8 ms·
2016 will be one second longer
- li4ick 10y agoJust to give time to somebody else to die.
- Applejinx 10y agoYou know, if I had to pick a year to have one extra second of, 2016 would be pretty much be last on the list. Everybody brace yourselves for that second, lest another cool person die! :P
- misnome 10y agoCan't we put it at the start of 2017, instead?
- anonymfus 10y agoBetween 00:00:-01 and 00:00:00 of the first of January? There would be problems with segmented displays.
- iamatworknow 10y agoI hope you're saying this in jest, but even then the meme that "2016 has been the worst!" has been pretty insufferable. It's usually used in the context of celebrity deaths, but think about the explosion of mass media that occurred between the 70's and today. With more TV channels, radio stations, and the internet, the number of public figures we're exposed to on a regular basis is far greater than any generation before us. And like all of us those people die, and will keep dying, and the half-hearted and self-centered social media mourning will become even more commonplace. I, for one, can accept celebrity deaths, but I'm not sure if I can accept the annoying cultural impact they seem to be having.
- CorvusCrypto 10y agoIt's not just about the deaths, but also about the social and political events that have occurred. It can be argued that this has happened before at this frequency also and mass media is the culprit, but if the cultural impact is more awareness we should applaud it, not shy away. Annoying as they are, social media and memes offer a way to connect many to an idea and make things a bit more light-hearted as well.
- iamatworknow 10y agoMy frustration is more with the reaction to celebrity deaths where people use the death as a means to focus attention on themselves, and how a lot of people seem to think that a magic cosmic switch will turn off on December 31 and they'll stop happening.
- kobeya 10y agoIt's still been a very minor year, even for recent memory.
- alkonaut 10y agoBrexit, Trump, Syria, ... Even before we approach Bowie it's been pretty dreadful.
- iamatworknow 10y agoNo argument here. But what makes 2017 so special that these same sorts of events (or even more drastic ones) won't continue? Placing any amount of hope solely on an arbitrary date by wishing for a sooner end to 2016 just seems asinine.
- alkonaut 10y agoI'm not sure why people believe 2016 ending will somehow end the misery but I can understand why they hope it will. I think it's a bit tongue-in-cheek.
- marcosdumay 10y agoNobody believes it, it's a joke.
- gdulli 10y agoNobody thinks the year boundary has real meaning with regards to this or that anything will change. We spread the meme as a way of experiencing the observations of 2016 together and finding comfort in making it a shared phenomenon rather than one to experience alone. Rest assured, we know that attaching meaning to 2016 is symbolic and that "2016" is not a property of the universe that brings any intrinsic context to our civilization.
- Tempest1981 10y agoReminds me of this Billy Joel song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g Although it covers 40 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire
- lucb1e 10y ago> the meme that "2016 has been the worst!" has been pretty insufferable. This is the first time I've heard it mentioned. For finding it insufferable, you just spread the word.
- iamatworknow 10y agoI, unfortunately, still have a bit of a compulsion for social media, where this has been a growing trend since about June, but it has seeped into my workplace as well.
- anonymfus 10y agoWhere would you put 1941 in your list?
- tedunangst 10y agoPre Bowie, doesn't count.
- kobeya 10y agoJust below 1942.
- kobeya 10y agoI'd take 2016 over 1968 any year. Don't get me started on 1942.
- jasongill 10y agoHasn't this been discussed ad nauseam on HN before? The leap second insertion was announced 6 months ago
- PedroBatista 10y agoYes! and has been in everyone's mind ever since!
- chomp 10y agoYep, set my NTP server to slew the leap second after getting wrecked by the last one!
- snuxoll 10y agoI always found this a fascinating way to deal with the problem of leap seconds. I've been tempted to switch my servers from UTC to TAI to avoid the leap seconds altogether but I've been coming to realize that the clock being out of drift is more likely to confuse my coworkers than "just" dealing with a non-local time offset. Maybe I'll do this myself before the end of the year - but who am I kidding, I don't have time to reconfigure my NTP server right now.
