortly after sunrise. On DST that sunrise would be 9:18am, well after my daily standup time. I'd be biking in twilight, if not nautical night. I already hate biking in the dark for safety reasons, I'd probably start driving more.
I don't know what part of the country you're in, but some of us are already making this tradeoff with the current setup. In NYC, a typical winter sunrise is shortly after 7am - before many people are riding to work, myself included. A typical winter sunset is well before 5pm, so the entire evening commute is dark.
When the days are very short in winter to begin with, and you spend a third of them out and about, someone somewhere is going to be out and about before or after dark.
As a daily bike commuter, I have the opposite problem. I never bike to work in the morning before the sun rises (not even close), but in the winter the sun is setting before 5pm which leaves my entire ride home in darkness. Having more light in the evening would help a lot.
It also seems to me like your job starts a bit early in the day, relative to most tech jobs anyway. If I get in before 10 I'm usually the first one there in the morning.
You are supposed be to be lit up like a flashing Christmas tree anyway. I don't know why my fellow cyclists insist on rolling the dice when nearly everyone on the road is texting or having a screaming match with someone on their phone.
I'm all for not changing our clocks anymore, but DST is stupid. If you want to get up earlier and have more daylight in the evening, great, do that. If you want to get up later so it's not dark when you leave in the morning, sure, makes sense. And if you want to change your schedule as the year progresses to adapt to the seasons, I'm with you.
The real problem is that we have this weird idea that our whole society has to operate synchronously. And hey, I get it, some groups of people do have to coordinate with each other. An assembly line won't work if people show up whenever. But most people aren't in that situation and even that assembly line doesn't have to be synchronized with all the other assembly lines in the country. Heck, it might even be a good thing if we didn't all drive to work at the same time...
We have to agree on what time it is so that we can coordinate, and as long as we're doing that, let's agree on something that's not a lie. If we're going to meet at noon, the sun should be straight over head, damnit.
Both standard time and daylight saving time are arbitrary. Sunrise and sunset times shift throughout the year based on multiple factors. It would be unreasonable to try and mandate a time system that always made 12:00 exactly when the sun is directly overhead.
Timekeeping systems are meant to coordinate human activity, yes, but if you're calling daylight saving time a lie... then so is standard time, and all other timekeeping systems, for that matter.
Oh man - this was my position as well for a long time.
And then I realized that you can’t even count on “high noon” meaning much at all, DST or not, because using solar noon is basically the same thing as having arbitrarily many timezones for each unique longitudinal point on Earth.
Now I’m tempted to go full UTC and to hell with all of it
> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun.
I try to when I can. But you are right. Most people's lives revolve around work. For most of human existence, our lives revolved around the sun. Now it revolves around a job.
>For most of human existence, our lives revolved around the sun. Now it revolves around a job.
I blame our corporate reality as much as the next guy but tbh even without work most people's lives don't exactly revolve around the sun. Or else the clubs on the weekends would be empty
> I am not sure I know a single person whose morning wake-up time is dictated by the rise of the sun.
So you don’t know why farmers, laborers, gardeners, contractors, garbage men, etc? There’s a long list of jobs where there’s practical reasons to start work when it gets light outside.
Clearly you must understand you are in the minority and most of the world have jobs requiring a set start time.
And once you partner with another you must now hope you both can be afforded that luxury of a job.
Despite working remotely since 2008 I'm married to someone who works at a hospital and must be there by 7am. Getting woken up and trying to fall back asleep is much worse than just going to bed with her and waking up with her to get uninterrupted sleep.
Add on kids to that equation who must be at the bus stop at a certain time and the number of working households who can wake up with the sun is minuscule.
Probably a good part of these people is just being selfish.
They completely ignore the increased suicide rates and other effects the switching of the clock has. It even affects the cows of farmers. It has negative side effects for millions of people, but NOOOOOO, those poor people who need to get up earlier, they'll be having a much harder time!
My personal pet peeve is when people write the Standard Time acronym when scheduling cross-timezone meetings, despite the fact that it is Daylight Saving Time. (Eg. "I'll call you tomorrow at 4pm PST.")
In the past, I've gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings, but I also don't want to seem like a pedant by bringing up their mistake.
I'm curious if this change will make this sort of thing more or less common.
I've never known anyone who wasn't a programmer who even knew the difference between say, PST and PDT. Like, if they didn't schedule it through a computer with up to date timezone code, I would confirm verbally.
I've gotten into the habit of naming the location like "4pm Chicago time". It's a lot less confusing in general because most people here aren't very solid on what the time zones are on the other side of the Atlantic (going both ways), even disregarding any DST-type changes.
When there's an obvious reference city for at least one side of the conversation, I just use that. "Talk to you at 3pm [New York, SF, Tokyo] time." Apart from avoiding any possible confusion about what PST/PDT means, this is also less likely to suffer from typos, and it's more likely that the recipient actually reads it and notices any mistakes. Easier for people from different countries too, if they aren't familiar with each other's timezones.
