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Comment by ssl-3 | Hacker News Reader

We've on track to do something different before the end of 2035: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Phase-out_and_futu...

Shifting to a leap-minute feels close-enough to me: We might get one every 50 or 100 years. A lot of us reading this today will never live to see a leap-minute, but it's close enough that we'll still have it collectively in-mind when it it needs to happen. (And if we screw it up at that time, the outliers will only be off by a minute. Not so bad.)

A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. ~6,000 years is a very long time; society will be a very different thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.

edit: accidentally a word, and fixed an off-by-an-order-of-magnitude error on the approximate years required for a leap hour

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> A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. 600 years is a very long time; society will be a very thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.

Something to consider: The use of timezones in mostly 1-hour increments over inconsistently placed areas means that the vast majority of people are already living many minutes off from the "actual" time at their precise location, in some cases even more than an hour. "Giving-up" implies that this is something important worth maintaining, where-as for the vast majority of people they gain nothing from leap seconds or even leap minutes. The most important thing for people is simply that everybody agrees on what time it is, which is easier when leap-Xs aren't done.

That said it's also probably true that a leap-hour would never actually happen, but that's not some big issue. By the time we got to the point that a leap-hour would make sense people would have already adjusted their habits and it probably wouldn't be worth it.

An extreme example is Xinjiang, where solar time can be more than three hours off from civil time (due to the PRC policy of having only one time zone for all of China).

Xinjiang is well-known for effectively operating in two timezones at once, with part of the population mostly operating on +6 and part on +8.

Indeed. On a long-enough timeline, people will adjust to whatever it is that the sun is doing regardless of what the clock on the wall says. That's the way it has always been.

So when we're talking about one second every once in awhile, I'm not sure that [effectively] giving up by adopting leap hours instead of leap seconds isn't the right option -- as long as we agree to do it uniformly.

> Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.

Sometimes, doing nothing is the right option. Sometimes, giving up is the right option. I believe this is one of those times. The alternatives seem worse to me, and the fact that it's even being considered by the curators of time would seem to indicate it's not a completely invalid option.

Every 50 or 100 years is possibly the worst way of dealing with it. You're essentially making it a repeating Y2K / Y2038 problem.

Doing it that rarely means most people will never see it happen in their professional life, so most processes will be designed without keeping it in mind. When it does inevitably happen, everything breaks at once.

With leap seconds it happens often enough that you actively have to keep it in mind during design. Leap hours are rare enough that they'll be a society-wide event, and can probably be handled without too much issue using existing timezone logic.

One way of thinking about ignoring leap seconds is that it's like letting the effective prime meridian drift east/west. And a "leap hour" is kind of like a timezone change. In fact, you could just not have a centralized/coordinated leap hour, and let individual jurisdictions change their own timezones as they wanted, if they wanted noon to be closer to the daily solar peak.

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