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You also said: > It sounds like Meta wants to change the definition of time for everyone just to make their programming a little easier. I find the very premis
by alecbz 4y ago
You also said:
> It sounds like Meta wants to change the definition of time for everyone just to make their programming a little easier. I find the very premise just out right ridiculous. ... Meta is just trying to make their problem someone else's problem.
Meta's argument is: we should get rid of leap seconds because even though they're helpful for astronomers, they're bad for everyone else.
Your counterpoint was: Actually leap seconds are _also_ bad for astronomers.
Which implies then that Meta is even more right to suggest that we get rid of leap seconds, because it seems like they help nobody.
- gmiller123456 4y agoI can see how you'd read it that way, but my point was that they were not invented for astronomers, with the implication being the author didn't research the topic thoroughly enough to be making recommendations.
- jefftk 4y agoAstronomers have been one of the groups most vocal in favor of retaining leap seconds: https://www.nature.com/articles/423671a https://www.nature.com/articles/423671a
- MikePlacid 4y agoAstronomers may just understand that the problem exists: [the ITU group’s chairman] says he needs more input from people who use universal time. “Many people don't even know that leap seconds exist,” The decision to ignore leap seconds reminds of the decision by Russian and some other orthodox churches to ignore changes introduced by Gregorian calendar. The decision saved them some internal political problems, like the need to decide which saints will have their celebrations missing, but now the Orthodox Christmas is moving to summer with the speed of about 1 day per 100 years. Eventually somebody will have to deal with this, but not now - there’s a lot of time - same thinking. Meanwhile, if you leave in a Gregorian country you can have your Christmas tree for free on Orthodox December 12th…
- eshch 4y agoI'm not sure Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas with a tree. At least in Russia the tree is mounted for New Year celebration and it lasts till Orthodox Christmas for granted. Actually it usually lasts to the so-called Old New Year - New Year in Old Style (meaning Julian Calendar before introduction of Gregorian one by Bolsheviks).
- crimony 4y agoOrthodox Christians in the Southern Hemisphere already celebrate Christmas in summer, as do other Christians. #borealocentrism
- MikePlacid 4y ago> borealocentrism Guilty as charged. Thinking of that - there could be no more Russian winter as we used to it at all, even in the Northern hemisphere. My friends are now growing apricots in the Russian temperate zone. Apricots! - in the place there the “Baptismal Frosts” (to happen each year just before Christmas) used to kill all such fancy vegetation. #climateasitwasbeforechangecentrism
- School-Cotton 4y ago> Eventually somebody will have to deal with this The Islamic calendar drifts by about 10 days a year, and Muslims seems to be able to cope fine with their holidays not consistently being in the same season.
- foolswisdom 4y agoWell to be fair, I don't think the Muslim calendar is _meant_ to have any solar correspondence anyway. But more importantly the holidays, is the use of the calendar in having a natural sense of time (that is, corresponding with the seasons / sun). Which is why most Islamic countries use the Gregorian calendar for civil purposes (or so claims Wikipedia, at least).
- School-Cotton 4y ago
- nl 4y agoFar from being "most vocal", that 2003 article has a single quote from a single astronomer whose only warning is: > If the change is implemented, “the old meaning of time will become ambiguous,” warns Steve Allen, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California. This does seem like a problem that is solvable. In 2015 the ITU (mentioned in that 2003 story as studying the problem) announced: > The ITU World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15), currently in session in Geneva from 2 to 27 November, has decided that further studies are required on the impact and application of a future reference time-scale, including the modification of coordinated universal time (UTC) and suppressing the so-called “leap second” https://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/53.aspx https://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/53.a... In 2012 they also decided to defer: > ITU Press Release of 19 January 2012 - ‘ITU Radiocommunication Assembly defers decision to eliminate the leap second’ https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/Documents/ITU-R-FAQ-UTC.pdf https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/Documents/ITU-R-FAQ-UTC.pdf
- jefftk 4y ago> a single quote from a single astronomer whose only warning is... It's not a quote, but the article also has Allen saying that "it could cost between US$10,000 and US$100,000 for each telescope to correct the problem, and that corrections will be tricky to implement." It also has another astronomer claiming problems: "But separating time from rotation would mean that telescopes would no longer function properly, according to Patrick Wallace, an astronomer at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, UK. Most telescopes with a viewfinder wouldn't be immediately affected, but instruments that track satellites and other moving objects could feel the effects within a few years, Wallace warns."