> I’ve gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn’t observe Daylight Savings.
Maybe I can help you with that. I’m from Arizona, which does not observe any time change, effectively meaning that we’re on MST for part of the year and PDT for the rest. I have _never_ heard of someone living in Arizona refer to our time zone as MST, MDT, PST, or PDT, but only as “Arizona time” or something to that effect.
My personal pet peeve is giving times in their local time zone when they know full well everyone is going to be in different time zones. Convert it to UTC so everyone can just worry about their offset.
I'd rather people not do that, simply because I wouldn't trust most people to do the conversion in either direction. At least if the person setting the meeting gives the time in their local time time I can be relatively confident that at least they'll be there on time.
I doubt most of my colleagues even know what their offset is – keeping track of that with DST is just not fun. Personally I just Google e.g. "2pm PT in CT," as Google has an info box that handles time conversions and is smart enough to know when you want DST.
This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the regular time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.
I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.
> And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.
I don't think it's possible to lobby employers to change their shift hours. It is, in fact, much easier to lobby the government to change the clocks.
> I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
This is probably a good idea, though... good ideas don't really seem to have much bearing on the way we arrange school schedules.
> There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.
You're probably overthinking this. Not every government action is a five-level Machiavellian scheme. Sometimes overwhelming public sentiment carries the day.
Standard time just sucks. If you work or do after school activities, you simply stop seeing the sun in the wintertime during the week. Its set by 5:30pm when things have wrapped up for you, and it rises just as you are getting into work or school. You spend the entire day indoors and don't see the sunlight until clocks change in the spring.
I don't know whether there is such a lobby, but if there is, they fall victim to the same mistake as many other proponents of permanent DST: society is highly synchronized with the movement of the sun. Permanent DST means that timetables are going to be adjusted over time to compensate for it and no one is getting out of work earlier before sunset.
I don't like when people accuse others of living in a "bubble", but this is a particularly egregious example of being deeply out of touch with the lives of most working people.
Why didn't I think of this sooner? Here I was, slaving away until 6-7pm every day, when I could have just got up from my chair and walked out of the building!
Honestly anyone who is passionate about which time to switch to has put way too much faith in the whole academia-to-reality pipeline. Those folks get shit so directionally wrong so often on more important things, I really don't think any academic's model of the consequences of ST/DT will be anything remotely close to complete.
We should all just chill, and be grateful for the relief.
No, I am aware of the lives of other working people, and I have worked jobs with fixed shifts before.
But I also have seen over the last 20 years that flexible time has moved from an exotic perk to a standard contract term in my country, at least for white-collar workers. And we have mandatory works councils, where workers can have a say in certain decisions, for example shift hours. (In the US the equivalent is roughly when a company has a union.)
So it is not being out of touch, it is a political demand. I am just saying what's possible.
This is ridiculous. Why don't they make the DST permanent? And if people want to have more light in the MORNING, then they just WAKE UP LATER. Surely that is easier than permanent REGULAR time.
Because, aside from that noon should be at noon (roughly, allowing for the obvious error that standard time and mean solar time introduce, but which are present in both perma-standard and perma-DST) and you shouldn't be legislating business hours by screwing around with what the clock says…, it's a bad decision:
> Permanent standard time is considered by circadian health researchers and safety experts worldwide to be the best option for health, safety, schools, and economy, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, National Sleep Foundation, American College of Chest Physicians, National Safety Council, American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Canadian Sleep Society, World Sleep Society, Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, and several state sleep societies.
> It is supported by environmental evidence, owing to evidence that DST observation increases driving, morning heating, and evening air conditioning, which all in turn increase energy consumption and pollution.
This is ridiculous. Why don't they make AEST time permanent? And if people want to have more light in the DAYTIME, they can just MOVE TO AUSTRALIA. Surely that is easier than PEOPLE BEING ABLE TO SEE MY FACE DURING ZOOM MEETINGS.
1) Permanent DST
2) Permanent Standard Time
3) Status Quo
And the problem is that, at least based on what I've gathered anecdotally from speaking to people and from which side the media pushes, preferences are usually 1-2-3, followed by 2-1-3, followed by 2-3-1, with anyone who prefers the status quo in dead last.
Personally I prefer standard time to DST as well, but we don't really have any power to make that decision.
I could not stand a permanent standard time. The sun would rise at 4:15 in the summer. The sun already rises way to early in the summer, making it even earlier would be unimaginable.
Not everyone has the freedom to choose when to get off work as many have commitments from looking after children and to commute. Given a fixed schedule, I think more people have free time in the afternoon and would like to have that time be in the light and spend the time like commuting in the dark.
I do not see how either daylight or standard time is fundamentally easier than the other. I could just as easily tell people who want brighter winter mornings to just wake up later.
The argument in favor of DST generally goes that people have more spare time in the afternoon than in the morning. So extending afternoon sunlight hours benefits more people.
The government wants everyone to have more daylight hours after work, since that's correlated with higher economic activity.