- filipn 10y agoHaven't we suffered enough..
- starquake 10y agoI'm curious to see it the countdown on TV is going to take this into account
- takeda 10y agoUnfortunately (I would like to see it too), it only needs to be included if you're in UTC time zone, everywhere else the countdown will be the same.
- TorKlingberg 10y agoOh, so I can annoy my friends by counting down to the new year "correctly", one second after them.
- tonmoy 10y agoOnly if you are in UTC timezone I suppose
- tspiteri 10y agoIt is unclear for timezones behind UTC. If you are in UTC+1, the leap second happens at 1 am, so the countdown would be over: no fun here. If on the other hand you are in UTC-1, the leap second happens at 11 pm, so if the countdown clocks are not corrected for the leap second, friends can still be annoyed.
- suanmeiguo 10y agoEither way, your friends will be annoyed..
- Dylan16807 10y agoWhat clock is set that precisely, hasn't drifted since being set, and won't pick up the correction by itself?
- tspiteri 10y agoA GPS watch without a firmware update to handle the latest leap second?
- Dylan16807 10y agoGPS announces leap seconds well in advance.
- joeax 10y agoYour phone should update at one second before midnight UTC. So if your in EST then at 6:59:59, watch for 59 to be counted twice.
- Somasis 10y agoLet it end.
- analog31 10y agoMy band will have to play auld lang syne in five.
- an_account 10y ago10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 1... 0!!!
- halomru 10y agoThe seconds count 23:55 56 57 58 59 60 00:00 Counting the leap second twice is more of a quick hack used in computers, but it's not how it actually works
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- xg15 10y agoThat moment when some horrible thing will happen in that last second...
- hiccup 10y agoFinally, the time I need to get that side project done. Show HN: Passive Income 2017 post, here I come!!!
- creeble 10y agoA small point I missed that is covered in this article: leap seconds aren't added just because of the slowing of the Earth's rotation (as I've always explained it to others), but because atomic time is a few milliseconds per day faster than Earth time in general. Not sure how I missed that in previous discussions of leap seconds, but now I can comfortably spend my leap second in 2016 basking in this knowledge.
- arikrak 10y agoWhy couldn't they define the leap second more precisely then? I think there has to be an astronomic reason for the leap second. Either the Earth is slowing down or maybe the they want better alignment between the earth daily rotation and annual revolution.
- creeble 10y agoIt's both: average inaccuracy, and adjusted earth spin.
- masmullin 10y ago10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, Happy New YEAR!!!
- CorvusCrypto 10y agoAnother damn off-by-one error :(
- finid 10y agoOne second! In real terms, does it really count? A few months back, a friend of mine was so happy when she got on a scale and found that she's lost one pound. One pound!
- 4ad 10y agoThe weight of one person varies around 1kg each day depending of several factors. One measurement of one pound less doesn't necessarily mean any weight loss. She could have even gained some (minor) weight.
- tonmoy 10y agoAt least in the technical would I suppose it's a lot. For example your GPS could be off by miles because of 1 second.
- lucb1e 10y agoBeing off by a millisecond is already too much for practical use, if I recall correctly. GPS needs something more precise anyway, it's not for these systems that we need to include whole-second corrections. And besides, GPS doesn't actually use leap seconds.
- danellis 10y agoGPS time isn't UTC, it's... GPS Time. It's unaffected by leap seconds.
- brudgers 10y agoPersonally, a leap hour seems about the right level of granularity, but I suppose an approximately once per century leap minute would be ok. But leap seconds are a waste of time. If ignored since their introduction in 1972, official time would be out of sync with the Earth's rotation by 26 seconds. There's been a lot of running around and gnashing of teeth to correct 1.845668179868485e-7 error that isn't even an error most of the time. The 26 seconds of error fleshes out as 7.389 meters at the equator when using celestial navigation and for anything that accurate we use radio signals not a sextant. The Earth's rotation and revolution are useful abstractions at a certain level of granularity. But the reason we have atomic clocks is because those abstractions break down when we need precise measurements of reality. Reality is real because the rotation and revolution of the Earth are not cosmological constants. Leap seconds are an expression of the superstition that humans control the arrow of time: as if one thing happening after another would cease to be the case without them.
