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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

A hydrogen atom being looked at by the Navy right?

Cesium, NIST.

And not just one, millions of them.

What a waste of taxpayers’ money! They should just pick one and stare at it. Why should we be paying for millions of them???

If you don't use the budget you won't get the budget, sailor.

I see no downside.

I get the confusion for the US Navy though, as the clock is at the US Naval Observatory.

If you ever need the time, just call (719) 567-6742

"US Naval Observatory, Master Clock, at the tone, Mountain daylight time, nine hours, sixteen minutes, fifteen seconds...beep!"

Just called the number holy cow it’s real. I love obscure infrastructure stuff like that

Speaking clocks are pretty common. Here we dial *133.

When I was a kid, you could dial the operator and ask them for the time. I still don't know why anyone would do that, but I remember it was a thing you could do.

Also, dialing 0 to get a human operator. I swear I'm not that old.

Another good one is Bell Atlantic's support number which is strangely still connected even though they merged to form Verizon in 2000. 570-387-0000.

"Thank you for calling Bell Atlantic. Due to an emergency condition, we are operating with a reduced staff, and you may experience delay."

Waiting on hold is like the forever traffic jam of Doctor Who.

Yeah according to Wikipedia anyway the USNO is operated by the US Navy.

"At the tone?" ...what kind of ship are you running here? Is it at the start or the end of the tone?

The USA has two main time labs: the USNO, which provides time and navigation for the DoD, including the GPS; and NIST which provides time for civilian purposes, including WWV. NIST tends to do more research into new kinds of atomic clock (eg optical clocks, chip-scale clocks) whereas the USNO does more work on earth orientation.

The USNO atomic clock ensemble includes caesium beam clocks, hydrogen masers, and rubidium fountains. NIST uses mostly hydrogen masers, and fewer caesium beam clocks, though their primary frequency standards are caesium fountains.

Sort of. More like from a DNS service for time, to which the navy both contributes and receives information from. I found that part to be the most interesting.

You are sort of correct. NTP is pretty decentralized. DNS has a few specific servers (root servers) that all DNS eventually hits to find where to get a result, but, the 'tree' of DNS resolution is much different from that of NTP, which doesnt have such a tree, except as defined by any DNS entries, if they are used (ex pool.ntp.org has many A records for many ips or CNAMEs to other domains (ex 0.pool.ntp.org)).

There are many contributors to the official timekeeping. Most facilities who do science will have their own actual atomic clock, which they then share out the data, in the form of an NTP server, however, they will not typically use data from the rest of the world, except for correlation events. The rest of the world relies on a handful of clocks which are either from NIST (ntp.org I think is owned by them), or from major providers like cloudflare (not sure they have an ntp server available the public can use, im almost certain that they would use their own atomic clock internally for security reasons), microsoft also has one, i think, afaik they would need to because they provide their own ntp pool, but they may just aggregate from multiple NIST servers.

You can setup your own NTP server as well, and setup systems you own to start using it instead of whatever is configured. And, if one were so inclined, could even find and run your own atomic clock, and register it with the ntp pool. Im actually not sure the atomic clock is required, id hope it would be, but idk.

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