From the government's perspective, they cannot force all companies to shift their working hours, but they can shift the clock. They're changing the abstraction once instead of changing all concrete implementations.
This change doesn't make a difference for most of us in tech, since we can usually set our own hours. But it does make a difference for shift workers.
But 6am is a made up construct. It's an artifact of the logistics of getting kids to school before the parents' working hours and accommodating those kids' after-school jobs.
If you move school an hour later then typical working hours also have to move an hour later and nothing actually changes.
Our children will say it is unnatural for teenagers to wake up at 7am.
Thats is the reason, permanent DST won't "work". Childrens wake time is highly dependant on the sun. So, if it already makes sense to start school later, then it only gets more so, if there is permanent DST. Which means, most work times have to start later as well.
This would be better for kids, actually. An hour less of school even would be better. Kids are given too much garbage in school rather than concentrating on core education.
What do you mean they can just leave work earlier? There are tons of jobs where the shift hours are defined, eg 9-5 or 8-4 and you can’t simply leave earlier.
I see this as ultimately a conflict between morning people and non-morning-people.
I am not a morning person, and so naturally I welcome this trading away of brighter winter mornings to get brighter winter evenings. But I recognize there are many, presumably yourself included, who prefer the opposite.
I don't have a good solution to suit everyone, and I certainly don't want to gloat at having "won." If anything, perhaps just as workplaces are sorting into remote-first and non-remote-first to address different employee preferences, the same will happen with times of day.
I'm a morning person (I sleep from 9:30 to 5:30), but I generally like daylight saving time. If it's dark when I get up, I get to enjoy the sunrise, and I love wrapping up the day outdoors in the evening.
But I also don't have any kids in school, and I don't have a 9-5 job. Maybe that flexibility makes the difference.
As someone who lives in the north. During the winter standard time is absolutely brutal. You drive to work in the dark and by the time you leave its dark. At least that's the case for most people. Moving it an hour forward may alleviate this at least a little bit.
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I think it's night owls and delayed-cycle teenagers attending school who will suffer most under permanent DST.
In the Winter, permanent DST means everyone has to get up an hour earlier for work or school's clock time, relative to the sun which regulates their body rhythm.
Someone pointed out virtually nobody sets when they wake by the sun. Fair enough. But the sun does affect how well and how long they sleep, how restored they are, how they feel when they wake, and energy and concentration through the rest of the day.
Night people already struggle with getting up early enough for clock-time social expectations. As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them. (If the sun makes no difference, why is it already hard?)
Research (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30691158) suggests that overall, health will suffer, sleep will be shorter, and educational attainment in teenage years will reduce. Even brain development may be adversely affected.
But there will be more shopping (economic activity), so that's ok.
That’s a change that can, and should, be made independently.
It's economics. People can't work if they have to stay home with their kids.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's 99% of the reason for the standard school day/hours. To fix the school problem, we have to fix our out-of-date 8-5 mindset toward work, first.
Starting school later sound good if you live a very privileged life, but makes life impossible if you need to leave a 3 to work.
Why can't we also adjust work hours?
And if we can adjust those as well, why can't we just be on Standard Time?
The problem isn't the clock. It never was the clock.
Highly educated, longest living, least depressed.
And the sun is out at midnight 76 days per year there.
Humans are adaptable. A -permanent- hour change would surely be less harmful than changing said hours twice a year.
But this is false equivalence as it's studying a different thing. Also it is very difficult to compare mental health studies across countries and attribute differences to single causes as there are so many confounding factors. In Norway there is a good standard of living, a social safety net, cheap healthcare and many other factors that are proven to be beneficial to mental health.
Humans are adaptable but sometime I think it's more accurate to say that humans tolerate different environments. We often don't adapt to them, we cope with them.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... [2] https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/147...
If you ask actual scientists who research this topic, you get a different answer:
"The authors take the position that, based on comparisons of large populations living in DST or ST or on western versus eastern edges of time zones, the advantages of permanent ST outweigh switching to DST annually or permanently"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...
So, permanent standard time is better than switching, but switching is better than permanent summer time.
That's just an argument for a good social security system and says nothing about DST
1. Comparing the US (or any other country) to Norway is not valid because there are so many confounding variables. For one, Norway sinks in oil money and uses that money extensively to fund great social welfare programs.
2. What matters is relative within a country, not between country. The US had the choice between two time zones, and that's the question at stake here (not how the US compares to other countries, or how other countries deal with short day light periods).
Compared to what? Anytime I speak to any Norwegian/Swede, they tell me how depression during winter is so widespread basically everybody suffers in one way or another. People in Norway, Sweden, Finland etc go into household lightning overdrive to help this a bit, but real sun is real sun.
Single most important reason why I never moved there, even above short summer.
Source please?
If what you're saying is true, schools should start at 10a. We need to have those conversations.
I'm on one coast, my coworkers are on another, we gotta figure out how to sync our meetings. Same goes with when the supermarkets are open.
Most of us are not farming anymore. It's just about having a consistent meter stick to which to adjust our standards.
