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Comment by repsilat | Hacker News Reader

This leap second business seems like a pretty dreadful idea. Considering timezones are way off-base all around the world as it is[1], it seems a lot simpler to just let the clocks drift for a while. One less weird thing in our operating systems, much less opportunity for bugs in all kinds of code that deal with times.

The set of people who really care about solar time "down to the second" is smaller than the set of people who'll be put out by 23:59:59 not being immediately followed by 00:00:00, and most of those people probably want sub-second accuracy anyway. Astronomers complaining about the clock time being wrong is exactly the same as farmers complaining about daylight savings.

1: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~maggiolo/index.php/2014/01/how-...

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> Astronomers complaining about the clock time being wrong is exactly the same as farmers complaining about daylight savings.

Well, and it's exactly the same (only the sign is changed) like software engineers complaining about leap seconds.

Do a better job and the systems will not suffer from leap seconds. Of course, astronomers and farmers will be more inclined to agree with this statement; software engineers, not so much. :)

We all complain when we are inconvenienced. When other people are inconvenienced, bah, it's a trifle.

The point is that the leap seconds don't actually help astronomers because they need sub-second accuracy anyway, so they're going to need a more exact time and they won't really care whether it says "12:47:45.435" or "12:47:44.435". So it's a lot of work for dubious benefit.

Also, we "suffer" from leap seconds not because we did a bad job designing the system, but because the Earth's rotation is slowing due to tidal forces from the moon, so an earth day today is already a tiny fraction of a second longer than it was when we defined a day to be 24 hours. So we have a couple of choices: change the length of an hour (and minute, and second...) to match the Earth's changing rotational speed; let solar time and clock time gradually drift apart; or add leap seconds to keep them roughly in sync. The first option is clearly insane, since having our measure of time vary over time would be a huge inconvenience. Out of the 2nd and 3rd, options, we have chosen the 3rd. A lot of people are arguing that the 2nd is really a better option. In the (very very) long term, it almost certainly is. Once the Earth's day becomes 25 hours, we'd be adding a leap hour every day!

This is my understanding of the situation, anyway. Anyone with more experience here, feel free to correct me.

Here I would suggest that we use a thrusters to fix (yes, fix) Earth's rotational speed. Heck, let's slow it down when we're at it, I could use more hours in a day!

See https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/

Too bad leap seconds will not be abolished before this happens, abolishing leap seconds is up for consideration in November 2015 at the World Radio Conference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Proposal_to_abolis...

I wish they had a call for public comments.

"In May 2014, David Willetts, the ex-UK Minister State for Universities and Science,[38] described as a non-scientist with a degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science,[39] expressed opposition to the abolition of leap seconds. He indicated that as a layman, he wanted to keep "the link between time and people's everyday experience of day and night." He also wanted to keep Greenwich Mean Time in Britain, and "warned" that it would drift towards the United States.[40] An article in the Times science section suggested that the abolition of leap seconds would mean the demise of Britain's role in timekeeping.[41]"

Just gah.

UK: please realize you are a medium-sized EU country, not a global super power. :)

Sincerely, the rest of Europe

Gah. The ignorance, it burns.

It will take thousands of years for the drift to even amount to one hour.

If people care about it then, ... they can switch timezones (e.g. like DST causes twice a year in most places) to compensate for it.

I agree. This bullshit temporal nationalism was also used as an argument for stopping Britain from changing to the European time zone (it makes way more sense). Apparently we can't do that because GMT is British. Ugh.

> it makes way more sense

I never understood this argument. The whole point of having a 24-hour clock is so that 12:00 is midday and 00:00 is midnight.

If you break that link then there seems little point in even having time zones, but it is useful to understand that "09:00" is in the morning, in whatever arbitrary location that time is observed.

The instant failure of "Swatch internet time" showed that the current system is still working.

12:00 is almost never midday. Even in equator, "midday" drifts by several minutes as the year goes by. Sunrise and sunset times vary a lot by latitude, so 5:00 in one location might mean sunrise, where in another location the sun won't come up for a couple of hours. Ditto for sunset. Even DST can't compensate if the sun is rising at 6:00 and setting at 22:00.

Midday doesn't have to be that precise, and you centre your day around it rather than move the day around sunrise and sunset. It may be that Swatch Internet Time was rather _before_ its time rather than something that will never catch on, but the current system works really well for pretty much everyone.

You don't want to know what time the sun's highest in the sky in various places around the world, though - you want to know what time people are likely to get to work, when people will be heading off for lunch, and when they'll be back. And that isn't as simple as knowing when it's 9am or 12 noon everywhere, because cultural assumptions about working hours and lunch hours are as variable as the alignment of timezones to actual astronomical noon. What you actually need is to keep an eye on people's Skype presence indicators.

No, we can't do it because it would involve me getting out of bed an hour earlier.

Tell you what: i'll allow a switch to European time if we move the start of the working day to 11:00. Deal?

