White House Petition to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time(petitions.whitehouse.gov)
petitions.whitehouse.gov
White House Petition to Eliminate Daylight Savings Time
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/eliminate-bi-annual-time-change-caused-daylight-savings-time/ShChxpKh
6 comments
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.
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.
Always my favorite video showing just how crazy DST makes everything: http://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4
Get rid of the multiple timezones in the USA while we're at it.
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.