

White House Petition to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time - hglaser
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-bi-annual-time-change-caused-daylight-savings-time/ShChxpKh

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tokenadult
It's really tiresome to post every new White House petition on Hacker News,
especially those that have nothing to do with the issues most Hacker News
users care about. The petitions are almost never the best framing even of
issues that are inherently interesting to the broad and curious community
here.

AFTER EDIT: I should have made more clear when I first posted that one reason
it doesn't make sense for United States politics to absorb HN submissions is
that the HN community is international. I have lived in more than one country
myself, and many participants on Hacker News live outside the United States
and aren't particularly influenced by local details of United States law. If
you are a programmer programming for an international clientele, you have to
learn a lot of different standard time rules to display correct local time to
your online clients. I actually support the United States being on standard
time year-round, but I think United States standard time rules are not a major
issue for most of the working participants on Hacker News. Anyway, a technical
work-around for internationalization of time would plainly be on-topic for
Hacker News, but most (nearly all) political issues are not.

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jewel
I think computer systems are the ones that are the most impacted by daylight
saving time changes. The amount of effort that is necessary to make sure a
change goes smoothly might be higher than you're thinking.

I worked at a medium-sized billing business in 2007 during the switchover from
the beginning of April to what it is now. Our team spent a great deal of time
going through every single system, making sure that they had new DST tables.
If I remember correctly, we still got bit because the MySQL service on a
server hadn't been restarted since we upgraded the rules. We also had problems
because of a java service since java ships its own copy of the time zone
database.

For historical reasons, the dates and times on the mainframe weren't stored as
UTC. We would do billing during the night in batch jobs. After suffering
through problems a few years, we finally figured it was easiest to simply
suspend the batch jobs during the whole "repeated hour" in the fall, so that
we wouldn't get out-of-order timestamps in various places.

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bdc
Aside from inertia, what is keeping DST in place right now? I could imagine
some bizarre lobbying incentive, like it provides some marginal and trivial
benefit to the corn industry somehow, although I am not aware of one.

~~~
wglb
I think it is the barbecue industry.

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drewjoh
Always my favorite video showing just how crazy DST makes everything:
<http://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4>

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ewams
Get rid of the multiple timezones in the USA while we're at it.