The problem is the "consistent yardstick" actually. People are accustomed to start work at "8am", and react badly to being told to start work at "7am". So we change the clock so that their yardstick "8am" occurs at solar 7am and people get out of work earlier. And people now are like "lets keep summer time" which is the exact equivalent of "lets always go to work at solar 7am".
I mean if you work night-shift, morning shift, evening shift, you already have weird circadian rhythms, and out-of-sync school schedules.
And yet, somehow, they seem to function as humans. So maybe that 1 hour difference for 4 months a year won't actually result in the zombie apocalypse.
People will adapt just fine.
Winter in the northeastern U.S. is damn depressing because the sun sets at basically 3:30-4:30pm. If you sleep in on a weekend, you get max 4-5 hours of sunlight (feels like less because the sun is so low and thus long twilights). Kids coming home from school have zero after school time with sunlight.
I know various people who work in shifts. It's really bad for your rhythm. It takes months before people find a way to deal with the effects. It's worth it due to the additional money they earn, that's it.
They also seem to ignore Arizona. 7.5 million people all happily living their lives without dropping like flies from seasonal-affective disorder.
Oh, and you're coming home for the day at 5 or 6p? Fuck you, here's some darkness. I can't understand how anyone would be against DST.
Deleted Comment
"Work is defined to start at 8am so lets have everyone call solar 7am '8am' so we can get everyone to go to work an hour earlier."
Now "high noon" will occur at 1pm and the middle of the night will be 1am. In Ohio (or west edge of any time zone) the middle of the day will be 2pm and middle of the night 2am. Sunburn zone in ohio? 12pm-4pm.
I suffered even with switching because no matter what part of the year we were in school was scheduled to wake me up in the dark.
I guess any form of coordination is going to be more convenient for some parties than for others. The question is whether we really need to coordinate our entire days to such an extent. Many companies already practise a "core hours" schedule which allows individuals to be flexible about when they start work. This seems like the right approach.
I'm not looking forward to having to make normie appointments on Summer time during the winter, though. Making my way to the doctors at 5am in winter isn't going to be fun.
Yes, the sun coming up an hour later means less light peeking into the room and more sleep cycle time. Big collective win for night owls.
As it's a struggle already, getting up an hour earlier is going to be harder for them
Times are changing, literally. Nice thing about all this remote work is you can be a night owl on the East Coast while everyone else is a morning lark on the West Coast. For me waking up is never an issue, I just get moving. But the night owl schedule is where everything naturally settles.
In Norway in December people wake up "in the middle of the night" because sunrise is at 10am: Humans can adjust easily to this stuff, it's just that we like to sleep "late" (as defined by the clock)
I argued that commenters who say permanent DST specifically favours night owls are incorrect about who it favours, because they (most of them) haven't considered the effect of the sun on sleep quality and daytime cycles.
My view is that most solar-affected night owls will have slightly worse sleep and daytime energy and metabolism, because clock-time social requirements will not change (that's the point of changing the clocks after all). Sunshine after will work will make people happier after work, which is reflected in economic activity, but I think the insiduous effects on health are being ignored. There is some scientific research to back up this point of view.
There are early risers here who don't like permanent DST saying "we're not all night owls like you", believing the change is designed to favour night owls.
There are night owls here who say permanent DST will be great for them because there will be less sun in the mornings to ruin their sleep. That implies they have a choice about when to wake, or they are thinking of Summer. They are in the minority even for night owls, because the change applies only to Winter, when most people are already forced by social requirements to get up when it's dark. There is no light streaming in that early in Winter. Permanent DST will only mean that it's dark for longer after they get up.
I think this is a very dramatic hypothesis you've presented here. If an individual or family is inconvenienced by this, adapt!
Places that already do not change for DST are doing just fine. e.g. Arizona
I am shocked that none of our unit tests failed on Monday. One of the first code reviews I did here I pointed out that his tests were going to break in a few months when DST kicked in because his tests asserted that there was a 24 hour gap between two calculations. He responded this code was temporary and it would be gone by then.
There was another PR on a certain Monday a few months later. Told ya so.
I think it just means for all American developers it's _more_ likely they'll introduce bugs if they cater to an international audience and there's still countries with DST.
DST has always been a good way to get Devs to think about the timezone database. If people start relying on offsets more that's not a net good thing, until the entire world is done with DST.
You should know in how many frameworks and libraries i18n is an afterthought and much more cumbersome than necessary.
Moving DST is my pettiest reason for disliking George W Bush. Flashbacks to the last few times I had to fix time offsets for some country or state that opted out.
So your code will still require this logic, it just may be easier to ignore the bugs of a while.
There is nothing to thank for since nothing will change, except for the lack of enforced switches the developers will have to deal with, which may lead to more bugs.
Important note: "Senator Marco Rubio said after input from airlines and broadcasters that supporters agreed that the change would not take place until November 2023."
> The proposal would not take effect until Nov. 20, 2023, to give airlines and other transportation industries more time to adjust to the change.
