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No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026
- Wingy 4mo agoDoes this mean the negative leap second isn't happening anymore?
- linux2647 4mo agoNot anymore forever. We’re just not adding one for this year. We might need one next year, we might not. It all depends on the Earth’s rotation and orbit
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agoand Earth's rotation was too fast for last several years we were all waiting for the negative leap second to finally happen - but cowards got too afraid
- deathanatos 4mo agoI don't think it's cowardice, is it? The graph at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second seems to indicate that adding a negative leap second at this point in time would be improper. (We're ~+0.1s off, and a negative leap second would occur if the line was approaching +0.6s. I'd like one too just for the curiosity of the thing, but … the Earth isn't having it.)
- tedd4u 4mo agoThere's an opportunity to insert or remove a leap second twice a year. They only decide about 6 months in advance of each opportunity what to do (leap second, skipped second, or do nothing).
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- voidUpdate 4mo agoI enjoy how Chrome asks me if I want to auto translate from German to English. Where did it get German from? It's French!
- simlevesque 4mo agoIt's a mix of french and english... so it's german.
- lopis 4mo agoA mix of English and French is just called... English
- tosti 4mo agoFrenglish
- Gander5739 4mo agoFranglais?
- fhars 4mo agoThis book would probably disagree :-) https://www.fnac.com/a19325120/Bernard-Cerquiglini-La-langue-anglaise-n-existe-pas https://www.fnac.com/a19325120/Bernard-Cerquiglini-La-langue...
- bhaney 4mo agoProbably from the "Content-Language: de" header
- raverbashing 4mo agoOk but that makes even less sense
- rpozarickij 4mo ago
- bombcar 4mo ago"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time" is just the best preamble ever.
- flexagoon 4mo agoThe only better thing is the organization being called "International Earth Rotation Service"
- nullorempty 4mo agoOh boy :) I think that would come with IERS Tax.
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoYou have to go to the ends of the earth to cancel.
- summarybot 4mo agoThe real problem is finding the antipodal help desk without digging.
- layer8 4mo agoSomeone should establish the Interplanetary Sun Orbiting Service.
- firefax 4mo ago>Someone should establish the Interplanetary Sun Orbiting Service. I hope they have one of those logos with a bunch of weird freemason symbols that freak people out.
- steve1977 4mo agoSounds like something out of a Douglas Adams novel.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- srean 4mo agoWhat happens to systems such as Spanner under these circumstances? Is it a headache or a non-issue
- metalliqaz 4mo agoLeap seconds are not added on a regular schedule like leap days, they depend on physical measurements of Earth. So high reliability systems with comprehensive timekeeping would not be perturbed by these choices, I would think.
- bri3d 4mo agoIt’s a huge problem. The most common approach to address it is called smearing; the duration of each second for a 24 hour period ahead of the “leap” is adjusted. For strict ordering systems this works as each device maintains time sync with the global clock, the duration of a clock cycle is just slightly different. I think this was in the original Spanner paper, actually. Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator seconds and ignore the earth rotation second, but if you ever have to translate those to real time, you get an accumulating disaster over time and it’s generally regarded as not a good idea.
- criddell 4mo agoI wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.
- jefftk 4mo agoClocks used to be able to use the 60Hz cycle to track time, and grid providers would run slightly slow or fast ("time error correction") to get back into sync. A leap second would just be part of this. I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.
- 4mo ago
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoNotice they only said leap second. Meanwhile.... International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-timekeepers-to-vote-on-changing-the-leap-second-to-a-leap-hour/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... (https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329)
- _joel 4mo agoreally, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.
- icepush 4mo agoWe can change that!
- tialaramex 4mo agoA leap hour wouldn't affect you. In practice it will never affect anyone because it's a legal fiction, but even if you pretend to believe we would actually introduce this "leap hour" it would be in the distant future long after we're all dead and if there are still humans who have any idea the year 2026 happened they're not sure which of Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Tony Stark and John McClane were real people. Edited to add: This is such a ridiculously long time frame that they might not be sure whether we were worried about climate change, for them that's either a disaster they survived (and maybe most didn't) or it's a weird blip in their historical charts which they struggle to explain. Did our civilisation do something very, very stupid? There is a flammable gas deep underground, did we set fire to it because we were crazy? Why the hell would we have done that? There are signs we deliberately set fire to the coal which is a toxic rock also found underground? That would explain the global climate going nuts. Maybe it was a ritual or something. Ancient people are mad.
