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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

by 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."

by Yujf 4y ago

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."