- frisco 10y agoAn error of 7 meters would probably mean the FAA would refuse to certify GPS for aircraft use. Even now it's only usable in many circumstances with ground based corrections (eg WAAS or GBAS). A minute of error would probably make it unusable for enroute navigation.
- creeble 10y agoI'm sure someone will point it out, but GPS doesn't use leap seconds. "Adding leap seconds is a waste of time" I see what you did there. And agree!
- frisco 10y agoInteresting. I didn't know that. I think half of the point remains (what sounds like a small error can be critical) but I guess GPS isn't a great example, then, as safety critical systems tend to be smarter by design anyway.
- 10y ago
- _greim_ 10y agoQuestion for the experts. Say I'm writing a bunch of code for date/time stuff in JavaScript, using the built-in `Date` API. Is this something I need to worry about? I've read countless "falsehoods programmers believe about time" blog posts but they tend to not explain the why of it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ue_ 10y agoThey also don't offer or explain any solutions. I've found the 'falsehoods' articles are good for generating discussion and not much else. They make the writer feel clever, without having to do anything.
- brudgers 10y agoI'm making to no claim to being an expert. Nevertheless, my question is "Does one second matter to your application? If so, how does Javascript's single threading, garbage collection, and default asynchronous programming idioms fit with the needs of a real or near real time system?"
- _greim_ 10y ago> Does one second matter to your application? Yes. And it's not just real-time; even when just displaying dates and times, an off-by-one error at any granularity can bump it into the next year. I guess what I'm wondering is how does the decision to add a leap second here or there find its way into system clocks, such that it knows whether: new Date(1483228800000).getUTCFullYear() ...is 2016 or 2017?
- brudgers 10y agois 2016 or 2017? Depends on where one is. It takes 24 hours for the New Year to propagate. The maximum error during propagation is < 0.00115741% Assuming that .getUTCFullYear() is accurate, the maximum error for a leap second is: 1 / (365 * 24 * 3600) = 3.1709791983764586e-8 The duration of that error is one second. Curious about the nature of the application.
- ridanaz12 10y ago2016 will be 1 second longer: Google can help you cope.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoGood reminder to use Google's public ntp servers, which perform leap-second smearing[1]. This is the only sensical way to handle this without strange edge cases in every-day software. 1. https://developers.google.com/time/ https://developers.google.com/time/
- wglb 10y agoWhen I was a young ham radio operator, I would listen to WWV often, both for time and propagation. I ordered a publication http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1788.pdf http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1788.pdf which has just about my favorite title for an article Dating of Events in the Vicinity of Leap Seconds. More modern material is at https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/leap-seconds-faqs https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/leap-se.... A good resource for red hat linux is https://access.redhat.com/articles/15145 https://access.redhat.com/articles/15145. And another resource is https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Best_Practices_for_Leap_Second_Event_Occurring_on_31_December_2016_S508C.pdf https://ics-cert.us-cert.gov/sites/default/files/documents/B...
- seagreen 10y agoLeap seconds have no business being tracked in the core logic of our programs. Just like timezones and calendar changes, leap seconds are a display issue. While obviously very important in some circumstances there's no need to keep track of them through absolutely all of our code. If the way you measure time takes leap seconds into account, you have no way of saying "exactly X Système international seconds from now". This is a big deal.
- rspeer 10y ago> If the way you measure time takes leap seconds into account, you have no way of saying "exactly X Système international seconds from now". Note that this is the case for anyone using POSIX time, which inherently assumes that hours start on multiples of 3600, and has to be adjusted or smeared when a leap second happens. But I've never seen a system that follows your recommendation, using TAI as the internal time and something like TAI-5:00:36 as the local time, except for GPS devices.