Comment by _alternator_
2 days ago
In short, yes, the weather, geology, and signicantly, human movement of water via aquifer draining and dam building, as well as glaicial and ice melts, all contribute to unpredictable changes in the earths rotational period, as well as the axis of rotation. The models for this are IIRC trigonometric polynomials of fairly low order, so even if we could model the unpredictability perfectly, truncation error would limit our ability to distribute the model at super high accuracy. The existing models are built in to, eg, satellites, so you can't just make them arbitrarily complex.
Fun fact: leap seconds will stop being a thing soonish. I think they phase out in 2035, with a delay because Russia needed time to update glonass satellites.
(Note: on mobile, this is from memory, details need checking ;))
2035 is the agreed drop dead date.
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally identical to "Just turn them off" but without legal problems.
Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack. You may have heard that controversial UK politician Nigel Farage "resigned" as a Westminster MP recently and that's not technically true because you can't resign, historically people hated that job and so you can't resign and we never changed that, but what you can do, and everybody does, is get assigned an "Office of profit" in which legally the King is paying you, an MP can't work for the King so you can't be an MP any more. The "Offices of profit" in question aren't real jobs† and don't pay real money, like this "Leap Hour" they'd be a legal fiction. So everybody says you "resigned" but in fact you legally can't do that...
† I mean, historically they were real jobs that made sense which is why the King paid somebody to do them, but England is very, very old so they haven't made sense for centuries and serve only as a legal fiction today.
On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century.
For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.
Comments like this make me really worry for the future of Hacker News. Here we are, on a seemingly informative thread, and you’ve jumped in with baseless political propaganda no doubt designed to influence the upcoming election.
His honour Count Binface is from Sigma IX not Sigma 6! To lump him in with those scurrilous, pro-littering hoodlums is the kind of anti-Recyclon smear I would associate with Sigma X’s online forums, not this place!
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Quite a few MPs in Westminster already don't take their physical seats in Parliament (and never vote or address the House) because the conditions attached to doing so aren't compatible with their principles. Maybe Count Binface will be the next.
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> Count Binface
I did not expect this to be a real person. Is he with the Standing At The Back Dressed Stupidly And Looking Stupid party?
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The most amazing thing would be if he removed his helmet on entry to Parliament and underneath was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sidebottom
Between 2002 and 2013, Hartlepool in North East England elected a local football mascot known as H'Angus the Monkey as their mayor, winning three elections. I think he did ditch the monkey costume between elections, maybe Binface could do the same?
Binface discussion thread here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848034
More appropiate would be the legal inability to resign from the house of commons, thus having to be appointed to a specific office of the crown which is incompatible with being a member of the commons.
There were arguments that the government should refuse Farage's appointment because he's doing it to stop the clock on investigation into his various financial dealings. While against constitutional law to decline such, it was discussed in similar situations in the past - fairly recently in fact for the same reason -- Henry Cadogan in 1842
On the subject of headwear in parliament, I quote the member for Hereford who yesterday in parliament said:
> How very different from the forthcoming by-election in Clacton, which appears to be a choice between a novelty comedy act with no real policies, and Count Binface. It is a long time since we had a count in the House of Commons, and when the time comes—as it surely will—we will have to leave to you, Mr Speaker, the delicate question of whether and how to suspend the rules on headgear in the Chamber for the new Member.
Which implies that the laws around headgear are at the behest of the Speaker.
There is precedent in electoral history for election of people dressed as a figure -- H'Angus the Monkey (a football mascott, not an actual monkey) was elected Mayor. However on the ballot paper his entry was
STUART DRUMMOND Independent
Where as Binface's is
Count BINFACE Count Binface Party
Given Farage received a mere 45% in 2024, and a unity candidate beat an incumbant mp who previosuly had 55% and was mired in a similar scandal back in 1997, it's not impossible.
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How is this relevant to the current topic? I don't have any context on political stories you are discussing, but I am fairly sure that this isn't the place to do so, not at least this thread.
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Leap minutes. You only change your clock when you have accumulated a minute of error. Then you only need to change it once per century
That actually sounds like the worst of all possible worlds!
It's infrequent enough that most systems won't bother implementing it, but a big enough time difference that it absolutely must be handled correctly at the right instant.
You'd be setting yourself up for a millennium bug-sized panic every century. And as soon as that the generation that experiences one retires, their successors will start saying "there's not going to be a leap minute for the next couple of decades, and there's no chance our code will still be running then...", and the cycle will repeat. Again and again and again.
The leap hour proposal is better because if it really is still relevant in however-many-thousand years, we can do a long-term plan to handle it which includes giving a century of notice.
What does "technically legal" mean here, what authority is that coming from?
The co-ordinated universal time, UTC exists by international agreement. In the 1960s lots of countries signed a treaty so that's the "authority" AIUI.
The treaty says everybody agrees that this new standard will try to track "solar time" which felt intuitively reasonable. They want something equivalent to the old GMT which was really based on solar time, except more modern. At first the idea was, well, we just work out how fast this damp rock spins more precisely and we can use that to ensure everything works forever.
