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The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

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Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#111

Post by LaputanMachine »

ender341341 wrote: post #89
jylam wrote: post #59

It seems I've got an unpopular opinion reading the comments here, but having some leap seconds from time to time ensure we are able to manage them. But "no leap second should be added for at least a century" ensures there will be a y2k reckoning every century. Seems short sighted to me, even if it is not a game-changing issue, let's be honest.

Why have them at all? how many people do things where they actually matter? at the current rate it'll be ~9000ad before we hit an hour offset, and we do hour offsets twice a year, so if an hour off is okay why is 1 second off not?

> we do hour offsets twice a year, so if an hour off is okay why is 1 second off not?

The actual Unix time does not change when the clocks are switched between daylight saving time and standard time. Only the time zone changes.

When a leap second occurs, the actual Unix time changes, which can lead to bugs, e.g. when a positive time difference comes back as negative. To prevent such issues, a monotonic clock can be used to measure time intervals.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#112

Post by [deleted] »

hoytech wrote: post #103

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

[deleted]

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#113

Post by programmarchy »

hoytech wrote: post #103

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

Moral of the story is that sometimes social engineering is much cheaper and more effective than software engineering!

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#114

Post by throw0101a »

charcircuit wrote: post #79
adamsb6 wrote: post #50

Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…

There has never been a negative leap second. >If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute The drift is not in a single direction. The total drift is not going to be significant for a very long time if ever.

> There has never been a negative leap second.

That doesn't stop the (e.g.) FreeBSD folks run tests to make sure things are fine:

* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-Nove...

* https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/leap-seconds/

Of course there's a whole lot of other userland code besides ntpd.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#115

Post by hcrisp »

hoytech wrote: post #103

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

Reminds me of the story of the computer engineer at Data General in Traccy Kidder's nonficion book, "The Soul of a New Machine" [0], who quit after spending weeks toiling away on sub-second timing concerns:

> He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#116

Post by gnu8 »

hoytech wrote: post #103

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

It is a uniquely crummy feeling to have your work go unused like that, but you shouldn’t let it discourage you. You reached a level of mastery on this particular thing that few people have, which is evidenced by the fact that no one else in the trading community was able to reach your company’s level of confidence and they decided to wait out the leap second instead.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#117

Post by ARandomerDude »

Akronymus wrote: post #35
kibwen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.

Wouldn't work afaict. You'd have to get rid of the mass, not just explode it.

“Sir, are you suggesting that we blow up the moon?”

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#118

Post by gcanyon »

It's (less than) a minute a century -- why would we not simply say "no corrections except at the century mark, in the middle of the weekend closest to January 31st"? That way:

There's an exact time everyone knows the correction will happen, it's just a question of how big the correction will be.

The correction is always in the same direction -- no "one second forward, then later one second back" shenanigans.

It always happens over a weekend, so no one has to deal with real-time work-time issues.

While maybe some have to work a weekend, at least it's not near the year-end holidays.

It only happens once every 100 years.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#119

Post by bewaretheirs »

throw0101a wrote: post #85
bewaretheirs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drift is sufficiently slow that you can fix it with a "leap hour" when needed -- perhaps once every five thousand years. This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.

> This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged. Like I said: it could become a huge coordination problem. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption_by... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...

it's really just a tzdata update for the vast majority of computer systems. That package updates several times a year. Get the revised rule in there a decade in advance and you're golden.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#120

Post by ajkjk »

krick wrote: post #108
ajkjk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a totally valid synecdoche. "The world votes..." doesn't mean "every human on earth votes...", it means "a worldwide body votes...".

It is "a valid synecdoche" only as long as we accept that doublethink and newspeak are desirable. Sure, calling black — "white", dictatorship — "worldwide democracy" and so on… everyone will adjust. And by "will" I mean "already do and always did" — there's nothing new about this, it's just the "truths" we are supposed to believe in are what changes over the centuries, not the way societies work. Perhaps it's even tr…

I... uh... it's a normal phrase. Dunno know what to tell you. You're not gonna get a lot of takers on this being "bullshit". Feels like you're mad about something big and taking it out on random irrelevant things.

There's maybe an argument to be made that using language which implies the legitimacy of organizations as presenting "all of us" is a sort of supremacist way to act, because it casually legitimizes whoever happens to be in power without questioning where they got that power or whether they earned or deserve it.

But, like, it's a standards body. If the world didn't have one it would want to go and make one and then be back where we started. This isn't the interesting battlefield for that kind of point.

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