But we switch back to standard time on November 5, 2023. Just to get two weeks of that until we switch back to summer time permanently?
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/598314-senate-unanimousl...
Way too soon. Stupidly so IMHO.
I went through the last DST law change, and it took quite a lot of work in many IT areas. Unixes weren't too bad, but there was all the JREs, databases, etc.
And that's not getting into all the embedded and industrial gadgets.
Wouldn’t it be more “convenient” to have children go to school at a time that is in line with their natural sleep patterns? From the CDC [1]:
“The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that middle and high schools start at 8:30 a.m. or later to give students the opportunity to get the amount of sleep they need, but most American adolescents start school too early.”
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/features/schools-start-too-early.h...
Seems like I misread what was stated in the article.
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I don't think there's any guarantee that they will even take up the bill, much less vote for it. (Hopefully, I'm wrong, because I would love permanent DST)
[1]: https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2021-September/030397.html
I wonder how many bugs will pop out because of this. Time is already pretty complex… and it might force some old systems to need updates.
Dead Comment
Here's the thing: If you're a proponent of permanent standard time, you should be in favour of turning off the switching no matter what. Even if it means daylight time. Because you know what? Your local time zone is changeable. You can lobby to change it. If permanent DST really results in the entire country turning into sleep deprived zombies having spontaneous heart attacks as they arrive at work and crashing into children going to school, then there'll be pressure to change it -- but we will have at least already started the process of eliminating the worse thing: changing twice a year.
Far more important to me is ridding ourselves of the twice-annual insanity of changing clocks. I'd be okay with adopting UTC if that meant our clocks never changed again.
Ditto. Switching is the issue for me. And it's not because it's all that disruptive to me personally. But it is highly disruptive, and dangerous to shift workers. The fall change in particularly raised hell in the hospital where I worked, since it literally created an hour that occurred twice. Computers can store time in universal time, but a nurse medicates or does a procedure on a patient by clock time, and that duplicate hour and compressed shift increased risk of patient harm, misrecording of data, and overall stress a lot.
And really, it's just dumb.
Waking before light is very demanding for some people's bodies. I can't sleep past beyond 9AM, but waking up at night is a big no no for my body. I can't wake up, I can't function, and it creates all kinds of adverse effects.
Health is more important than changing clocks two times a year.
No, I'm not simply dreading waking up before sunrise. My body can't function until sunrise regardless of the number of hours I sleep. It's built like that. You might not be suffering like me, but I'm not the only one. Half of our office comes in half-asleep during winter hours.
And no, sunrise clocks doesn't work for me.
It changes on a Saturday night. It's almost not noticeable. One day a year you get one less hour; another day you get one more.
I mean if changing the times one hour is so bad, what about flying across 3 or more time zones?
While I know that jet lag _does suck_, if changing the time one hour at the least impactful time of week is so insane, it must make traveling very difficult for some people.
I'm not even campaigning for stopping or DST or ST (I frankly haven't thought about this problem that much because it just hasn't mattered much to me), I'm just surprised it is considered "insane" or a huge deal to many people.
In the US it would be less weird, but still weird.
That said, I'm heavily in favor of ending it. It's stupid. But I disagree that permanent DST is less stupid than time changes. I think the idea of permanently having the clock say an hour later than it is is just as senseless or more so than the yearly switch. Just end this madness and be done with it.
The states that have this law waiting for the fed asked it to be reviewed.
I wonder if daylight time will be the new standard but your state can opt for standard time if they like.
This passed the senate today but it still needs to go through the house and president. I hope it’s smooth sailing.
Aside: I’m curious why states care about the federal law here but don’t in the case of THC legalization. I think it’s legal with (at least) a medical card in UT and CA.
As an example France and Spain have no business being in CET/GMT+1 at all. France is geographically entirely in GMT, while some of Spain is in GMT-1 even, I mean what the actual fuck.
Time zones should be based on science, and work/school schedules should be flexible enough that people can decide on a company/institutional level when to start. If you want to start later, start later, don't fuck with the countrywide clock and make timekeeping a nightmare you goddamn idiots.
(YMMV, I'm describing situation here in .cz)
Try to force regulations everywhere and then there will be fights and sterile discussion just for the sake of having a regulation, as if it were a must.
People seem to hate it. Here's a news report lamenting the decision:
https://www-cumhuriyet-com-tr.translate.goog/turkiye/kalici-...
Personally, I'm happy that we get more sunlight after work hours but people who need to get up early (especially children who get up early to go to school) reportedly are frustrated with it.
I'm trying to find a pro-permanent-DST article but not having much success with it.
Here's a more balanced take on the issue with psychologists chiming in:
https://tr-sputniknews-com.translate.goog/20211123/kalici-ya...
Here's a non-newspaper source (don't miss the references bit in the end if you're interesed):
https://bilimveaydinlanma-org.translate.goog/kalici-yaz-saat...
It objectively seems like a bad idea, It appears Turkey should move back to UTC+2 and stay there. Permanent DST has many downsides.
