Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
21–30 of 259 posts
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#22What happens to systems such as Spanner under these circumstances? Is it a headache or a non-issue
It’s a huge problem. The most common approach to address it is called smearing; the duration of each second for a 24 hour period ahead of the “leap” is adjusted. For strict ordering systems this works as each device maintains time sync with the global clock, the duration of a clock cycle is just slightly different. I think this was in the original Spanner paper, actually.
Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator seconds and ignore the earth rotation second, but if you ever have to translate those to real time, you get an accumulating disaster over time and it’s generally regarded as not a good idea.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#23Notice they only said leap second . Meanwhile.... International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... ( https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329 )
really, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#24Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#25Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#26As one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer.
They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#27They should have a global holiday to celebrate the people who maintain time/date related code in OS kernels that keeps the world from imploding.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#28What happens to systems such as Spanner under these circumstances? Is it a headache or a non-issue
It’s a huge problem. The most common approach to address it is called smearing; the duration of each second for a 24 hour period ahead of the “leap” is adjusted. For strict ordering systems this works as each device maintains time sync with the global clock, the duration of a clock cycle is just slightly different. I think this was in the original Spanner paper, actually. Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator se…
I wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#29> The difference between Coordinated Universal Time UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is :
>
> from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37s
This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.
Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
#30What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?