5 ms·
I'm kinda impressed by the hubris, really. Usually it's emperors, kings, and big multinational governing bodies that try to screw around with the time standard
by corrral 4y ago
I'm kinda impressed by the hubris, really. Usually it's emperors, kings, and big multinational governing bodies that try to screw around with the time standard that ordinary people have to live with. Occasionally strident revolutionaries who've already solved the "overthrow and replace the government" part of their problem and aren't content with just beheading people all day.
Says something about how Facebook sees itself, I guess.
- ncmncm 4y agoFacebook is arguing to stop monkeying with the time Standard. Correctly. Leap seconds are exactly the "screwing around" you criticize.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoLeap seconds are added because the Earth is slowing down. Are you angry at celestial mechanics?
- ncmncm 4y agoI totally don't care about the Earth slowing down. Nobody does except astronomers. Computers don't need to know.
- thrown_22 4y ago>Your honor the nuclear attack on San Fransisco happened at 10.59.59 as per UTC-Facebook time and is as such part of WWIII and not a violation of the armistice.
- ncmncm 4y agoBy "UTC-Facebook" time, you of course mean UTC time, the time everybody already uses, and that has no need to be broken every year, two years, or three years, and wouldn't be broken at all if we simply stopped breaking it.
- lelandbatey 4y agoLot's of folks care, what are you talking about? Accountants and lawyers the world over EXTREMELY care about keeping the computers idea of wall-clock time and your idea of time in sync, and if you're a customer faced with the side-effects of changing the standard after-the-fact, you probably care as well. Let's paint a picture based on actual code I've actually seen in the real world. If you ignore the leap second but keep using UTC, then in about 5 years, UTC will differ from wall clock by about 5 seconds. So if, in some software used for, I don't know maybe billing customers, someone was calculating day boundaries by doing modulo division of UTC by the number of seconds in a day (I've seen it), then in 5 years we've got a 5 second discrepancy in the number of API calls made by customer X when comparing what the software says to what the customer measured. Customers don't like this, accountants and lawyers REALLY don't like this, and us engineers will have the wonderful experience of telling them all > "this code used to be valid until some boneheaded engineers at Facebook convinced a ton of other engineers to break the agreed upon standard about what it means to measure time in this way, and now things that used to work fine need to be patched because we've got a Y2K EVERY DAY!" Oops, I guess ignoring wall clock time might be something other human people care about after all.
- bartread 4y ago> I totally don't care about the Earth slowing down. Neither do I in day to day life. But I do have to care about it when I or members of my team write code, or store and retrieve data to and from a database, or work across multiple timezones, because it can be critically important to unambiguously know whether something happened on one day or the next. The reality is there aren't any nice, elegant solutions to this problem. Leap seconds aren't a nice solution. Meta's proposal isn't a nice solution. I don't necessarily even think it's worse than leap seconds, but it's certainly not substantially better. The key point is it's a change and one which, in my view, won't deliver enough value for everybody (beyond just Meta) to justify the level of disruption it will certainly cause if implemented.