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Why do you think it's not also too hard for their peers? Any company with an interest in time keeping spends tons of money dealing with time zones and leap seco

by dymk 4y ago

Why do you think it's not also too hard for their peers? Any company with an interest in time keeping spends tons of money dealing with time zones and leap seconds.

kstrauser 4y ago
Because I haven’t seen the Google or Amazon proposal to ditch it. Perhaps they’ve written them and I don’t know about them, but I’m not aware of them. We do lots of things that are hard because doing them right is often more important than doing them easily. Switching from ASCII from UTF-8 was a pain, but we did it. Software upgrades are a pain. Security infrastructure is a pain. Timezones are OMG such a pain. But in all those cases, we collectively said “welp, guess we’ve gotta do it”. And what Facebook notably didn’t propose was a way to actually make this happen. Who’s going to project manage the global coordinated effort to migrate the planet to Facebook Time? That sounds like much more work than them just fixing their time handling.
- Yujf 4y ago
  Someone has to propose it first. Just shooting them for that seems bad. I agree that we don't just need to do something because fb wants to do it, but it might actually be worth having a discussion over.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    OK, so I do agree with that. It’s worth having a conversation about. But I don’t feel like this rose to the level of an actual proposal. It was very short to assert a claim with such wide-reaching implications as “we should start ignoring leap seconds”. As such, I don’t think it calls for an in-depth rebuttal. Consider: Proposer: “It’s time to leave Unicode in the past. It requires us to update every part of our system to deal with UTF-8 strings instead of much simpler ASCII, and we’re spending a lot of resources. Because it’s so hard and expensive, we should all use well-tested ASCII code. People who want to interoperate with our system can just rename themselves to use the Latin-1 alphabet.” Everyone else: “No.” Yes, it is hard, and people have spent a lot of, ahem, time and money to figure out how to manage this at scale. But there are real-world-tested approaches to dealing with the issue, and I firmly believe it’s better to work out and coordinate on the remaining rough edges than to throw the whole thing away to make a handful of engineers’ jobs easier.
    - dymk 4y ago
      It's not everyone else. Most countries want to get rid of the leap second. "A small number of countries however, including Russia and the United Kingdom, want to keep the leap second." https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        That is sufficient argument, alone, to drop it. UK used to decide on which date to switch to and from "summer time" every year. "The admiralty will take up the question in coming weeks."
- jefftk 4y ago
  It's not just Facebook: apparently in 2015 most countries wanted to drop leap seconds, though some wanted to keep them: Most countries, including China, the United States and many in Europe, favour scrapping the leap second and basing UTC on the continuous tick of atomic clocks. -- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855
thrown_22 4y ago
Those companies hire people who can code their way out of a paper bag. Source: I managed to make a transition from UTC to TAI in a broker trader in 2009 when I was fresh out university.

by dymk 4y ago

Why do you think it's not also too hard for their peers? Any company with an interest in time keeping spends tons of money dealing with time zones and leap seconds.

kstrauser 4y ago

Because I haven’t seen the Google or Amazon proposal to ditch it. Perhaps they’ve written them and I don’t know about them, but I’m not aware of them. We do lots of things that are hard because doing them right is often more important than doing them easily. Switching from ASCII from UTF-8 was a pain, but we did it. Software upgrades are a pain. Security infrastructure is a pain. Timezones are OMG such a pain. But in all those cases, we collectively said “welp, guess we’ve gotta do it”. And what Facebook notably didn’t propose was a way to actually make this happen. Who’s going to project manage the global coordinated effort to migrate the planet to Facebook Time? That sounds like much more work than them just fixing their time handling.

Yujf 4y ago
Someone has to propose it first. Just shooting them for that seems bad. I agree that we don't just need to do something because fb wants to do it, but it might actually be worth having a discussion over.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  OK, so I do agree with that. It’s worth having a conversation about. But I don’t feel like this rose to the level of an actual proposal. It was very short to assert a claim with such wide-reaching implications as “we should start ignoring leap seconds”. As such, I don’t think it calls for an in-depth rebuttal. Consider: Proposer: “It’s time to leave Unicode in the past. It requires us to update every part of our system to deal with UTF-8 strings instead of much simpler ASCII, and we’re spending a lot of resources. Because it’s so hard and expensive, we should all use well-tested ASCII code. People who want to interoperate with our system can just rename themselves to use the Latin-1 alphabet.” Everyone else: “No.” Yes, it is hard, and people have spent a lot of, ahem, time and money to figure out how to manage this at scale. But there are real-world-tested approaches to dealing with the issue, and I firmly believe it’s better to work out and coordinate on the remaining rough edges than to throw the whole thing away to make a handful of engineers’ jobs easier.
  - dymk 4y ago
    It's not everyone else. Most countries want to get rid of the leap second. "A small number of countries however, including Russia and the United Kingdom, want to keep the leap second." https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      That is sufficient argument, alone, to drop it. UK used to decide on which date to switch to and from "summer time" every year. "The admiralty will take up the question in coming weeks."
jefftk 4y ago
It's not just Facebook: apparently in 2015 most countries wanted to drop leap seconds, though some wanted to keep them: Most countries, including China, the United States and many in Europe, favour scrapping the leap second and basing UTC on the continuous tick of atomic clocks. -- https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18855

thrown_22 4y ago

Those companies hire people who can code their way out of a paper bag. Source: I managed to make a transition from UTC to TAI in a broker trader in 2009 when I was fresh out university.