Same here, and I've also thought about writing the same app.

I've always wondered why our system of time is built around the point of "midnight", when what we really care about is "sunrise". DST is an ugly hack that we use on top of our midnight-based time system to roughly approximate a constant sunrise time.

Imagine if 00:00 was defined as the time that the sun rises. You could set your alarm to 00:00 and start work around 01:30 or 02:00 every day.

There'd be no need to worry about kids going to school in the dark, and the shift between summer and winter time would be continuous instead of an abrupt shift (so no more DST-induced heart attacks or traffic accidents). We now have computers that could do timezone conversions quickly and easily, and places like Iceland that go for months without seeing the sun could use an arbitrary point in time to represent sunrise.

Ancient societies have used systems of time that are based around the time of sunrise, e.g. the ancient Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_hour. For whatever reason, we ended up with our midnight-based time system instead.

I think that DST is not such an ugly hack. Think of it as a mass coordination problem. You want to start work every day 1-2 hours after the sun rises. Fine, but in this time system, it's a different time in every point on earth, and it's complicated to convert between them. If you want to schedule a phone call, you're going to have to use a computer to figure out what two equivalent times are. Times are meaningless unless a precise location is also specified.

A similar (but not as bad) problem cropped up when every town had a clock set by the local solar noon, and the railroad came to town. They would have to do time conversions for train tables for every stop. The conductor couldn't just have a watch to figure out what time to pull out of the station or how long until the next stop -- it involved a bunch of time offsets. The solution was time zones. Then the conductor just has to adjust his watch exactly one hour when they cross a timezone boundary and everything works out.

DST is a very similar solution to a very similar problem. Everyone wants to have certain things happen at approximately a certain time after sunrise. People still want to be able to specify a time that is valid over a large geographical region, and is easily convertible when outside of that region. People want to be able to have watches that don't need to know the user's location in order to say what time it is.

DST gives you the approximation of all of these things, and you only have to think about it twice a year, when you make a big adjustment to the length of the day, instead of making little adjustments to the length of the day every day.

DST wouldn't be so bad if everything didn't need to be heavily synchronized alongside a 9-to-5 mentality. Time is useful for synchronization, but just the fact many people chastise night owls while applauding early birds, as well as emphasizing the "when" instead of the "how many hours did you do N" (or better: "how much N did you achieve"), puts many people who are dependent on more light to start their day in a weird spot.

That's what DST does. It forcefully yanks those people already struggling to adapt to society's wishes, forcing a pretty radical change. We have several solutions (group people based on chronotype, respect chronotypes more, limit the need for synchronized events in early mornings / late nights), but those still aren't being applied as widely as they could be.

Just the fact people are expected to drink coffee to wake up and participate in a relatively dangerous activity while still groggy (driving) indicates how little we actually think of all this.

Please stop the whine for people who are late stay ups. It am social okay for scheduling event at late night. Dinner am late night. Nightclub am late night. All these things are being late night and social okay. No such for early morning, we are expect for stay up late to make these thing, late sleep people only have awaken for 9:00 o clock morning zoom connect.

Our system was originally based on noon, not midnight.

I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.

You'd have 3+ hour swings in what time meant from December to June.

Seems worse than even daylight savings time.

> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun.

I do regular trips in the back of beyond. The first day everyone is up until 10-11 O'Clock in front of the camp fire hanging around with a beer. By the third day, everyone is up at dawn and asleep at 8 O'Clock.

Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally. We've just isolated ourselves from the natural environment and forced ourselves onto arbitrary schedules most of us have a completely screwed sense of time.

If you flex your day based on sunrise, you get more useful sunlight hours... which means more time for being outside enjoying the day instead of stuck indoors. It's also a lot easier to get moving based on natural light, our bodies are programmed for it much like they are programmed for a 24 hour day.

The big issue with daylight savings time is the loss of sleep due to it all happening at once. You don't have that issue if you just have an alarm that wakes you at sunrise.

"Humans absolutely rise with the sun naturally."

That might be the case somewhere that doesn't have wide variations in day/night lengths throughout the year - but I definitely do not rise naturally at 4am in summer and 9am in winter. I've spent plenty of time outdoors as well.

Man are evolving from fertile cresent where make more hours in day light the same for summer and winter.

I wish society would let me rise with the sun in winter... fat chance. Employers want their 8 hours, no matter what happens outside.

Where do you live? I would be awake for only 8 hours a day if I followed this in the middle of winter.

You are missing the point.

It is difficult to sleep with natural light. That doesn't mean we collapse to the ground when it gets dark.

As I said, we rise with the sun, and stay awake so long as it makes sense.

The sun doesn’t rise until almost 8:30 near the end of the year so there’s no natural light to interrupt my sleep.

