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

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 456 posts

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

#51

Post by Vvector »

CryZe wrote: post #32
nousermane wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TAI - atomic clock, ignores earth rotation. UT1 - based on Earth's rotation only, strictly 86400 seconds per day; length of each second varies; takes a heck of a lot of effort (and time) to measure accurately. UTC - has same length of a second as TAI, but (for now) tracks UT1 to a precision of +/- 1 second. To achieve that, can have days that are 86399, or 86400, or 86401 seconds long. None of 3 is planned for scrapp…

Oh right, I confused the terminology, but the point still stands mostly.

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

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

#52

Post by micah94 »

clnq wrote: post #20

> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night. A very interesting idea, but probably much too progressive.

I'm for this. Get rid of timezones, AM, PM, DST, leap years, seconds, all of it! Imagine having to know just one time. It takes a bit to wrap your head around. But only because we've accepted all the confusion for so long. The sun is still going to be "up" in one part of the world and "down" in another. The little numbers on your clock don't change that. Why can't it be the same little numbers everywhere?

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

#54

Post by kangalioo »

CryZe wrote: post #14

How is this supposed to work? The rotation of the earth is not a constant. So we either scrap UT1 ("the atomic clock") or UTC ("the calendar"). Neither sound like an actual option. The latter would imply that at some (far off) point in the future you wake up at like 10pm as UTC and UT1 are now entirely mismatched (you may as well get rid of all time zones at that point).

In my opinion, leap seconds are accumulated so slowly that the impact of abolishing leap seconds won't be noticeable in daily life for a couple hundred years.

As the article said, many countries jump forwards and backwards an entire hour twice a year and after the adaptation period we don't notice

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

#55

Post by bobthepanda »

kangalioo wrote: post #43
Hamuko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?

Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night

Also, historically, we did care about the equinoxes and solstices falling on specific days of the calendar.

We may not care anymore, but emphasis on may.

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

#57

Post by magnio »

micah94 wrote: post #52
clnq wrote: post #20

> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night. A very interesting idea, but probably much too progressive.

I'm for this. Get rid of timezones, AM, PM, DST, leap years, seconds, all of it! Imagine having to know just one time. It takes a bit to wrap your head around. But only because we've accepted all the confusion for so long. The sun is still going to be "up" in one part of the world and "down" in another. The little numbers on your clock don't change that. Why can't it be the same little numbers everywhere?

How do you know whether the sun is up or down in a place when all places have the same time?

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

#58

Post by Vvector »

kangalioo wrote: post #43
Hamuko wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely we won’t just get more and more out of synch with the earths orbit? Why does being out of sync with the Earth's orbit matter?

Because humans use time as an indicator for day and night

And you can still use UTC as your indicator for day and night. In 100 years, it would only drift around 1 minute.

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

#59

Post by jylam »

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.
Post reply on HN