from Hacker News

Samoa Scraps Daylight Saving Time

by JackMcMack on 9/23/21, 8:28 AM with 278 comments

• by adolph on 9/23/21, 11:52 AM

  Fellow anti-DSTers, this is a big win. Samoa might not have a large population but it is the future. In fact, it is already tomorrow there.

  https://time.is/Samoa

• by ch_123 on 9/23/21, 11:05 AM

  > DST was implemented in 2010 by the previous Government of Samoa to give more time after work to tend to their plantations, promote public health, and save fuel. Instead, it “[...] defeated its own goals by being used by people to socialise more,” according to the Samoa Observer.

  Maybe I am lacking context here, but that seems a bit mean on the part of the Samoan government. Is extra socializing such a bad thing?

• by mattowen_uk on 9/23/21, 4:17 PM

  My observations from reading this comment thread, are that Time is a construct created by jewellers to sell more watches. :)

  Also, we should switch to UTC globally. My 22:00 is your 22:00 and their 22:00. For me it's my bedtime, for you it's lunchtime, and for them it's breakfast. People should adjust their daily activities around the daylight hours they have, and let time be less of a controlling force in their lives.

  We live in a globalised world, especially in business. So with the whole world on UTC, everyone knows when the meeting starts, when the delivery arrives, and when the end of the year starts and finishes.

  And if that fails, we should just attach rockets at the poles and push/pull the planet back upright to get rid of the problem altogether.

• by rafaelturk on 9/23/21, 1:40 PM

  Brazil got rid of Daylight Savings Time two years ago. Initially I was against the idea.. Well now I love it. Feels more natural do deal with increase and decrease of sunrise and sunset as seasons change.

• by stephen_g on 9/23/21, 1:35 PM

  I’m really glad to live in one of the states in nearby Australia that doesn’t have DST.

  I feel like people should just be encouraged to have a bit of flexibility to shift their hours how they want. In a lot of professional jobs, that’s basically the case, and a lot of ‘blue collar’ work happens much earlier anyway already (tradies etc. usually start at 6:30 or 7:00am as it is and knock off around 3pm. Plenty of cafes open at 6:00am to 7:00 am too because people are up cycling, jogging, etc. before it gets too hot. The swimming pool I go to to swim laps has different summer and winter hours. None of them need daylight savings to do any of that!

  I just don’t get the obsession with changing the clock. It just makes things inconvenient…

• by doctor_eval on 9/23/21, 10:47 AM

  I was working in Samoa when they changed their time zone to align with NZ instead of the US. Lost a whole day!

  Quite an interesting problem for our billing platform to solve…

  https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/samoa-dateline.html

• by EdSchouten on 9/23/21, 10:51 AM

  Interesting that they only announced it six days in advance. That doesn’t really give software vendors time to release zoneinfo updates.

• by seniorsassycat on 9/23/21, 4:39 PM

  Washington state passed a a law to follow daylight savings time year round but it's contingent on changes to federal law that requires states to observe DST changes or use standard time all year.

  I've emailed all my representatives asking for action on this without any response.

  I've also emailed the president, our governor, and and secretary of transportation asking to move Washington to Mountain Standard Time because it is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time and doesn't require changes to federal law.

• by mhh__ on 9/23/21, 11:54 AM

  In the UK at least I don't really see the argument for DST. All it seems to do is fuck up my already precarious sleep cycle in exchange for what seems to be some farmers productivity (but they only make up 0.1% of the population roughly)

• by kypro on 9/23/21, 5:24 PM

  I personally find odd historical "traditions" quite romantic and usually dislike movements to update them. For example, I dislike American-English spellings or selling milk in litres for this reason. I guess find the historic reason behind these traditional ways of doing things interesting enough to keep them even though I acknowledge they make little sense today.

  However, daylight savings is one of those things I find to be genuinely inconvenient and although from a purely sentimental perspective I would be sad to see it go, I do agree with scraping it.

