News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone by waqf on Thursday October 26, 2017 @03:54PM (#15562409)
I think we should shift time zones a little every day, so that (in some designated location, say New York or DC) the sun rises at exactly 6am every morning. This eliminates the sudden transition to daylight savings which is the source of most complaints, and it would be trivial to implement with modern electronics.
Re:Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone by grzm on Thursday October 26, 2017 @04:10PM (#15562548)
I firmly believe we'd see a lot of problems. Pick nearly any datetime library and see how easy it would be to calculate things like durations between two arbitrary timestamps. Even with those that do handle daylight saving or time zones properly, many applications that do use these libraries don't use these features. Or how often projects update their timezone databases. Handled in an incremental way would be a world of pain, precisely because of our reliance on modern electronics and software, or more precisely, because we rely on time so heavily to coordinate events, and rely on syncing these operations with human activities. I think I may have just literally shuddered.

By the way, what you describe is how things worked prior to standardization of time which was driven in part by the expansion of the railroad. There's a brief history on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#History

Re:Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone by connicpu on Thursday October 26, 2017 @04:04PM (#15562495)
"trivial"
Re:Massachusetts is considering leaving the Eastern Time Zone by macNchz on Thursday October 26, 2017 @05:53PM (#15563411)
Regardless of the (extreme) technical challenges to implement something like this...a 6am sunrise in NYC would make for sunset at 3:15pm in December. A little early for my taste!