- Epa095 4mo agoUp until now we have added 1 leap second every 2 year (27 leap seconds since 1972). So if it continues like this, in 7200 years it would be 1 whole hour, and in "only" 3602 years it will be closer to the next hour than the previous (so a natural time to add the leap hour).
- delichon 4mo agoHear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
- gumby 4mo agoThe problem is future societies harvesting the engines for interstellar probes. This problem has been discussed in a series of books by Larry Niven.
- tenthirtyam 4mo agoThere's a graphic novel by Cixin Liu "The Wandering Earth" where they not only stop Earth's rotation with this method, but also propel Earth out of the solar system (for what appear to be good reasons, I might add). Can't quite remember what fuel they used for the engines.
- tialaramex 4mo ago> for what appear to be good reasons, I might add [Spoiler] They are good reasons. Conspiracy theorists are able to persuade almost everybody that the reasons were bullshit, an excuse to seize power or something, and so the few who still insist this was necessary and mustn't stop are executed. Almost immediately after those executions, Mother Nature proves them right. So that leaves everybody: Guilty of having murdered their saviours and with no choice but to carry on with the very plan they had insisted was bogus... There is a Chinese movie but I'm kinda surprised no Hollywood studio got themselves a rights deal and made a US-friendly movie where the Sun conveniently blows up slightly earlier and our heroes are vindicated and everybody agrees they were right all along.
- jandrese 4mo agoIIRC they accelerated rock as the reaction mass. Gigatons of rock accelerated to well above escape velocity and launched from the ground. In the real world their scheme is doomed as it would strip the atmosphere off of the Earth, but since they were planning to leave the solar system the atmosphere was going to freeze to a solid anyway so maybe it didn't really matter. To be honest I thought the entire scheme was an extremely elaborate cover for the fact the lead ship was the actual ark and everyone else was just plain doomed. This would have mirrored one of the themes in the 3 Body Problem where interstellar space travel is strictly forbidden until everybody can participate at once. The "launch the Earth as a spaceship" concept was so poorly thought out I thought it had to be a fraud in the story, and our somewhat dense protagonists just didn't catch on.
- returningfory2 4mo agoAs one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer. They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.
- thwarted 4mo agoLeap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.
- RugnirViking 4mo agogod that would be awful. Can you imagine time zones being one second off from each other. Or two or three? ah yes, india is GMT+4:30:03, where europe is GMT+0:59:58
- TimTheTinker 4mo agoThe TZDB could handle it though
- ninju 4mo agohttps://m.xkcd.com/2867/ https://m.xkcd.com/2867/
- lanstin 4mo agoI had not seen that. In the nineties I worked on an alerts system where you could sign up for like some sport or weather data at a certain time of day. We stored the alert times as minutes before midnight and then ran the time to trigger calculations often enough that unless you were some freak that wants weather alerts at 2 am it basically worked to send one alert each day at the appropriate time; we had a special non-OS copy of the tzdb as the users were global. One quarter I forgot to update it and everyone in Mexico City got their alerts one hour off till someone complained and I updated it. We also had data feed alerts, like score changed or stock hit x% over previous high, where the problem is some data is manually entered and can be off by a factor or two of ten from time to time. Had to be filtered. I had a lot of fun.
- t1234s 4mo agoThey should have a global holiday to celebrate the people who maintain time/date related code in OS kernels that keeps the world from imploding.
- radomir_cernoch 4mo agoLol. Exactly!
- ortusdux 4mo agoI like the argument that we should have 12 months that are exactly 30 days long, and then merge whatever is left into a single timeless holiday.
- tialaramex 4mo agoYes, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- ortusdux 4mo agoBecause of you I have learned the word 'intercalation', and am grateful for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(timekeeping) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(timekeeping)
- BurningFrog 4mo agoThere would be 5-6 days without time every years?
- soiltype 4mo agoI've often dreamed of and revisited this idea. I first started thinking of it seriously when I realized I was paying the same rent in February as in January despite a significantly shorter-than-mean (30.4375) month...! My ideal year is 12 months, each 5 weeks long, each week 6 days long. At the summer solstice, 3 intercalary days (bank holidays), at the winter solstice, 2 or 3 intercalary days depending on leap year.