After decades of using an alarm clock and sleeping in a dark room, a few years ago I began going to bed consistently around 10pm and allowing natural light to wake me up. It has really improved the quality of my sleep and my feeling of restedness in the morning.

Of course, this means the time I wake up does vary throughout the year, but the time change helps keep it more consistent and even in the middle of winter, waking up at 7:30 or so give me plenty of time to get to work.

I do know people that use lighted alarm clocks and report similar results, but that's clearly just an imitation of the real thing.

> I don't think most people really care about sunrise. Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun. I don't know anyone who plans their day based on when the sun rose.

Probably everyone you know habitually uses artificial lighting.

For anyone living north of san Francisco it's pretty much a requirement. If I didn't use artificial light my winter days would be 6 hours long and my summer days would be 18 hours longm

If that were true, every latitude north of San Francisco would have been completely uninhabited for most of human history.

I remember being quite surprised when I noticed (while I was actually in San Francisco) that its about the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. So you are talking about almost all of Europe.

> Humans don't seem to naturally rise with the sun.

Ever been camping for more than a day or two? Rising by the sun happens pretty naturally and quickly.

Endless artificial light is a very recent invention. What do you think life was like before electricity?

Well, depends a bit on where. I live at 69 degrees northern latitude, with a 2 month polar night/day in winter/summer - all this talk of DST and schedules following the sun seems a bit silly from up here (and we do have forced DST in Norway - although I hope we'll drop it).

An interesting counter point: in summer it's quite easy to drift into a pattern of following the weather -sometimes day will be overcast/rainy, nights clear and sunny. On vacation/camping you can sometimes flip the day to night in summer.

Absolutely. DST makes no sense at your latitude, where rising with the sun isn’t always possible.

A long camping trip during the polar day would be sooo weird! I’ve only been to Reykjavik in the late summer, and it was hard for me to get enough sleep.

Has anyone started a Northern mystery novel with “It was a clear and sunny night...”?? ;)

Well, the original Insomnia was set in Tromsø (later remade by Nolan):

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119375/

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0278504/

Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart. Also, sunrise and sunset are always symmetrical to noon, even when the day length varies considerably. For setting up a time system, noon consequentially is the correct reference point. But yes, your day rhythm will vary relative to that across the year, but there will differences according to local (like latitude) and personal environments which will make sunrise not a good reference point for a time system.

> Noon is the only easily measurable time point in the day that is always (approximately) 24 hours apart.

DST resets the time to move noon closer to sunrise, not closer to midday. There are currently 4h30m before noon and 7h30m between noon and sunset. In the middle of summer, it's 6h30m before and 9h30m after. Noon isn't well indexed at all.

You and I are very much alike in thinking. Sunrise is the logical start of the day.

For appointments and scheduling, using GMT makes sense. For any other reference, hours after local sunrise makes much more sense.

IIRC our system of time is more so aligned with midday rather than midnight. As that is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky, which allowed us to create a common point between timezones.

The problem would be that everyone would have a different time depending on where they are on the globe, not only different hour but also minute. That would make things like meetings between people living in slightly different places very difficult. Timezones are needed by the modern organization of society, and I guess that organization is not necessarily very friendly with human needs.

IIRC, this is also how time is kept in some equatorial regions, as their days are consistently the same length year-round. Starting one 12 hour cycle at daybreak and another at sunset made the most sense.

May work well in your latitude, but go far enough north and it’d just get ridiculous over the year.

Sunrise is also gradual and long enough around the solstices to become quite arbitrary

a thousand years ago in Scandinavia the new day would start at 6pm, effectively at sunset, which is also why Christmas in Scandinavia is on the evening of the 24th instead of the 25th in the morning.

Or so the legend goes. I'm pretty sure that the ancient winter solstice feast had something to do with it as well. In Scandinavia the word for christmas is still some variation of the ancient "Yule" meaning wheel in old norse.

That would mean variable length days right? Sounds a bit like a nightmare.

It would be a bit of a nightmare for makers of mechanical clocks. For nearly everyone else if their clocks automatically handled it, I can't think of many people that would notice that the interval from a given time one day to the same time the next day varies slightly from day to day.

We already have variable length days ;)

My single biggest frustration with excessive use of outdoor illumination at night is that it means I have to use blackout curtains to have a dark bedroom at night.

Without that, there would be absolutely no reason to even think about a technological solution for waking up with the sun.

OT: I have a tip for blackout curtains.

There are expensive ones that do a really good job of blocking light, and inexpensive ones that let some light through.

Walmart's house brand, Mainstays, is the later. They block a decent amount of light, but some will get through.

I found that if you use blackout curtains with grommets, like the Mainstays [1], you can simply double them up. Set one panel on top of another with their grommets aligned, and you have a double blackout curtain. A pair of $10 Mainstay panels doubled work as well as the expensive ones which are way more than 2x$10 per panel.

