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    Andy Woodruff

    andywoodruff.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2015

    Andy Woodruff, a cartographer and data visualization designer, makes interactive maps on time zones, geography, eclipses, and flight tracking.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    Data & VisualizationScience
    What HN says

    HN links it for the daylight saving time visualization, which commenters call a nice interactive view of sunrise and sunset times.

    Stats for nerds
    21HN people shared it
    14linked in comments
    264story points
    Mar 2026last shared
    2016people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
      9 people · 121 points · first shared 2015 · 84 comments on HN
    2. 2
      FlightAware Map Design (2024)
      1 person · 102 points · first shared 2025 · 25 comments on HN
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      Eclipse 2024
      3 people · 30 points · first shared 2023 · 8 comments on HN
    4. 4
      What’s really across the ocean from you when you look straight out?
      7 people · 9 points · first shared 2016 · 2 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Land by latitude and longitude, or, a pile of continents
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2016 · Discussion on HN
    6. 6
      Boston squared
      1 person · first shared 2021

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • romwellSep 2018

      Thank you for answering. Now let's discuss this answer.

      The first question is: which specific time? This time will differ based on the timezone and geography. Because of timezones, sunrise time effectively makes a one-hour jump at the transition points, which makes this chart of yours look different for people living living close to timezone border vs. someone living in the center.

      To that end, which time zone and which city was this chart made for? Because we'd need many charts like that to see the effect of DST on sunrise time. (Remember, timezones make sunrise/sunset times depend on longtitude (exact coordinates, actually) as well as latitude and time of year!).

      Thankfully, some people have done just that[1][2] (note that [2] is interactive!).

      As you can see by playing with [2], if your goal is to have sunrise before 7:00AM across the country on as many days as possible, then DST works against this goal.

      Of course, one can always throw one's hands up in the air and say "it's an approximation". In the same sense, 0 is an approximation to any number -- just not a very good one.

      The US foreign debt is approximately 0 dollars, if you don't talk about error margins.

      Now, looking at the interactive chart at [2], do you really think that DST is a better approximation to "having the sun up at (your chosen time)" than doing nothing at all? Or shifting the whole timezone by an…

    • artimaeisMay 2019

      Really depends where you are on the globe in terms of latitude. Russia is a gargantuan country that currently spans 12 time zones, I don't think there's a single solution that can cover it, especially given that the southernmost portions of the country (mainland) are around 41° and the northernmost parts are around 77°N.

      I think the US tends to be much simpler in this regard (49°N-24°N - contiguous states). It seems in much of the country you really do get a more optimized time for sunrise/sunset if we all moved over 1 time zone: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/

    • floatrockMar 2021

      That saying is also oddly appropriate here because the joke for anyone who lived in boston is that the city is built on paved-over cow paths.

      (yes yes fun-police, it's actually a myth https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/03/06/boston-streets-cow-paths/ but the truth of it being a bunch of ad-hoc cities that coalesced into one entity isn't too far off from the truth. My favorite bit of Boston artwork is road silhouettes of all the Boston-area squares: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/boston-squared/ )

    • shagieMar 2026

      Most of the world tends to prefer to not be too far from the center of the timezone (where solar noon matches solar time in standard time). Geographic and political boundaries make it so that often it's more red. The extremes of north and south tend not to care as much because it doesn't matter as much.

      https://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/

    • lburtonMar 2022

      http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/ has a nice interactive viz for # of days a place has a sunrise/sunset before/after a certain time with or without DST.

    • leobabautaJan 2021

      Here’s a good visual way of exploring that: http://andywoodruff.com/blog/where-to-hate-daylight-saving-time-and-where-to-love-it/

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