I think the real reason is that it gives us an advantage in attracting American businesses. If you're an American company and need to open a European office, you're going to open it in the place where people can talk to your New York office for more of the working day, so you go to London rather than to Paris or Frankfurt.

UK-born/resident person here, couldn't agree more. Sorry for all the British people who still think we have an empire and all that nonsense. It's what's behind all this anti-EU crap that's going around here too. Hate it all.

Yes, the UK has questionable politicians. A quick survey suggests this isn't limited to either the UK, English speaking countries, medium sized countries (by landmass or otherwise), or the EU.

Anyway, the UK is realistically still a global great power (the US being the only acknowledged super power):

  6th by GDP (nominal)
  8-10th by GDP (PPP)
  Permanent member of UN Security Council
  Declared nuclear weapon state
  6th by military expenditure
  3rd biggest European country by populace (excluding Russia)
  4th biggest importer and exporter in the world 
  7th biggest R&D spending

The only European countries to consistently be ahead of the UK are the French, and most of the time the Germans.

    Most pervasive cyber-surveillance state
    Most self-righteous has-been in denial. 
    Most politically jaded western democracy
    Most disturbingly enthralled celebrity culture.
    Worlds smallest media attention-span.
    Worlds best dogging hotspots.

> Most self-righteous has-been in denial.

You sure that's not the French?

Do astronomers actually complain about leap seconds? I was under the impression they had their own timescales that were independent of civil timekeeping. The real objection to leap seconds comes from legacy systems like US Air Traffic Control, who complained in the 70s when leap seconds were first instated. And rather than, you know, upgrade their systems in the intervening 40 years, clearly the best approach is to keep complaining about them until they go away.

i for one vote to a base 10 system that takes all that into account.

imagine splitting time not exactly in seasons begin/end (what was the last time you synched your clocks with a solstice?). no leap seconds. no 28-31 months. no 365+-1 years. even daylight saving time benefits can be worked in the system if we don't sync 100% with the solar day but skew it just enough that you get the drift to align things on daylight saving benefits and still can tell the time by simply looking at the sun.

it's not hard. just nobody has the balls to even suggest this seriously out of math circles.

At least most people who suggest this use one of the existing could-actually-work-even-though-it-will-never-be-implemented approaches (usually 364+1 "year day" or +2 for a leap).

There are a fractional number of days in a year. You can't have a year with an integral number of days (without varying the number of days in a year, i.e. leap years).

The proposal to abandon leap seconds is appealing but as short-sighted as two-digit years. You'll have to dynamically adjust times eventually because the rate of the earth's rotation changes. We can either do it right, incrementally, and programmers can manage to implement a standard that's been around for over forty years, or we can ignore it and pass the problem along. I suppose I can guess what will happen there.

You sir, are a beacon. A bacon of hope, light, justice and marshmallows!

Your idea has definitely never been tried or abolished. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

I don't think anyone should bring up DST when talking about time representations. DST is a stupid hack for artificially controlling economic forces, and has no meritorious bearing on timekeeping itself.

Let's face it: decimal time was really only intended for people doing lots of math work involving time. If the argument for base 10 is that calculations and representations are "easier" than base 12 (mainly because all modern human civilizations use base 10), why not make the argument that base 2 should be used, since computers virtually think for us at this point?

The real reason our representation of time is still so fucked up is that it has to be used by all humans, and all humans don't want to deal with lots of digits, fractions, floating point, etc. Sexadecimal is just simpler, even if we do have to occasionally jump through some hoops to keep this piece of crap timekeeping system in order. One second every couple years? Converting to decimal just to deal with little problems like that seems like a completely unreasonable suggestion to most people.

Ever since I was a kid, the concept of a seven day week threw me. Way back then I came up with a ten day week, three weeks a month, 13 months a year, and five non-month "holidays" calendar in my head. The five non-month holidays were (if I recall correctly) summer and winter solstice, spring and fall equinox, and New Year's Day.

I never could get around the 1/4 day problem, and still had to account for leap years with a sixth non-month day every four years. It was a fun thought experiment as a teenager interested in math and science though.

FYI, you have reinvented the French Republican Calendar[1], only you missed out on decimal time (1 day is 10 hours, 1 hour is 100 minutes, 1 minute is 100 seconds; 1 second is 0.864 conventional seconds)

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

Oh, I'm not surprised it's not an original idea, and I never claimed it was. Just the musings of a child fascinated by the seasons. :-)

edit: And I just realized I had a typo up there; I wrote "13 months" when I meant "12 months". D'oh.

Why are you all looking for base-10 hours, when it's rather the base-10 which is wrong??? Numbers should be switched to base-12. I mean we often need to divide 1kg by halves, quarters and thirds, and it should fall even.

We should do base 16, though, so it lines up with binary.

Not divisible by three, which comes up a lot. 12 is superior.

60 is probably best, tho.

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