  It's not completely relevant and probably somewhat common knowledge, but historically many (most?) cities and towns had their own time based on solar time before standardised time zones were introduced. In my city there is an old corn exchange building with two minute hands, one for our old city time and another for the actual GMT time we use today. In the past people would use these central clocks to set their own timepieces, but you can imagine how much of a nightmare this was trains were introduced and suddenly people wanted to travel between cities but there was no universal time. So in comparison to adopting standard time, this seems like quite a minor change.

• by dasKrokodil on 9/23/21, 1:53 PM

  I'm really glad that my employer is flexible about the time I start working. That way, whenever the clocks are set to/from DST, I just start work an hour earlier or later and my sleep remains unaffected.

• by panzagl on 9/23/21, 2:43 PM

  My dreams of 'spring back, fall back' seem further away than ever... I mean who doesn't want an extra hour of sleep twice a year?

• by DoubleDerper on 9/23/21, 12:44 PM

  Is DST a states rights issue in the US? What is the argument FOR keeping DST?

• by sharikous on 9/23/21, 3:16 PM

  Looking at the comments this reminds me of a frustrated spin system. No way to make everybody happy.

  We could just select 10 possible solutions (precise local noon, UTC for everybody, forever-summer, forever-winter, DST, DST in temperate/polar regions only, smooth sigmoid-like DST transition, etc...) and rotate between them every few weeks.

  You are welcome, no need to thank me.

• by kwertyoowiyop on 9/23/21, 2:28 PM

  Now, let the rest of the dominos fall!

• by tomrod on 9/23/21, 3:45 PM

  Can we just go to one timezone already? We can keep some kind of work hours standardization if we like, perhaps based on current timezones or adjusted for coordinates, but holy moly does this waste so much time.

• by Softcadbury on 9/23/21, 1:59 PM

  Is somebody aware about technical impacts of this kind of change ? I mean, it must break tons of softwares that need to be updated no ? Or I'm just too pessimistic

• by vladaionescu on 9/24/21, 1:13 AM

  Press F to pay respects to IT admins, ops, SREs and systems engineers who have to deal with this on such short notice.

• by gtirloni on 9/23/21, 10:48 AM

  And Brazil, while facing the risk of blackouts due to dry weather (most power is generated from hydro), is considering adopting DST again in 2022. It was abolished by the extreme-right government in 2019.

• by gentle on 9/23/21, 1:53 PM

  Now do New England.

• by forkLding on 9/23/21, 1:31 PM

  I'm still not sure why we have Daylight Savings Time, is it ok to abolish it? Makes coding timezone logic hell.

• by cratermoon on 9/24/21, 4:32 AM

  And programmers who have to keep track of when events happened in the past grow a few more grey hairs.

• by ajsnigrutin on 9/23/21, 3:38 PM

  Hello another tzdata update....

• by JohnFen on 9/23/21, 6:51 PM

  Let's hope the US isn't far behind!

• by travisgriggs on 9/23/21, 3:31 PM

  Norway’s getting electric cars and Samoa is ditching Ben Franklins biggest screw up.

  Small countries rock. I want to move. I speak Norwegian and love Samoans, I wonder if either will take me.

• by Aaargh20318 on 9/23/21, 12:16 PM

  Instead of moving the clock an hour forward in summer, we should move it back an hour, at least here in northern Europe. Call it Moonlight Saving Time.

  In summer the days get very long and with rising temperatures it's just not comfortable outside until later in the evening. At night, it takes a while for things to cool down and be comfortable enough to sleep. DST makes the problem worse by moving the clock forward.

• by bluGill on 9/23/21, 12:46 PM

  The whole world should go on UTC only. We should redefine noon to the time when the local sun is most directly overhead. Let places adjust their schedule to the local day/night schedule as they see fit.

  Passing sixth grade should require demonstrating a way to find the local noon on a day when there is at least 6 hours of sun and 6 hours of dark using only basic tools. If the demonstration is off because of magnetic north vs true north, the student is required to tell the examiner that fact, but no correction is required. The 6 hours sun/dark is for those who live in areas where there is less since midnight sun makes this weird.

  I'll settled for no DST, but I have to work with people all over the world and it is a pain to discuss times.