Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lists.iana.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 159 posts

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

#41

Post by philwelch »

throw0101d wrote: post #7
imglorp wrote: post #4

Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…

> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…

> There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such

“Over time” really glosses over how much time it would take. In 500 years there might be half as much divergence between solar noon and 12:00pm as we intentionally inflict on ourselves with DST, or that France and Spain inflicted on themselves in the 1940’s so they could share a time zone with Germany. By the time anyone will even notice we will probably change time systems for other reasons anyway. It’s not even remotely comparable to the Julian/Gregorian issue, which dealt with leap days. Each day has 86400 seconds.

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

#42

Post by phicoh »

paulddraper wrote: post #21
Vvector wrote: post #13

Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain. Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.

> The only people who need it are Astronomers. And anyone that cares about the relationship of the time of day and the position of the Sun. Granted, it's not a lot, only a minute per century.

Which means that time changes slowly enough that we don't notice. At some point everybody goes work half an hour earlier because it makes sense. Schools start earlier, shops open earlier. It doesn't have to be coordinated worldwide. Every region or even town can have its own customs. Then people notice they are in the wrong time zone and a country moves to a different time zone.

Statistically, nobody on Earth knows what UTC is. People know about their local time zone and how it related to time zones in other countries. Where the position of the sun is relative to UTC, almost nobody knows.

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

#43

Post by dijit »

imglorp wrote: post #4

Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…

Just here to reinforce your point.

The last leap-second I encountered (also the 2014 one) crashed my MySQL databases.

you wouldn't assume that it depends on time like that, because honestly why would it? "surely it's fine, NTP corrects drift of a second fairly frequently"- but a leap second is not a drift, it's something quite insane unless your primitives are solid. Nobody would test for this.

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

#44

Post by philwelch »

coldpie wrote: post #14
Vvector wrote: post #13

Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain. Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.

Hmm. I understand that perspective, but I'm not sure I agree. It does seem to matter over a relatively short & realistic time scale. According to the Wikipedia page, there have been 27 seconds added since 1972, which is only 44 years ago. At that rate, that's about 1 minute per 100 years. We have many systems that have existed for several centuries and I think it's not unreasonable to start making plans for systems t…

You make a good argument for the opposite of your conclusion. If you’re planning a system that’s supposed to last for millennia, that system shouldn’t depend on the fiat of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

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

#45

Post by b112 »

throw0101d wrote: post #7
imglorp wrote: post #4

Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…

> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…

If you think you're going to steal days off my life, you've got another thing coming buster!

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

#46

Post by paulddraper »

Vvector wrote: post #33
paulddraper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only people who need it are Astronomers. And anyone that cares about the relationship of the time of day and the position of the Sun. Granted, it's not a lot, only a minute per century.

Yet high noon at my current location comes at 12:03 (1:03 with DST). It's three minutes off. If I lived further west in my timezone, noon would come much later. How can people manage with noon off by minutes, yet want leap-second accuracy every 6 months?

More like every 2 years.

But yes, point taken.

The counterpoint is that it costs little.

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

#47

Post by wmf »

throw0101d wrote: post #37
wmf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a leap hour yesterday...

> We had a leap hour yesterday... Prescheduled. Now tell everyone we're having one June 30, 2029, and see how things go.

If we eliminate leap seconds, we'll need a leap hour in ~500 years. It could be announced 50 years in advance.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

tialaramex wrote: post #9
throw0101d wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…

The calendar adjustments are because the planet's constant orbital period isn't a whole number of days. The leap seconds were an attempt to have wall clock time map to the planet's rotational angle consistently despite the problem that the planet's spin varies unpredictably. Yes the "leap hour" is a legal fiction of course. In reality in the event anybody cares about this in the distant future they will make the kind…

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by euroderf »

throw0101d wrote: post #7
imglorp wrote: post #4

Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…

> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…

> There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such.

It won't happen on a human scale. So why oh why do we screw around with this moronic leap-second nonsense ? Oh dear, in the year 4000 noon will arrive three minutes earlier compared to now. So?

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

#50

Post by euroderf »

paulddraper wrote: post #46
Vvector wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet high noon at my current location comes at 12:03 (1:03 with DST). It's three minutes off. If I lived further west in my timezone, noon would come much later. How can people manage with noon off by minutes, yet want leap-second accuracy every 6 months?

More like every 2 years. But yes, point taken. The counterpoint is that it costs little.

> The counterpoint is that it costs little.

Radical changes to time-related software cost little ? Stop press !

Post reply on HN