14 ms·

> One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future We've had 27 leapseconds in the last 54 years [1] - an average of 0.5 second

> One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future We've had 27 leapseconds in the last 54 years [1] - an average of 0.5 seconds per year. At that rate, solar time will drift by 60 seconds over the course of 120 years. Drifting by 10 minutes will take 1200 years. The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

throwup238 8mo ago
> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing and many of the most famous megaliths like Stonehenge hadn’t even been built yet. The first real state, the Sumerian civilization, hadn’t formed yet in Mesopotamia. Personally, I’m very comfortable making this someone else’s problems 7200 years from now. If they’re still having basic coordination issues then it’s their own damn problem.
- refulgentis 8mo ago
  "Basic" made me lol :)
- vmilner 8mo ago
  "And so the Y10K problem was born"
  - IKnowComputer 8mo ago
    I’d better go brush up on my COBOL
    - tadfisher 8mo ago
      Programmer-Archaeologist will be quite a coveted position 300 gigaseconds from now.
  - caymanjim 8mo ago
    I just had a Y10K problem. Customer data was using 9999-12-31 23:59:59 as a placeholder value, and our app crashed converting from the customer's timezone to UTC. I learned that Python datetime can't handle Y10K.
- heresie-dabord 8mo ago
  > 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing Older folks at Göbekli Tepe grumbled that climate change wasn't real. As far as they were concerned, the Sumer and Indus Valley kids were playing with fire and didn't know squat. The older generation just couldn't understand the crazy architecture over in Egypt and the slangy "new wave" movement at Salisbury Plain. It always seemed that the shiftless youth there just loitered and smoked and invented new expressions to frustrate communication. And everyone could agree that no one liked their so-called music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Kingdom_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Kingdom_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
fanf2 8mo ago
Yeah. There’s also the issue that the earth’s rotation is slowing down, so over the long term leap seconds would become more and more frequent. There’s a point when the earth is slow enough that leap seconds need to happen nearly every month, and by that point they are no longer a workable solution to the problem. That is expected to take a few thousand years, comparable to the point where a leap hour would be needed if there were no leap seconds.
- Asmod4n 8mo ago
  So some future generations might get 23 hour days? That’s gonna be an interesting problem to solve for calendar implementations
  - hollerith 8mo ago
    25-hour days.
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    As another poster already said, there will be 25-hour days at some time. The dinosaurs had days with fewer hours than us.
    - Ekaros 8mo ago
      Where there fewer hours or were those hours just different length? Now we have locked in second extremely hard underpinning all of our measurements. But you could consider that you have same number of hours in a day and length of those hours has changed...
      - phantom784 8mo ago
        You could look at it either way. I couldn't say which system the dinosaurs actually used.
        galangalalgol 8mo ago
layer8 8mo ago
You're missing that the frequency of leap seconds is accelerating over time, because Earth's rotation is slowing down. The leap hour will therefore happen earlier: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/future2100.svg https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/future2100.svg
darkwater 8mo ago
> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226 You mean 09226, I believe. [1] [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=the%20long%20now&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

throwup238 8mo ago

> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing and many of the most famous megaliths like Stonehenge hadn’t even been built yet. The first real state, the Sumerian civilization, hadn’t formed yet in Mesopotamia. Personally, I’m very comfortable making this someone else’s problems 7200 years from now. If they’re still having basic coordination issues then it’s their own damn problem.

refulgentis 8mo ago
"Basic" made me lol :)
vmilner 8mo ago
"And so the Y10K problem was born"
- IKnowComputer 8mo ago
  I’d better go brush up on my COBOL
  - tadfisher 8mo ago
    Programmer-Archaeologist will be quite a coveted position 300 gigaseconds from now.
- caymanjim 8mo ago
  I just had a Y10K problem. Customer data was using 9999-12-31 23:59:59 as a placeholder value, and our app crashed converting from the customer's timezone to UTC. I learned that Python datetime can't handle Y10K.
heresie-dabord 8mo ago
> 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing Older folks at Göbekli Tepe grumbled that climate change wasn't real. As far as they were concerned, the Sumer and Indus Valley kids were playing with fire and didn't know squat. The older generation just couldn't understand the crazy architecture over in Egypt and the slangy "new wave" movement at Salisbury Plain. It always seemed that the shiftless youth there just loitered and smoked and invented new expressions to frustrate communication. And everyone could agree that no one liked their so-called music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2-kiloyear_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Kingdom_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Kingdom_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge

fanf2 8mo ago

Yeah. There’s also the issue that the earth’s rotation is slowing down, so over the long term leap seconds would become more and more frequent. There’s a point when the earth is slow enough that leap seconds need to happen nearly every month, and by that point they are no longer a workable solution to the problem. That is expected to take a few thousand years, comparable to the point where a leap hour would be needed if there were no leap seconds.

Asmod4n 8mo ago
So some future generations might get 23 hour days? That’s gonna be an interesting problem to solve for calendar implementations
- hollerith 8mo ago
  25-hour days.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  As another poster already said, there will be 25-hour days at some time. The dinosaurs had days with fewer hours than us.
  - Ekaros 8mo ago
    Where there fewer hours or were those hours just different length? Now we have locked in second extremely hard underpinning all of our measurements. But you could consider that you have same number of hours in a day and length of those hours has changed...
    - phantom784 8mo ago
      You could look at it either way. I couldn't say which system the dinosaurs actually used.
      - galangalalgol 8mo ago

layer8 8mo ago

You're missing that the frequency of leap seconds is accelerating over time, because Earth's rotation is slowing down. The leap hour will therefore happen earlier: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/future2100.svg https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/future2100.svg

darkwater 8mo ago

> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226 You mean 09226, I believe. [1] [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=the%20long%20now&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...