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Comment by christina97 | Hacker News Reader

The way it is is really how we all want it. 86400 seconds = 1 day. And we operate under the assumption that midnight UTC is always a multiple of 86400.

We don’t want every piece of software to start hardcoding leap second introductions and handling smears and requiring a way to update it within a month when a new leap second is introduced.

You never worried or thought about it before, and you don’t need to! It’s done in the right way.

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> We don’t want every piece of software to start hardcoding leap second introductions and handling smears and requiring a way to update it within a month when a new leap second is introduced.

That kind of thing is already needed for timezone handling. Any piece of software that handles human-facing time needs regular updates.

I think it would make most of our lives easier if machine time was ~29 seconds off from human time. It would be a red flag for carelessly programmed applications, and make it harder to confuse system time with human-facing UK time.

You can set your OS to any timezone you want to. If you want it to be 29 seconds off, go for it. The tz database is open source.

Nobody is an island… the hard part is interfacing with other systems, not hacking your own server.

Seems to work fine for most of the planet?

I don't want it this way: it mixes a data model concern (timestamps) with a ui concern (calendars). As other have said, it would be much better if we used TAI and handled leap seconds at the same level as timezones.

But most software that would need to care about that already needs to care about timezones, and those already need to be regularly updated, sometimes with not much more than a month's notice.

I will never forgive Egypt for breaking my shit with a 3 day notice (what was it like 10 years ago?).

Thankfully for me it was just a bunch of non-production-facing stuff.

Was this Morsy's government or Sisi's? If it's Morsy's government you're holding a grudge against, I have some good news for you. (Presumably you're not holding that grudge against random taxi drivers and housewives in Alexandria.)

I don't know if the level of bureaucracy where that decision was made is really impacted by the leadership changing. Egypt continues to make super short notice timezone changes as recently as last year. (Just at least not 3 days notice this most recent time around)

It's definitely not the right way, in this case.

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