- exegete 4mo ago> The difference between Coordinated Universal Time UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is : > > from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37s This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.
- doctoboggan 4mo ago> I also don’t understand the reference to 2017. My guess is that is when they last changed the offset, so the -37s has been in effect since then.
- flohofwoe 4mo agoApparently December 2016 was the last time a leap second was inserted, at least that's what Wikipedia says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agowe were ought to insert a negative leap second, but cowards got too afraid it would break code
- maxnoe 4mo agoNo, the current rules are being relaxed because with the current ones, a negative leap second _might_ happen in the near future. It did not happen yet. No negative leap second that should have been inserted was skipped. See this chart here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1#/media/File:Leapsecond.ut1-utc.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1#/media/File:Leapsecond.ut... You can see the the positive leap seconds as jumps upward once the graph reaches around -0.5 s. We were never close to reaching +0.5 seconds with a positive trend and we are still relatively far away from that.
- pdonis 4mo ago> This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? If anything, it's the other way around. A UTC day is defined as exactly 86400 SI seconds. But an actual mean solar day is a few milliseconds longer (although the difference is not constant due to irregularities in the Earth's rotation--but the average difference is expected to slowly increase over time). SI seconds are counted by atomic clocks, so UTC advances its day by one every 86400 atomic clock seconds. But a solar clock that advances its day by one every time the mean sun reaches noon (it has to be the mean sun because the rate at which the actual sun moves across the sky varies over the course of a year, we need to look at the average) will advance its day a few milliseconds later than UTC does. Or, to put it another way, each time period that the solar clock says is exactly 86400 seconds, is a few milliseconds longer according to the atomic clock. As this happens day after day, the difference accumulates, and when it gets close to being a full second, a leap second gets inserted into UTC, so that one of its days is 86401 seconds long instead of 86400. The reason for this is that UTC is not just counting atomic clock time; it also has to stay in sync with where the sun is in the sky since so many human activities are tied to that. And we humans have defined "in sync with the sun" to be "within a second of the average sun". In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian. So the 37 seconds is how far mean solar noon would be behind UTC noon, if we didn't use leap seconds--at UTC noon, the mean sun would be 37 seconds short of actually crossing the prime meridian in the sky.
- doctoboggan 4mo agoWhat causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?
- flohofwoe 4mo agoSince I was checking the Wikipedia article anyway (for when the last leap second was inserted), it also has an answer for this: "Because the Earth's rotational speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and not precisely predictable." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
- moi2388 4mo agoYes. Geological activity, movement in the outer core, atmosphere, oceanic currents, melting ice, earthquakes, to name a few. Earths rotation has been unusually fast lately. So there is not enough drift to warrant a leap second.
- entrope 4mo agoYes, all of those and more. Our measurement precision is much better than the year-to-year first and second derivatives of day length. https://datacenter.iers.org/singlePlot.php?plotname=BulletinA_All-UT1-UTC&id=6 https://datacenter.iers.org/singlePlot.php?plotname=Bulletin... has the most relevant plot to this; the vertical jumps reflect leap seconds. (IERS has other plots for other dimensions of rotation, but I like this one.)
- doctoboggan 4mo agoVery interesting, I wonder what happened in 2020 that causes the rotational speed to start drifting the other way? Pandemic -> more people working from home -> less people in tall office buildings -> faster rotation (like a skater pulling in their arms). Probably not remotely true but it would be funny.
- 4mo ago
- dodoisdodo 4mo agoThe real Time Variance Authority
- KboPAacDA3 4mo agoIf the UTC-TAI offset remains at -37s, then it also means the UTC-GPS offset remains at -18s. TAI and GPS have a constant 19s offset from each system.
- da-x 4mo agoMy longevity will extend one second into the future in nominal terms, increasing the chance to reach the 22nd century a tiny bit.
- clircle 4mo agoCool, I don't have to set my clocks back this December.
- ComputerGuru 4mo agoThis announcement is very much a nothing burger; it’s already been more or less decided that adding leap seconds just isn’t going to be a thing anymore (in our lifetime). Here’s on article from 2022: https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/end-of-leap-seconds-2022 https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/end-of-leap-secon...