A. The sun rises earlier and sets earlier.
B. The sun rises later, but sun sets later too.
But to add to that, the U.S. has 4 timezones[1]: Eastern Time, Central Time, Mountain Time, and Pacific Time. Each zone has a "Standard" time and "Daylight" time - that is, for the winter half of the year, California is in the Pacific Standard Time (PST), whereas in the summer (B., in your question), California is in the Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). It's a very petty pet peeve of mine when people confuse they two - when they say "Let's meet at 3pm, PST" to mean 3pm Pacific Time, but it's in the summer ~ so 3pm PST would really be 2PM PDT. I know, I know, it's petty... and normally I don't say anything and roll with it... but on the inside I weep.
[1] Note: 4 Timezones isn't exactly correct. There is Hawaii and Alaska of course, and the U.S. Island Territories too. And then there's Arizona, which is permanently on Mountain Standard Time (MST), so when the rest of the Mountain Zone jump ahead an hour to be in MDT, Arizona is still MST, which is the same "time" as PDT ~ is that a different timezone? Oh... and only most or Arizona avoids MDT - most (but not all) of the Native American Reservations in Arizona do observe MDT. WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS TO OURSELVES?!? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People are so disconnected from the world that their abstractions of it become more real to them than actual reality. I don't think it is a good thing.
Why not just make daylight savings time go away and do things "an hour earlier"? You'd literally be waking up at the same exact time, just that the clock will say 6 instead of 7 or whatever. Are we really so far gone as a society that we will go to such great lengths to fool our brains? It's madness.
With permanent DST, it will instead be 08:24-18:00
What bothers me is having to wake up when it's still dark outside. The last few days before the DST switch in the fall are always super rough for me, every year. Going through that all winter, every winter... I'm absolutely dreading this!
Society is already optimized for early risers and all we're doing is making it worse. Maybe there will eventually be a movement to switch time zones, but it would take at least another decade.
On the contrary, when the sun is already blaring, it feels like you're already running late & behind. Not to mention interfering with already precious sleep.
The world is already hyper-optimized for early risers. For once, let those of us who don't naturally fall asleep until well into morning hours enjoy a perk! :-)
I also have the light switch through two phases of red at night which signals to me to do things in the evening and prep for sleep.
I don't know if that will help you personally, but I can recommend it.
What I don't get is why it's so hard for people to just say "ugh, 5pm is already dark so we should start an hour earlier and go home at 4pm" or whatever.
I bet it's those smug morning peoples' fault.
You don't need to kill anyone. You can just travel to AZ or HI, neither of which changes their clocks for DST.
Dead Comment
Needless to say, I'm very happy this might finally happen. I do not, however, envy whoever is now supporting that software. I'm sure there are folks that haven't touched their systems since the last DST change.
Dates & times were not yet even part of standard C++ (some support started in C++11). Boost got your part of the way there, but it's IANA timezone db support was thin. (It could handle current timezones, but not historical or future). I think MS even support IANA timezone db support on Windows somewhere. Windows' ability to handle historical timezone changes was also pretty limited, and the actually history provided was pretty slim.
While I have no doubt should the DST change be made permanent will cause all sorts of issues with software (I mean, there's plenty of software, especially in embedded that still doesn't take into account the 2007 change), I personally welcome the end of a twice yearly switch. Which direction, I don't really care. I just want the switching to end.
If instead you ship timezone tables with the Java Runtime Environment, then you can promise that (by default) the code will behave the same.
It sucks that it creates extra maintenance burden (and lurking problems people may not be aware of), but that's the price you pay for decoupling.
I am happy to have more sun after I get out of work. It was a breath of fresh air this week getting out of work and seeing daylight.
Introducing a (permanent, i.e. unlike DST) offset to solar time just seems like a ridiculous solution to any real or perceived problem.
I take my dogs for a walk and go for a jog after in the dark and I love it. I want as much sun for after work/social activities as possible.
I also love coding in the morning and can't stand afternoon glare. This will allow me more time with windows open before the afternoon glare creeps in (I realize this is house dependent, but still)
Same here - I'm a zombie on autopilot in the morning, and I usually start the day with the mindset of "let's see what kind of problems are waiting for me" (e.g. nasty compliance emails with the subject "ACTION REQUIRED!!!", processes that have crashed or are stuck since X hours, etc..) therefore I have anyway a permanent negative association with the first hours of the day independently if it's dark or sunny or rainy etc... .
On the other hand usually by the end of the day I have stabilized the situation and if I'm lucky I can still go out and enjoy a little bit the sun(set), so the longer that lasts the better for me.
I wonder if HN-people in general (doing mostly IT work?) tend to push working hours towards the evenings/nights and are therefore more in favour of daylight savings?
I know it's stupid, but I just think DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars. Not to mention, because not everyone observes DST, it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings.
Overall, regardless of your preferences, the world would be better if we didn't have to adjust the clock for no reason.
> DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars
While that may make it a hassle, it doesn't make it unnecessary, DST has a real benefit - giving an extra hour of sunlight after you leave work, an hour you couldn't use otherwise as you would either be sleeping or at work. Also being a bit tech-headed here but time sync has been a solved problem in IT for quite a while, NTP and all that :P.
> it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings
We already have to deal with timezones, does DST really make that difference? Can't you schedule the meeting at 4PM EST and whoever is in that area figures out if it's 4PM or 5PM? Also google calendar and all that.
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If you ask "Would you like the sun to set later in the evening?" most people will say yes. Who doesn't like more sunlight?
If you ask "Would you rather go to bed early and wake up early, or go to bed later and wake up later?" most people will choose to stay up late and sleep in the next day. There might be some disagreement from early risers, but consider when most people choose to sleep during the weekend.
Everyone thinks of Daylights Savings Time as "yay, more sunlight," without realizing it also requires them to wake up earlier, relative to their circadian rhythms.
Timing of light and absence of light is critical - early morning light exposure greatly benefits people with SAD.
Of course, you aren't getting that in either system; even in Standard time the sun doesn't actually rise in the early morning. You're still going to need the wake-up light either way.
With permanent DST, you'll actually get more of a chance to witness the sun in general, as there's a greater span of time that it'll be available for use when you're allowed outside at the end of the workday.
Up in the dark, home in the dark just flat out sucks for the 4 months of the year these conditions occur; minimizing the number of people who have to deal with that and minimizing the number of days they have to deal with that should be top priority.
This reminds me of another conversation on HN about color sensitivity in human vision:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
I imagine that waking up long after sunrise could affect our sensitivity to certain light spectrums to the point that "night owls" and "morning people" are seeing completely different colors, but calling them the same name.
In other words, two people who wake up early in the morning might both perceive a certain color of orange as "dark / muted", while people who wake up later in the day might perceive that same color of orange as "bright". On the opposite side of the spectrum, the color blue may appear more vibrant to people who wake up early, because their vision is bombarded with yellow (sunlight) in the morning.
Uh, yes, that's the point - and many businesses and schools will stick to a consistent nominal time (like 8am) which will now be one hour earlier in real terms.
"Relative" terms -- i.e. relative to sunrise. Eliminating daylight savings means that all times are now "real" terms.
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The far east coast sees the sunset at 4:18PM on the winter solstice. Most people aren't even off work by then.
Ok, I'm actually for it.
I am totally in favor of this though, I was ranting about it to a friend on Sunday.
(i think i'm only half joking)
also then just move everyone to GMT for the hell of it.
If you get up at 8 every day, you're getting up ~2 hours after dawn (depending on date/location). When DST hits, 7 becomes 8, and you're getting up ~1 hour after dawn.
When the days are very short in winter to begin with, and you spend a third of them out and about, someone somewhere is going to be out and about before or after dark.
It also seems to me like your job starts a bit early in the day, relative to most tech jobs anyway. If I get in before 10 I'm usually the first one there in the morning.
I'm all for not changing our clocks anymore, but DST is stupid. If you want to get up earlier and have more daylight in the evening, great, do that. If you want to get up later so it's not dark when you leave in the morning, sure, makes sense. And if you want to change your schedule as the year progresses to adapt to the seasons, I'm with you.
The real problem is that we have this weird idea that our whole society has to operate synchronously. And hey, I get it, some groups of people do have to coordinate with each other. An assembly line won't work if people show up whenever. But most people aren't in that situation and even that assembly line doesn't have to be synchronized with all the other assembly lines in the country. Heck, it might even be a good thing if we didn't all drive to work at the same time...
We have to agree on what time it is so that we can coordinate, and as long as we're doing that, let's agree on something that's not a lie. If we're going to meet at noon, the sun should be straight over head, damnit.
Timekeeping systems are meant to coordinate human activity, yes, but if you're calling daylight saving time a lie... then so is standard time, and all other timekeeping systems, for that matter.
And then I realized that you can’t even count on “high noon” meaning much at all, DST or not, because using solar noon is basically the same thing as having arbitrarily many timezones for each unique longitudinal point on Earth.
Now I’m tempted to go full UTC and to hell with all of it
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/01/this...
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/6920/why-do...
I try to when I can. But you are right. Most people's lives revolve around work. For most of human existence, our lives revolved around the sun. Now it revolves around a job.
I blame our corporate reality as much as the next guy but tbh even without work most people's lives don't exactly revolve around the sun. Or else the clubs on the weekends would be empty
people with dogs. Dogs don't care about clocks and they will totally wake you up so they can poop and have breakfast.
So you don’t know why farmers, laborers, gardeners, contractors, garbage men, etc? There’s a long list of jobs where there’s practical reasons to start work when it gets light outside.
It's not like life is radically different on the east and west sides of a time zone either.
Or whatever time that their toddler(s) tell them to ;)
Well now you do
I do everything in UTC, don't use daylight savings, and I do set my wake up time based on sunrise
And once you partner with another you must now hope you both can be afforded that luxury of a job.
