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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

#231

Post by dylan604 »

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…

>I'm not sure what the moral is here, if there is one.

Apparently, its about as useful as the leap second itself ;)

I feel your pain though, as I've spent weeks on something only for it to be tossed away like it was nothing at the last second. I guess that's how Google devs feel when their projects are deprecated. At least theirs saw the light of day and provided some validation

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

#232

Post by kqr »

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…

I was gonna say, why not just close all positions and turn off the computers around the leap second? How much are you realistically gonna lose by missing a few minutes of trading, compared to the alternative risk?

Edit: I guess the other way to look it is I guess now how much you can make on a few minutes of trading, seeing that it was worth putting at least one software engineer on it for a long time despite the risks...

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

#233

Post by doctor_eval »

dwheeler wrote: post #188
krick wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I support your "hot take" — it is hot and requires a lot of contemplation. But that's not the point, IMO. The point is, that there ALREADY EXIST both TAI and UTC. TAI is true monotonic (whatever it means in a relativistic universe) and doesn't make any compromises. UTC abolishes monotonicity in order to keep both the length of a second and the time relationship to the orbital rotation. They both work. Fo…

Eliminating leap seconds was only a half measure. They should have finished the job by adding rockets to the Earth to ensure that its rotation will stay at exactly 24 hours. If they weren't going to do that, then why eliminate leap seconds? Kicking the problem down the road doesn't really solve the problem, it just makes it worse later.

Surely it’s all the test firings of Merlin and Raptor engines that’s slowing the earth down in the first place? I mean first he screws up twitter, now it’s time itself.

(/s)

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

#234

Post by alfalfasprout »

kqr wrote: post #232
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…

I was gonna say, why not just close all positions and turn off the computers around the leap second? How much are you realistically gonna lose by missing a few minutes of trading, compared to the alternative risk? Edit: I guess the other way to look it is I guess now how much you can make on a few minutes of trading, seeing that it was worth putting at least one software engineer on it for a long time despite the ris…

It can be extremely costly to close positions (often from a tax perspective this is a big-no no in some cases too).

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

#235

Post by kortilla »

jimmaswell wrote: post #190
svara wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moral of the story is that laziness is a virtue. Think of all the time that could have been saved, had you had no plans like your partners ;)

Think of all the time that could be better appropriated than on fintech in general. Seems like such a waste of resources siccing a bunch of computers against each other in a zero sum game of stock arbitrage. I will admit some of the stuff tech comes out of it is cool on its own at least.

Yeah, they could have been working on something truly valuable like violating people’s privacy with ad-tech. Or maybe sucking millions of hours of people’s lives away with TikTok algo improvements. Maybe they could be working on the next MoviePass!

> zero sum game of stock arbitrage.

By your definition insurance is zero sum as well. But people find that generally useful. Taking risk off of peoples hands has value even if a widget doesn’t come out the other end.

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

#236

Post by Vvector »

krick wrote: post #132
Vvector wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a minor problem. One minute off in a hundred years is something we can all live with.

I'm not saying that we can't, but saying that we can seems quite brave (and by "brave" I mean foolishly reckless) without actually trying it. I, for one, am not so sure. There is a lot of stupid stuff about calendars and clocks (of which DST is worst by far), but at least nothing is really drifting. Is it important that midnight is actually midnight? I don't know. I would prefer it to be, but perhaps I can just updat…

> Is it important that midnight is actually midnight?

Midnight is almost never at midnight.

Let's talk noon, specifically solar noon, as it is easier to visualize. Solar noon varies throughout the year, and based on the position in the timezone.

Solar noon for two cities in Eastern Time Zone: 11:29:16 - Boston 12:22:36 - Atlanta

Tomorrow, solar noon in Atlanta will be 12:22:50, 14 seconds later than today. No one notices a 14 second shift from one day to the next. As you can see, solar noon is almost never at clock noon, yet no one complains about that. Who would notice a 1 minute shift over 100 years?

The programming problem is made vastly more difficult because the leap seconds are not known in advance. When a new leap second is announced, every dependent system has to be updated.

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

#237

Post by [deleted] »

toast0 wrote: post #191
krick wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I support your "hot take" — it is hot and requires a lot of contemplation. But that's not the point, IMO. The point is, that there ALREADY EXIST both TAI and UTC. TAI is true monotonic (whatever it means in a relativistic universe) and doesn't make any compromises. UTC abolishes monotonicity in order to keep both the length of a second and the time relationship to the orbital rotation. They both work. Fo…

> For whatever reason (for obvious reasons that is, but doesn't matter) UTC was chosen in virtually any software system to keep time. What was chosen really isn't UTC. Several UTC seconds in the past are not accurately representable in unixtime. Several unixtime seconds in the past are ambigious as to which UTC second they are. Unixtime is awfully close to UTC time, but it's not the same. If UTC time stops inserting…

[deleted]

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

#239

Post by philwelch »

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…

It's going to be centuries until the difference between astronomical midnight and UTC midnight is more than an hour, which is the exact same amount of error we deliberately inflict on ourselves to have more daylight in summer evenings and half the error that residents of Spain experience by as a consequence of the political decision to join the same time zone as Berlin. If human civilization exists long enough for this to be an actual problem, we're probably going to have to figure out how to coordinate time with multiple space settlements, which is going to be a much harder problem thanks to time dilation.
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