- nl 4y agoI found a few more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32232564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32232564 It sounds like FB/Meta is correct in saying that Astronomers did object. I'd suggest (like Mata does) those objections are not especially important considering the trade-offs though.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
- thayne 4y agoAstronomers use time for at least two different thing. For recording the time of events and observations, astronomers usually use the julian day, and for that leap seconds are a big pain. However, for precisely pointing a telescope without a viewfinder, you need the local sidereal time. The local sidereal time is fairly straightforward to (approximately) compute from UT1, the current date and your longitude. And leap seconds keep UTC within 1 second of UT1, so you can just use UTC. But, for the latter problem, a better solution would probably be to have a service similar to NTP, that gives the current Greenwhich sidereal time, rather than UTC. Then it could be corrected more often than the current leap seconds. That doesn't solve the problem for existing telescope systems though.
- alecbz 4y agoIn that case I don't think I understand what you mean by: > Meta is just trying to make their problem someone else's problem. It sounds like you agree that leap seconds themselves are a problem for people besides Meta?
- gmiller123456 4y agoIt sounds like you agree that leap seconds themselves are a problem for people besides Meta? They are a problem many people have already developed solutions to.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- borland 4y agoLeap seconds are a "problem" in that they represent work and effort. That doesn't mean we need to discard them; they serve an important purpose. I agree with gmiller here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229049 that the whole thing smells like Facebook's engineers wanting to save themselves some work, at the cost of generating more problems for the future. This kind of garbage attitude is why we have climate change, covid-19 and so many other things wrong with the world. Befitting that this one came from facebook.
- coxley 4y agoI... What? It's not Facebook. Even the examples of the post include non-Meta. It's not "some work". It's how we conceptualize time moving linearly, and that logic encoded on software. People just want a reason to dig on Meta.
- School-Cotton 4y agoWhat important purpose do they serve?
- Beldin 4y agoI read this as a reply to sibling comment ("People just want a reason to dig on Meta"). It works surprisingly well in that role.
- ghshephard 4y agoYou have one of my favorite comments on this entire thread - so I'm interested in your thoughts on who leap seconds are useful for, if not Astronomers (and clearly not Meta).
- gmiller123456 4y agoThey are useful for ordinary people. Without them, at some point in the future people would go to work at 8am at sunset and go to bed at sunrise. Leap seconds are a way for everyone to agree to shift their schedules by 1 second to stay in sync with solar time. It's subtle enough that most people don't even know they exist, nor will it have an effect on most systems. Larger jumps would be much more difficult to ignore, and smaller jumps would be more frequent.
- jefftk 4y agoHow long from now are you talking about? Eyeballing it, I think it would take us about a thousand years to get off by an hour?
- balefrost 4y agoIn the worst case, you would get 2 leap seconds per year. So in the worst case, 1800 years. However, in the past 50 years, we've only had 27. So at the current rate, probably more like 6667 years to be off by an hour. Of course, if the earth's rotation changed speed by so much that 2 leap seconds per year wasn't enough, we'd find a way to cram more in. In fact, in that case, the case for leap seconds would probably get stronger.
- furyofantares 4y agoI would absolutely take the cost of work schedules being adjusted by an hour once every 6667 years over the cost of 6667 years of programmers having to deal with leap seconds and everyone else having to deal with the fallout of any bugs from that. How long has the 9-5 even existed? Less than 200 years? At no point in 6667 years would anyone notice any consequences of the drift, culture and work schedules change so much faster than that.
- panda-giddiness 4y agoTheir point is that Meta's argument is a straw man.
- alecbz 4y agoIt's not really a straw man because Meta's not really attacking that position, they're ceding that point. Like a straw man would be Meta saying "astronomers think that leap seconds are helpful but in fact they're not useful for anything!" Here, if anything, Meta is attempting to steel man leap seconds a bit by saying "look, sure, leap seconds are at least useful for some things, like astronomy, but they're still not worth it overall". And GP is claiming that it's not a very good steel man because even astronomers don't like leap seconds.
- panda-giddiness 4y agoBut Meta's not actually ceding the point. They're essentially arguing that (1) leap seconds are an esoteric concept that only astronomers care about, and that (2) we shouldn't care about their esoteric concerns, so (3) we should therefore dispose of leap seconds. The GP's point is that astronomers find leap seconds annoying too, so Meta's argument is based on a faulty premise.
- alecbz 4y agoOk sure, I don't think I quite got that from what GP wrote, but I can see that as a valid argument: "There are actually valid uses for leap seconds, but just not within astronomy. Meta's claiming that leap seconds were made for astronomy so that we assume that's why they exist and ignore the other real reasons leap seconds exist and the benefits they provide."
- ncmncm 4y agoThey do not provide any. Unless it is "programmers' employment assurance".
- panda-giddiness 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- afiori 4y agoI like meta-bashing as much an any other facebook hater, but their point is that leap seconds are by definition used to keep UTC in almost sync with earth rotation and their argument is that it is not something useful to do.