Remind HN: Turn your clocks back

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3201491

by spicyj • 15 years ago

24 21 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's the end of daylight savings time. (At least, for most of us in the US.)

viraptor3• 15 years ago

Makes me wonder... how many people here have clocks which still require this? I've got one only (and it's getting a bit old). None of the our alarm clocks (mobiles) require it. Even some hand watches are synchronized via radio. Will we get rid of manual time changing completely in the next couple of years?

godinaa• 15 years ago

Only things like my Sony bedside clock require changing for me.

adestefan2• 15 years ago

I have four I need to change: the clock in my car, an analog clock in my family room, the oven clock, and the microwave clock. Everything else is self changing.

mdda• 15 years ago

Unfortunately my bedside alarm clock still has the pre-change timezone info : It gave me a fake lie-in on Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, and will (most likely) have me stumbling out of bed too early tomorrow.

Urgo• 15 years ago

I don't want to :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co7WUA900Ds

Osiris4• 15 years ago

I've been mulling around the idea that the world should just get rid of Daylight Saving Time and Timezones completely. We should all just use UTC.

I work with people across the U.S. and every time I setup and meeting we have to always clarify the timezone and it's worse when working with Arizona because sometimes they are in Pacific Time and sometimes in Mountain Time since they don't observe Daylight Saving Time.

So, if everyone were on UTC, you could just say "Let's have a meeting at 16:00". 16:00 might be the middle of night for some people or the middle of the morning for others, but who cares? Everyone knows when 16:00 will happen. So, if I agree to the meeting, I don't have to know if they are in Mountain, Eastern, or Japanese time zone, only what time in UTC the meeting is. Done. Easy. No time math.

Who's with me?

viraptor3• 15 years ago

> Who's with me?

International pilots and the army. Just start calling it Zulu time, instead of UTC.

Osiris4• 15 years ago

I'd heard of Zulu time in passing, usually some military movie or TV shows saying things like "23:30 Zulu", but I never made the connection. It's good to know that some people are using some common sense. I'd love to see it more widely used.

pagekalisedown• 15 years ago

How do you pronounce "16:00"? 16 o'clock?

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

"Sixteen hundred hours".

Osiris4• 15 years ago

I've always heard it like "16 hundred hours", though I admit that it might be hard for some people to adjust. I'll usually say something like "Does eleven work for you?", meaning 11am. Since the US is -5 to -8 UTC, it would be something like 16 hundred hours for an 11am meeting, so "Does sixteen work for you?" or "Does sixteen hundred hours.." sounds a little odd.

PerryCox• 15 years ago

16 Hundred.

callahad2• 15 years ago

I find it quite useful to be able to assume that, wherever I am, businesses will likely be open between 09:00 and 17:00. Under a UTC-dominant system, I wouldn't have a standard way to map between local frames of reference. If I'm in Atlanta and typically work from 14:00 to 22:00 UTC, and I'm trying to schedule a meeting with a colleague in Singapore... well, I know exactly when the meeting would be, but I have no idea if 14:00 UTC is early or late there.

tzs• 15 years ago

You have the same problem under the time zone system. If you are contemplating a 9 AM meeting, Atlanta time, you have no idea if that is early or late in Singapore. You have to find the time zone difference and figure it out.

That would not change at all if you were on UTC.

dguaraglia• 15 years ago

Oh, wow, that's the silliest argument I've ever read. I've been working with people in other countries and traveling abroad on a regular basis for the past 7 years and literally never had an issue scheduling a meeting or getting to a flight on time.

Most of the scheduling issues are related to the actual time difference between the two geographical places: by the time someone in California is done with breakfast, commute and ready for the meeting, the guys in NYC might be heading out for lunch. But living in a unique timezone won't fix that, the same way it won't fix the Southern hemisphere being always in the 'wrong season'. In fact, it'd aggravate the problem when traveling even a few hundred miles: "uh, what time do banks operate here? Is it too late for lunch?".

The world is a (roughly) spherical body. Sol raises from the East. Learn to think in those terms, and you'll avoid most problems.

Osiris4• 15 years ago

So if you're setting up a meeting with people that live in, say, Hong Kong, you don't have to pull up a world clock website and try to figure out, "Well if I want a meeting at 10:00am their time, that's UTC+10 and I'm UTC-5 so thats going to be ... my time?" I find it hard to believe that you'd never had to stop and try to figure out the time differences between timezones to try to figure out when a good meeting time would be.

callahad2• 15 years ago

Hey, Android voice commands handle the time change correctly! It's 21:45 local. I just said "set alarm for 24 hours from now" and got back a new alarm for 20:45.

Remind HN: Turn your clocks back

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