14 ms·
> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would
by 21 8y ago
> The length of the day used for astronomical timekeeping reaches about 86,401 SI seconds. Under the present-day timekeeping system, either a leap second would need to be added to the clock every single day, or else by then, in order to compensate, the length of the day would have had to have been officially lengthened by one SI second.
Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?
- mikeash 8y agoIt will be easier to boost the Earth’s spin back to a 86,400-second day than to fix all the code.
- godelmachine 8y agoI don’t care if this goes against HN guideline and if I am downvoted, but that was the geekiest joke of the millennia :D
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wierd0 8y agoGeeks make it go around yo.
- mrighele 8y agoI would just change the duration of a second. It would be probably easier to change a few physics constants here and there than to fix all the broken code.
- anticensor 8y agoIf only you were manipulating second only. You would also be manipulating metre, candela, and ampere, assuming old definition of SI, or metre, kilogram and kelvin assuming new definition of SI.
- smt88 8y agoCan you explain how the duration of a second affects the metre?
- supermdguy 8y agoNot OP, but "The metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 second" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
- smt88 8y agoBut in that case, doesn't the "second" constant change (or the coefficient) and a metre remains the same length?
- supermdguy 8y agoA meterstick would remain the same length, but the SI meter's length would change.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoThe duration of a second is defined using Caesium-133 [1], not using anything else like daytime or rotational speed. It's independent of such factors and will always be the same in a given frame of reference. No need to update those values. edit: I think it will lead to the same or more problems because everyone would have to change all time-related constants. Easier to add a second to the day constant (because the day constant is a subset of the seconds constant, but the seconds constant affects many more aspects than just the day constant). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_caesium#Caesium-133 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_caesium#Caesium-13...
- wruza 8y agoUnless these physics constants are, well, constants put in the same code. How many ballistical systems treat ‘standard g’ as a variable? (hint: it depends on seconds squared.)
- itsthecourier 8y agoWe are so mad the developers made light speed a constant. Should be fixed in the next update. Reboot may be required. XD
- improv32 8y agoIt's been suggested that perhaps one way to find evidence of extrasolar life, would be to find exoplanets whose years are integer multiples of their rotational periods, i.e. they've done what you describe just to eliminate leap years and make their calendars easier.
- Firerouge 8y agoBut how do we know which base number system they're using!?
- cbluth 8y agoAll aliens have ten fingers, duh!
- kowdermeister 8y agoAnd speak perfect English according to the Stargate universe.
- yellowapple 8y agoI don't think that was true in the movie.
- wruza 8y agoIndeed.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoEvery base is base 10.
- styfle 8y agoAll your base are belong to us
- 8y ago
- tibbon 8y agoSomeone should write a short story about this.
- ithkuil 8y agoCode that assumes that is wrong today already. In fact there is no time.Day constant in the Go standard library
- garaetjjte 8y agoProbably not. https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- OscarCunningham 8y agoThat's the good way to write code, surely? Then you can just change it once to DAY_SECONDS=86401.
- rtkwe 8y agoFine but now you have to find every packaged binary using the old compiled version and update that too.
- vidanay 8y agoQuantum compilers will have that done by Tuesday afternoon.
- stickfigure 8y agoMaybe.
- nemothekid 8y agoAnd they can also pray that their development environment still works on Linux 9.21
- OscarCunningham 8y agoMaybe GNU Hurd will be on version 1 by then.
- itsthecourier 8y agoIt would be easier to spin down the earth, than make that release happening Even releasing half life 3 may happen before that
- joelcornett 8y agoMaybe humans will no longer be responsible for maintaining software
- deleted 8y ago
- skizm 8y agoCould you just add a leap day every 86,400 days?
- cpeterso 8y agoIn Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky novels, the characters in the far future track time using megaseconds (~11.6 Earth days) to sidestep the problem of days with different lengths. They still count from the 1970-01-01 Unix epoch, but the characters mistakenly think that date is when humans landed on the moon.
- walrus01 8y agoThere's also such a thing as a Programmer-Archeologist, can you imagine dealing with 14,000 years of nested dependencies? One key plot point in one of the novels, a totalitarian group is running a omnipresent surveillance network but has no idea about the software running underneath it. They set it up using the GUI and are using it but never looked under the hood. The group attempting to get out from under the grasps of the totalitarians has a programmar-archaeologist who digs into the underpinnings of the software and hijacks it from a lower level of its operating system.
- cpeterso 8y agoI forgot about the Programmer-Archeologist! Another point from (I think) these novels that stuck with me was Vinge's description of the "software midden heap". I'd like to think we can clean up some middle layers from our computing stack in the future, but with some old software only available in emulators (possibly running in WebAssembly in a browser), I am not so sure. In fact, I realized I made an nearly identical comment here on Hacker News back in 2011. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2702231
- Razengan 8y agoThe Matrix expanded-universe also has some surprisingly deep and complex lore regarding such interactions between the humans and machines and everything between and around them. Those movies and their spinoffs are worth revisiting now and then.
- pc86 8y agoYes but at least that far in the future we'll finally be rid of JavaScript.
- Simon_says 8y agoThey're missing a bunch of possibilities. Maybe a second is lengthened? Maybe we decouple timekeeping from the rotation of the Earth? Maybe we spin the Earth back up?
- tpudlik 8y agoLengthening the second is unlikely: for every physical phenomenon with a duration (from the rotational period of other planets to the frequency of atomic transitions), you would forever after have to wonder, is that value quoted in"new seconds" or "old seconds"? Redefining units leads to ultimate backwards compatibility problems.
- pupdogg 8y agoI'm pretty sure some nifty JavaScript code will come to save the day!
- sametmax 8y agoMachine learning will analyze your thoughs and output wasm, then run it a os that is sandboxed in a webrowser.
- abbiya 8y agohttps://github.com/search?q=DAY_SECONDS%3D86400&type=Code https://github.com/search?q=DAY_SECONDS%3D86400&type=Code
- baxtr 8y agoWhy don’t we just 6 minutes at the end of each year? Seems to be more practical to me
- pc86 8y agoYou want December 31st to be 6 minutes longer than December 30th?
- kamaal 8y agoA few centuries earlier that would have been worrying about adding extra teeth to the gear wheel driving the mechanical clock.
- hellofunk 8y agoThat would be quite terrible, if in fact 50K years from now there was such a thing as computer code.
- collinmanderson 8y agoPretty sure the Y10K problem would be a bigger issue.