No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026 • Hacker News Board

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#221

Post by opem » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:25 AM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101

tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

How is this relevant to the current topic? I don't have any context on political stories you are discussing, but I am fairly sure that this isn't the place to do so, not at least this thread.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#222

Post by BoxOfRain » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:30 AM UTC

opem wrote: post #221

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

How is this relevant to the current topic? I don't have any context on political stories you are discussing, but I am fairly sure that this isn't the place to do so, not at least this thread.

With all due respect, this is the kind of attitude which caused people to leave Stack Overflow en masse. We're discussing interestingly complex political procedures, this event has triggered several.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#223

Post by BoxOfRain » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:32 AM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #205

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

Comments like this make me really worry for the future of Hacker News. Here we are, on a seemingly informative thread, and you’ve jumped in with baseless political propaganda no doubt designed to influence the upcoming election. His honour Count Binface is from Sigma IX not Sigma 6! To lump him in with those scurrilous, pro-littering hoodlums is the kind of anti-Recyclon smear I would associate with Sigma X’s online…

A fair point, I acknowledge my error without any admission of liability under intergalactic defamation law.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#224

Post by latexr » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:34 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #124

latexr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For further context, Doctor Who is a member of the species.

I think if we're being pedantic, the character's name is "The Doctor". The TV show is named "Doctor Who" but the character doesn't call themself that and a name is what something is called. [Edited to avoid assigning a gender to a character who has had different genders]

I wasn’t being pedantic, I was (as per my words), providing further context. Anyone who has watched the show knows these things, they are basic information from it. My post and the one I replied to are (obviously) for people who know close to nothing about it, and those people won’t know who “The Doctor” is, the point was to make it clear it’s the main character.

Also, not only is “The Doctor” not the character’s real name, they have been called “Doctor Who” multiple times, including in credits, so you pedantry isn’t even right.

https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-name-debate-settle-explain...

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#225

Post by klausa » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:35 AM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #220

tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

[flagged]

I found the anecdote about it being technically impossible to resign as an MP interesting and am glad that the person posted it.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#226

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:49 AM UTC

opem wrote: post #221

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

How is this relevant to the current topic? I don't have any context on political stories you are discussing, but I am fairly sure that this isn't the place to do so, not at least this thread.

[deleted]

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#227

Post by spacedcowboy » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:51 AM UTC

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #207

ncallaway wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very disappointed to hear that the Monster Raving Loony party is deciding to stand and split the vote. I thought this was an opportunity for them to be tactical, but no. (this is a joke)

Binface's speculation to the media is that the Monster Raving Loony party may split the vote with Farage instead as that is closer to where his loyalties lie.

This is funny :) True, as well...

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#228

Post by iso1631 » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 8:51 AM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101

tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

More appropiate would be the legal inability to resign from the house of commons, thus having to be appointed to a specific office of the crown which is incompatible with being a member of the commons.

There were arguments that the government should refuse Farage's appointment because he's doing it to stop the clock on investigation into his various financial dealings. While against constitutional law to decline such, it was discussed in similar situations in the past - fairly recently in fact for the same reason -- Henry Cadogan in 1842

On the subject of headwear in parliament, I quote the member for Hereford who yesterday in parliament said:

> How very different from the forthcoming by-election in Clacton, which appears to be a choice between a novelty comedy act with no real policies, and Count Binface. It is a long time since we had a count in the House of Commons, and when the time comes—as it surely will—we will have to leave to you, Mr Speaker, the delicate question of whether and how to suspend the rules on headgear in the Chamber for the new Member.

Which implies that the laws around headgear are at the behest of the Speaker.

There is precedent in electoral history for election of people dressed as a figure -- H'Angus the Monkey (a football mascott, not an actual monkey) was elected Mayor. However on the ballot paper his entry was

STUART DRUMMOND Independent

Where as Binface's is

Count BINFACE Count Binface Party

Given Farage received a mere 45% in 2024, and a unity candidate beat an incumbant mp who previosuly had 55% and was mired in a similar scandal back in 1997, it's not impossible.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#229

Post by maxnoe » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:17 AM UTC

Dansvidania wrote: post #180

eqvinox wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really annoying part is that "leap smearing" (where people decided to just mush the leap second across about day) has made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard, since some leap smearing approaches affect that as well. Which destroyed any assumption a developer could make about CLOCK_MONOTONIC, since you won't know if leap smearing is in use :(. (And depending on the leap smearing implementation, it also smears…

I don't think I understand.. can you please dumb it down even more? I'd figured that UNIX time just counts actual seconds and that leap seconds and similar calendar shenanigans would be a problem of mapping epoch to the correct date, so that if normally epoch X maps to date D then both epoch X and X+1 map to date D. Am i to understand that leap seconds "stretch" a epoch unit ? so that some epoch second "lasted longer…

Unix time does not count elapsed seconds in real time since 1970-01-01T00:00:00, this is a common misconception.

Unix time assumes a fixed number of seconds per day. 86400. If a leap second is inserted, either end of June or end of December, the day is 86401 seconds long.

There are different implementations for how your Unix time will behave 24 hours before to 24 hours after the leap second. A timestamp might just repeat during the leap second or the system changes the length of a second in a time range around the leap second introduction to make up the difference. This is called smearing.

A simple example is the elapsed time between these two timestamps:

    2016-12-31 23:59:50
    2017-01-01 00:00:10

Unix time differs by 20 seconds (assuming the system/library doesn't use smearing). But actually elapsed time is 21 seconds, since

    2016-12-31 23:59:60

was the last added leap second. This timestamp cannot be represented by Unix time (again assuming no smearing, with smearing you could).

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#230

Post by ralferoo » Fri, Jul 10, 2026, 9:19 AM UTC

doctoboggan wrote: post #30

What 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?

Quite the opposite. The earth's rotation can vary by quite a few seconds each year. But over hundreds of years, the variations mostly cancel out, which is why I think trying to add or remove leap seconds are a bad idea. The only people who care about such things are space agencies, and they can apply whatever offset they want, it doesn't need to affect everyone else.

Arguably, the only real-world impact this drift has on normal people is GPS, but GPS already transmits an offset from its own clock so that receivers can correct for that. The GPS clock is different both from UTC and TIA.