- Surac 4mo agoWorld will end at 26 December so no leap second needed
- AbstractH24 4mo agoELI5: How does this impact UNIX timestamps? Particularly for things that are in maintenance mode or otherwise minimally maintained. Nothing I do requires this level of precision, but certainly there are things that do.
- eqvinox 4mo agoUNIX timestamps are fully ignorant of leap seconds, i.e. pretends they don't exist. That means there can be physical seconds of time that cannot be referenced with a UNIX timestamp (when a leap second is inserted) as well as UNIX timestamps for seconds that don't exist (when a leap second is deleted).
- aidenn0 4mo agoIt also means that if you subtract two timestamps, you might not get the actual time between them. Though this is also true of most ways of representing time (TAI being a notable exception).
- eqvinox 4mo agoThe really annoying part is that "leap smearing" (where people decided to just mush the leap second across about day) has made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard, since some leap smearing approaches affect that as well. Which destroyed any assumption a developer could make about CLOCK_MONOTONIC, since you won't know if leap smearing is in use :(. (And depending on the leap smearing implementation, it also smears CLOCK_TAI, jumps it to opposite polarity at the actual time of leap second, and then smears it again. The leap smearing people really made a mess of this.) From a correctness perspective, the only good choice is to go all-in on TAI. [Ed./P.S.:] "just ignore leap seconds" - that's going all-in on TAI. At this point it's probably easier to redefine UNIX timestamps as TAI based after 2035 ("abolishing leap seconds"), and introduce a new CLOCK_SOLAR_EARTH that accumulates leap seconds and can be used if/where necessary. The main issue is to create a proper delineation between the two clocks, which we just don't have at this point. Way too many systems where it's just not clear what they use. And note that leap seconds are earth specific too. You'll have entirely different requirements on e.g. Mars.
- BobbyTables2 4mo agoToo expensive in this economy ?
- yayamao 4mo agolooks like tons of service will crash at the new year eve
- gnabgib 4mo agoNo. Try again
- usr1106 4mo agoIsn't this anti-news? I vaguely remember they have stopped introducing leap seconds until further notice because they cause too much trouble with today's computing systems. On my phone now and did not research it, as I say vaguely remember. Now we are 37 seconds off. Nobody of us will have to worry that Christmas is around Easter time. We can leave that problem to future generations much more responsibly than many other problems. That the notice comes every 6 months is just to meet the letter of the original international treaty.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoThe fact that it’s only 6 months seems insane to me and probably the cause of the problem, if time was +- 60 seconds nobody would notice, so a more manageable solution would be to implement an arbitrary leap about once a decade, with a decades notice so everyone can sort their systems with plenty of notice. 6 months for a world wide coordinated execution is laughably optimistic.
- chippiewill 4mo agoNo, they haven't done that yet. It's just a proposal, but it's not likely to be formally stopped until 2035. The reason we've stopped having leap seconds is because the drift between TAI and UT1 slowed down and has actually been very slowly drifting in the other direction.
- mimo84 4mo agoWith the Temporal API will all of the browsers / nodejs etc be able to get the time right when performing operations around that time or will they need to be updated in order to not mess up calculations?
- wahern 4mo agoTemporal API seems to be based around Unix/POSIX timestamps, which ignore leap seconds. In Unix time a day is always 86400 "seconds". This makes it trivial to do UTC calendar arithmetic into the past and future without recourse to a database and without necessarily having to deal with fractional seconds. Leap seconds are handled by the OS by repeating or skipping a second, or slewing the length of a second for some period before and after the leap second. Most datetime APIs are fundamentally designed and intended for supporting calendar and wall clock operations for business functions. If you need SI seconds for scientific purposes, you really need to use alternative APIs and facilities that provide and guarantee the semantics required all the way down to the hardware level. Likewise, if you want timers, etc, for software facilities like thread sleeping, you use dedicated interfaces like monotonic clocks. If leap seconds are phased out, this won't really change the situation. It was wrong for software to rely on Unix timestamps for, e.g., mutex algorithms before and it'll be wrong if and when leap second clock adjustments are gone.
- junglistguy 4mo ago[dead]
- mayhemducks 4mo agoThe man with more than one watch never knows what time it is.