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

nature.com

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

#431

Post by layer8 »

layer8 wrote: post #361
c3534l wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I guess in those days, there weren't as many systems that depended on the assumption of time lurching forward one second at a time.

Few systems actually should need to depend on the clock tick matching actual elapsed seconds, and those who do depend on accurate elapsed time usually only do so short-term (while the program is executing) and don’t need to correlate that time with calendar dates and time-of-day. Most applications could very well live with an intermittently slowed-down time-of-day clock upon leap-second insertion, or a fast-forward u…

s/grow/go wrong/

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

#432

Post by db48x »

tim-- wrote: post #395
db48x wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they‘re mostly trivial variations of each other, or durations that nobody uses at all.

That's the problem though. If you don't support the durations that nobody uses, then you can't fully support ISO8601 dates. Every trivial variation is another if/switch statement.

Durations are not used in places that need a timestamp, and visa versa. More applications need timestamps than need durations.

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

#434

Post by dredmorbius »

akyshnik wrote: post #339
ZhangSWEFAANG wrote: post #338

Does anyone find it weird that the General Conference of Weights and Measures has acronym CGWM instead of GCWM?

It's CGPM, from French "Conférence générale des poids et mesures"

This is also fairly common on international bodies' initialisms for which there are multiple official languages, to not favour any one of them.

"ISO" is the International Organization for Standardization, in English, Organisation internationale de normalisation in French, and Международная организация по стандартизации in Russian, its three official languages, as one fairly well-known example.

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

#435

Post by dangero »

nullc wrote: post #368
dangero wrote: post #122

Google does "leap smearing" which seems like the best human solution to this problem: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-... standardizing leap smearing algos and constants could work -Bottom layer is atomic clock seconds -We define targeted relationship between current UTC and atomic counter that will occur on a given day and time X -Time is interpolated to drift UTC into place by the given…

Leap smearing is awful except for rough synchronization operations that don't care if you redefine a second, and even there it isn't great even if you know the exact smearing formula because you can't easily tell if the data you're getting is pre-smeared or post-smeared, or should be smeared but isn't, and then you end double smearing or inverse smearing by accident.

Maybe it’s technologically difficult from a standards perspective, but it works well for humans. If the computer smears an extra second into my day, I won’t notice.

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

#436

Post by cturner »

gear54rus wrote: post #421
cturner wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread.." Someone who wants to buy or sell goes to a market in order execute at the best price achievable, and they may be under time pressure. If the spreads are wider at one place than another, participants will gravitate to the place with the narrower spreads. If there is better liquidity at one place than another, activity will move to that place. The purpose…

Unless I'm missing something, a spread between 10 and 20 is not a place where you can 'buy for 10 and sell for 20'. Otherwise these 2 guys could fill their orders immediately. 10 20 means you can sell for 10 and buy for 20 instead.

My error, thanks for the correction.

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

#437

Post by cturner »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #425
cturner wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread.." Someone who wants to buy or sell goes to a market in order execute at the best price achievable, and they may be under time pressure. If the spreads are wider at one place than another, participants will gravitate to the place with the narrower spreads. If there is better liquidity at one place than another, activity will move to that place. The purpose…

I feel like you basically rephrased what I said, but added a little terminology around it and said it's a good thing. Market orders taking 1 second to fill instead of 80 milliseconds isn't a meaningful contribution to society. Imagine a world with no market makers. There would still be plenty of buyers and sellers of SPY shares at any given time to keep a tight spread and fast execution, but people placing market ord…

What is your goal? Is it better markets, or getting rid of market makers?

You seem fixated on the latter, to the extent that you will define away the quality measures of a market to get there.

The vampire/victim labelling you use is unreasonable. Market makers rest liquidity on the book and then other participants choose to interact with them. Both participants have chosen to enter the deal.

You propose a market without market makers. If you set up such a book, I expect you would find that nobody would want to trade there because they will get better prices and more liquidity elsewhere. If it was a good model, then all the exchanges would be doing it.

You misuse the term front-running here. Front running is when a broker has an order from a customer, and places orders on their own behalf before processing the customer order. In doing so they would put their own interest ahead of the customers. Rules about front running are a form of consumer protection. On-exchange market makers do not have customers, so the concept of front running is not relevant there.

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

#438

Post by Matumio »

bentcorner wrote: post #334
FeistySkink wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is comparing aggregated data across several time zones when DST changes happen.

Shouldn't you just aggregate based on UTC? Leap seconds still cause a problem here but daylight savings shouldn't matter.

People expect e.g. their "daily power consumption" to end at midnight local time. When they zoom in on the daily aggregates, they don't want a spike to suddenly disappear just because it belonged to the next local day and you only stored UTC-day aggregates. Even more so for billing.

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

#439

Post by throw827474737 »

kortilla wrote: post #381
throw827474737 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, they could have been working on something truly valuable like.... But why not just a reasonable product? Yes, what could that be, there cannot be something that is fairly priced and people really want, need, what just helps. Not today anymore! > By your definition insurance I know what you try there and on a very abstract level you are maybe slightly right, but PLEASE no, high level gambling (==milliseconds&m…

> high level gambling This is a weasel phrase. Insurance is high level gambling as well. They both use risk models to decide at what price they will sit on the opposite side of a trade for. Decide where you really draw the line and if it’s time horizons that’s pretty arbitrarily stupid. Insurance uses re-insurance quite quickly to de-risk their own books so pretending trading within a minute vs daily/hourly is pretty…

You didn't want to understand me. Sure both use risk models, but exactly this still doesn't make them anyhow relatable? And sure I know still that everything is interconnected, but it is clear that if someone complains about fintech (but other arguments then immediately go into the "oh you say fintech, but what about .."), he doesn't mean the necessary stuff like payments processing or normal markets. anyway fine to disagree here ;)
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