Despite working remotely since 2008 I'm married to someone who works at a hospital and must be there by 7am. Getting woken up and trying to fall back asleep is much worse than just going to bed with her and waking up with her to get uninterrupted sleep.
Add on kids to that equation who must be at the bus stop at a certain time and the number of working households who can wake up with the sun is minuscule.
They completely ignore the increased suicide rates and other effects the switching of the clock has. It even affects the cows of farmers. It has negative side effects for millions of people, but NOOOOOO, those poor people who need to get up earlier, they'll be having a much harder time!
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In the past, I've gotten paranoid that they may live somewhere that doesn't observe Daylight Savings, but I also don't want to seem like a pedant by bringing up their mistake.
I'm curious if this change will make this sort of thing more or less common.
Someone with experience dealing with this needs to write it.
I constantly ride people about it. I don’t care about being perceived as a jerk.
Maybe I can help you with that. I’m from Arizona, which does not observe any time change, effectively meaning that we’re on MST for part of the year and PDT for the rest. I have _never_ heard of someone living in Arizona refer to our time zone as MST, MDT, PST, or PDT, but only as “Arizona time” or something to that effect.
If you just use UTC, then EVERYONE has to do some conversion in their heads.
(Unless some participants happen to live at the prime meridian, in which case using UTC as "the timezone" is equally as good.)
Then the ball is in their court to make sure they meant the same thing.
I know people will say it's too hard to change habits and (clock) work hours, but with permanent DST you will have to change that anyway, when people realize how dark winter mornings will be. I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
There's a pro-DST lobby because more post-work daylight hours is correlated with higher consumer spending. For that reason, permanent DST is more politically expedient in relation to permanent standard time.
> And if people want to have more light in the evening, then they just leave work earlier. Surely that is easier than permanent daylight savings time.
I don't think it's possible to lobby employers to change their shift hours. It is, in fact, much easier to lobby the government to change the clocks.
> I predict a lot of people will want to move school start to a later hour then.
This is probably a good idea, though... good ideas don't really seem to have much bearing on the way we arrange school schedules.
You're probably overthinking this. Not every government action is a five-level Machiavellian scheme. Sometimes overwhelming public sentiment carries the day.
I don't like when people accuse others of living in a "bubble", but this is a particularly egregious example of being deeply out of touch with the lives of most working people.
Honestly anyone who is passionate about which time to switch to has put way too much faith in the whole academia-to-reality pipeline. Those folks get shit so directionally wrong so often on more important things, I really don't think any academic's model of the consequences of ST/DT will be anything remotely close to complete.
We should all just chill, and be grateful for the relief.
But I also have seen over the last 20 years that flexible time has moved from an exotic perk to a standard contract term in my country, at least for white-collar workers. And we have mandatory works councils, where workers can have a say in certain decisions, for example shift hours. (In the US the equivalent is roughly when a company has a union.)
So it is not being out of touch, it is a political demand. I am just saying what's possible.
> Permanent standard time is considered by circadian health researchers and safety experts worldwide to be the best option for health, safety, schools, and economy, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, National Sleep Foundation, American College of Chest Physicians, National Safety Council, American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Canadian Sleep Society, World Sleep Society, Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, and several state sleep societies.
> It is supported by environmental evidence, owing to evidence that DST observation increases driving, morning heating, and evening air conditioning, which all in turn increase energy consumption and pollution.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_time_observation_in_...)
1) Permanent DST 2) Permanent Standard Time 3) Status Quo
And the problem is that, at least based on what I've gathered anecdotally from speaking to people and from which side the media pushes, preferences are usually 1-2-3, followed by 2-1-3, followed by 2-3-1, with anyone who prefers the status quo in dead last.
Personally I prefer standard time to DST as well, but we don't really have any power to make that decision.
The argument in favor of DST generally goes that people have more spare time in the afternoon than in the morning. So extending afternoon sunlight hours benefits more people.
From the government's perspective, they cannot force all companies to shift their working hours, but they can shift the clock. They're changing the abstraction once instead of changing all concrete implementations.
This change doesn't make a difference for most of us in tech, since we can usually set our own hours. But it does make a difference for shift workers.
I'm a proponent of this regardless. Forcing teenagers to be awake at 6AM is not helpful.
If you move school an hour later then typical working hours also have to move an hour later and nothing actually changes.
Our children will say it is unnatural for teenagers to wake up at 7am.
Feel free to follow your own advice and come into work later.
I am not a morning person, and so naturally I welcome this trading away of brighter winter mornings to get brighter winter evenings. But I recognize there are many, presumably yourself included, who prefer the opposite.
I don't have a good solution to suit everyone, and I certainly don't want to gloat at having "won." If anything, perhaps just as workplaces are sorting into remote-first and non-remote-first to address different employee preferences, the same will happen with times of day.
But I also don't have any kids in school, and I don't have a 9-5 job. Maybe that flexibility makes the difference.
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What percentage of people do you think get to choose what time they can leave work?