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

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

#241

Post by amiga386 »

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…

The most amazing thing would be if he removed his helmet on entry to Parliament and underneath was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sidebottom

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

#242

Post by dmurray »

tialaramex wrote: post #232
donall wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that SF is not a protest vote but they do vote and debate. Since their first major electoral victory over 100 years ago they have been clear that they represent their constituents to the best of their abilities (I won't opine on the quality of representation in this forum). That has always involved a cabinet, votes, debates, and eventually a bicameral legislature. The key aspect is that they consider the Englis…

The thing is, an SF MP can't vote or debate because they, by policy, refuse to attend. You're correct that the party has representatives in the other bodies which it does recognise but those aren't the same people. So for example Órfhlaith Begley was elected MP for West Tyrone. Her voters will have known she's not going to Westminster, and she didn't - but she's not in some parallel institution instead, AFAIK there i…

But Órfhlaith Begley does go to Westminster, and she has an access badge for the Houses of Parliament, and she flies over there and works in her office in the parliament buildings and answers her @parliament.co.uk emails and asks her staffers (paid for by the parliament) to respond to letters on paper headed Órfhlaith Begley MP. All the work of an MP except the most performative part.

She just doesn't go into the room which is called the House of Commons and try to speak or vote there, because the armed guards at the door won't let in anyone who doesn't swear allegiance to the King. If swearing allegiance to the King was a requirement to use the email system, then she wouldn't do that either.

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

#243

Post by ChrisRR »

tialaramex wrote: post #70
_alternator_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, yes, the weather, geology, and signicantly, human movement of water via aquifer draining and dam building, as well as glaicial and ice melts, all contribute to unpredictable changes in the earths rotational period, as well as the axis of rotation. The models for this are IIRC trigonometric polynomials of fairly low order, so even if we could model the unpredictability perfectly, truncation error would limit…

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…

What a weird tangent

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

#244

Post by mellosouls »

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…

Binface discussion thread here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848034

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

#245

Post by acessoproibido »

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…

Well played sir you got me good in the first half

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

#246

Post by pineapplepizza5 »

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…

[dead]

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

#248

Post by pdonis »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #201
pdonis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined? > It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. Which is why I specified on the prime meridian, which is the particular local meridian that UTC is defined as corresponding to. > solar noon varies from day to day by 10-20 seconds. Which is why I was careful to specify mean solar noon. I'm not quite sure what your is…

> Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined? That's an explanation of how it is, not why we should care to preserve it. The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history. > Which is why I was careful to specify mean solar noon. And "mean solar noon" is meaningless to people's lives. Even in the areas where time zones do follow meridians and not country bor…

> The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history.

In terms of what physical process we use to set the standard, yes. But those very changes were made to try to preserve the same time periods that were important to humans. In other words, to not change what hours, minutes, and seconds mean intuitively to us humans as we go about our daily lives.

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

#249

Post by globular-toast »

prerok wrote: post #134
tialaramex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically we guessed wrong. We thought knowing "Solar time" would be more useful than in it, and we thought these "Leap seconds" would be less trouble than they are. It's like you buy a cat to help with your rodent problem, figuring the cat will eat mice and isn't much trouble to look after, but after purchasing a cat you find that your problem was actually rats, your cat is terrified of these large dangerous creatur…

Heh, I like the analogy but my question was really why it was considered such a hassle. I mean we deal with daylight saving time all the time and I know it's not the same because the leap second affects UTC, not just local time zone, it's just that you are either dealing with monotonically increasing time like epoch, or you are dealing with "human" time and I found no distinction in the latter. Is it "just" that leap…

The real problem is they made Unix time non-monotonic. So there is no agreed universal monotonic clock.

We also don't deal with DST very well either. You won't believe the amount of programs written that treat local time as monotonic. It causes all kinds of problems and most people roll their eyes when someone who knows pipes up about local time and time zones etc.

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

#250

Post by roryirvine »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #164
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…

Leap minutes. You only change your clock when you have accumulated a minute of error. Then you only need to change it once per century

That actually sounds like the worst of all possible worlds!

It's infrequent enough that most systems won't bother implementing it, but a big enough time difference that it absolutely must be handled correctly at the right instant.

You'd be setting yourself up for a millennium bug-sized panic every century. And as soon as that the generation that experiences one retires, their successors will start saying "there's not going to be a leap minute for the next couple of decades, and there's no chance our code will still be running then...", and the cycle will repeat. Again and again and again.

The leap hour proposal is better because if it really is still relevant in however-many-thousand years, we can do a long-term plan to handle it which includes giving a century of notice.

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