If you need more than one panel (or pairs of doubled panels) side by side to cover your window, the grommets can help there too. Overlap them side by side by a couple grommets. You've now got effectively one wider panel.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mainstays-Blackout-Energy-Efficie...

I once jury-rigged blackout curtains by attempting to dye regular white curtains with a navy dye; the colour only partially took, and turned out to be at precisely the right spot on the em spectrum to act as an irresistible magnet for bees, which would consistently wake me on summer mornings coming though the open window and buzzing against the botched curtains, rather obviating the purpose!

Or just use an eye mask?

In my case my blackout curtains are not to help with sleep. They are in my living room, where the only good spot for my TV is opposite a window that can get a lot of sunlight.

When watching TV the bright reflections in the screen from that window can be quite annoying, especially during darker scenes. During parts of some days you can actually see a reflection of the sun itself in the TV screen, making it hard to see even bright scenes.

We live fairly rural so it's not a huge issue. The moon is usually the brightest thing we have to deal with. I have considered automated black out blinds even for that (plus for daytime movie viewing and naps!)

I was gifted some Philips Hue lights a few years ago. I set one up on my nightstand to turn on at sunrise (actually earlier in the winter, sunrise is the latest I want it set to). It's a much more pleasant way to wake up (with it fading in over 10 minutes or so) than an actual alarm clock. Of course, it can't travel with you but it's not a bad option for the home.

Scandinavian here, i'll pass :)

Most of June the sun rises from 4:30 to 4:50, and it's not until late august it rises around 6am again. Sunset is between 9pm and 10pm, civil twilight lasts until 3:42am, and the sun never goes below 12 degrees.

From November to February it doesn't rise until 8am. (and sets around 4pm, astronomical twilight around 6pm)

We have a large roof window that allows morning sunlight to enter our bedroom, and while my brain/body would probably benefit from following the natural daylight cycle, it has the shutters closed for most of the summer.

My theory is that most people who write on HN about waking up at sunrise (it's a common theme) live in the US, much of which is substantially closer to the equator than Northern and Central Europe.

Nice mild weather with sane sunrise/sunset times all year round is definitely on the list of things I envy about the SF Bay Area.

I live in Oregon which is the same latitude as much of Europe. In the height of summer, days are 16 hours long which leaves a near perfect 8 hours of dark for sleep. It's just a tiny bit south of London and Berlin. About even with Paris, and further north than Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.

It's mostly not about the middle of summer. We have fabulous long summer evenings. It's the interim months like right now, where I most miss having that extra time in the evening. I want long evenings every day possible.

But they miss the glorious long summer evenings we get further north!

Philips also sells an actual wake-up light alarm clock(s) (such as HF3519/01 ). They have smaller models too which probably would be OK to pack for travel.

I actually do something very similar. The light doesn't fade in, but I have some strip lighting which turns on before my alarm. It's a great way to get moving in the morning without a jarring alarm.

I built a watch face for my Garmin that emphasizes the time relative to the next solar event, so right now it reads

(last solar event in small font) Sunset 19:17

(current date/time small) Mon 15 19:26

(relative time to next solar event in large) Dusk in 17

It tracks dawn, sunrise, solar noon, sunset, and dusk. It's pretty simple but has changed how I go about my day. I don't use an alarm to wake up, but I've learned that when it's 8 hours to dawn I should be getting in bed.

The problem is stores need to open at some specific time, and thus need employees to start work at that specific time. Adjusting either of those based on the sunrise every day wouldn't be very practical.

If everyone did it, it would work fine.

Business hours : 1 hour after sunrise until 10 hours after sunrise.

Even without that, many of us have flexible hours and can either start work earlier, or just do something before work when we have time. Waking up early in the summer means you can catch a bike ride or take a short run or hike before work. Since it's too hot in the afternoon/ evening this works quite well for much of the country.

It would be massive mess. Unless we tie large regions to some specific point. Entire idea of timezones was to get rid off local times. Bringing them back would just cause more issues specially in current world with all the electronic communications we do.

The time when sunrises changes both when travelling west to east and south to north... Not to even mention being beyond artic circle. Where sun never rises or sets at least on some days...

Yeah, but it's not possible for everyone to do it, because sunrise changes depending on both your latitude and longitude. Some places the sun never sets and rises for months at a time. We interact with businesses that aren't close to us.

For those who are just doing it on their own, I think DST actually helps them. The government creates a very rough movement following sunrise, and you can use personal adjustments to zero in on the exact sunrise time.

Please write that app.

Would buy for $4.99.

Here you go: https://apps.apple.com/mk/app/wake-up-light-sunrise-alarm/id...

That seems like it solves the problem in the reverse direction.

I want an app that allows me to shift my schedule to the sun, not sync an artificial sun to my schedule.