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Comment by patheman | Hacker News Reader

"3:00 pm" is in the middle of the night, the time to wake up for work will always "change"..

well, one time .. but do you !really! care about how the folks in +600 yrs measure time? I'd guess they invent some kind of "glacial-period-light-saving-time" by then...

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Well, we're still using the Gregorian Calendar, and according to Wikipedia, that was released in 1582 [1]. When designing a system as eternal as time, I believe that it should still be easily usable in 100, 600, or 10,000 years; on any planet, and in any galaxy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

I know it's a joke, but it's lazy programming/lazy thoughts like this that caused the issues with the systems in the first place :)

Although I still don't fully understand why leap seconds caused such a problem - we can handle leap years and we can handle daylight savings, surely this is just another clock correction action such as these?

The problem with programming for a leap second is you don't know when a leap second will occur. Compare this to a leap year, which happen every 4 years, always. Leap seconds are sporadic [1]. Programming a clock to accept the time of 11:59:60 only on occasion is trivial in a web app, but slightly more complex in a firmware or high-reliability system like flight controls.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Insertion_of_leap_... (see the chart at the side)

Thanks for the explanation, makes sense. I see what you mean about the sporadic nature of the insertions!

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