More precise measurements of the damp rock showed that, annoyingly, Mother Nature did not provide the spinning rock as a precise clock, it spins slower and faster according to a huge number of variables and so the best we can do is measure the spinning against an actual clock. So, "Leap seconds" were born to meet that legal requirement to have UTC match the solar time.
The "leap hour" would likewise fulfil this requirement, just in a deliberately useless way because we actually do not care about precisely tracking solar time. If we did, almost every human in the world would be perpetually annoyed because of course our present system of "time zones" means on average we're at least 30 minutes wrong!
So, it's solving a real problem, why are we dropping it? I mean, why does everybody agree it's a bad solution?
Basically we guessed wrong. We thought knowing "Solar time" would be more useful than in it, and we thought these "Leap seconds" would be less trouble than they are.
It's like you buy a cat to help with your rodent problem, figuring the cat will eat mice and isn't much trouble to look after, but after purchasing a cat you find that your problem was actually rats, your cat is terrified of these large dangerous creatures and sometimes gets bitten by them necessitating expensive vet bills and now you need to pay a lot of attention to the poor animal and also now need to buy cat food.
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It's not solving a very important problem and the edge cases it introduces makes software more complex and bug prone
If the world weren't entirely reliant on software to the extent it is today (like when leap seconds were introduced in the 70s), it wouldn't matter as much.
just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.
This seems like an interesting solution, even if it's absurdist at first thought. What if we just shift the steel bar in Greenwich 20 metres east or west instead of adding a leap second?
Then everything would theoretically be correct. The logical next thing to do would be to move all the time zones as well. But time zones already don't coincide with the lines of longitude in practice; they tend to follow country or internal boundaries somewhat close to the lines of longitude (but sometimes multiple hours away!). After a few thousand leap seconds, maybe one or two countries would feel it was helpful to readjust a time zone boundary to better align with solar time, but in practice this would never be the overriding reason for that decision.
You say people's GPS systems would all suddenly be wrong because they depend on locations in latitude and longitude? I don't think this is a problem either: in practice longitude and latitude are given not relative to the steel bar in Greenwich, but to per-continent geodetic datum points. This already prevents continental drift from affecting your coordinates, though a big earthquake can still mess things up.
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> Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack
The 999 year lease to essentially make land practically freehold is one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease
It's caused significant controversy in my (former colony) country where all other long-term leases are 99 years. The landowners are insisting that their ancestors were cheated and they want their land back.
What a weird tangent
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I found the anecdote about it being technically impossible to resign as an MP interesting and am glad that the person posted it.
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea
No. Not everybody. I prefer accurate time, and all the complaints I've heard hold little water.
My servers need to timesync forwards and back all the time, eg timedrift. They need to jump to new times, or slowly drift, depending.
VMs can be hypervisor starved, or need to move to a new host.
Servers also need to handle missing time. Any daemon or program which cannot handle this is buggy, broken, and needs to deal.
Leap seconds are just part of all of this, and present no new issues compared to normal time change. I question the capabilities of any engineer who singles out time second as difficult to deal with, time is constantly changing on servers. Constantly.
So back to the start, no... everybody doesn't agree. Google isn't "everybody".
Accurate to what though, and for what? We decide what the standard is, and it seems like it would be a lot easier to have accurate time if we aren’t adding or subtracting seconds here or there. Does it really matter if the sun crests the horizon a second earlier than it did ten years ago? If it does, isn’t it much easier to just adjust your sun-cresting time?
Farage is such an ass, the King should make him feed donkeys or something.
"Vote Count Binface and Bin the Cunt" :D
There's a long tradition in the UK of having electoral candidates who don't expect to win but run because it's free publicity in a high profile race. "Count Binface" is a comedian who dresses up as a space alien whose outfit resembles well, having a Bin for a face. The serious political parties told Nigel to fuck off, if he wants to step down and then immediately contest the same seat they wouldn't run against him in this farce, but Binface isn't a serious politician so he is running in that by-election.
Nigel wanted to be able to do this whole thing about how the establishment is rotten and he (Wealthy public schoolboy who keeps lying to people and doesn't bother going to Parliament even though he was elected to do so) is a true man of the people and can put things right. It got him this far in life. But with the other candidate on your ballot being a space alien it's obvious which of these options is really "the establishment" and it's not the guy whose policies include "Building at least one house†" and who says he comes from a different planet...
† British political parties often insist they will build lots of housing because that's popular with voters. But, in practice they don't tend to really deliver because the various groups lobby not to actually build. So "at least one house" is a joke about this phenomenon, while conveniently also being technically possible, Binface could just build a house, that's a thing you can do.
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> as well as the axis of rotation
A frightening fact, the 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake shifted the position of the Earth's figure axis about 17 centimeters, making days about 1.8 microseconds shorter.
Phasing out leap seconds is such a crack pot idea. Read the resolution [1]. The conclusion hinges entirely on accepting the immutability of these 2 premises:
I accept all the other premises from the resolution, but then the obvious conclusion should be to just recommend TAI instead of UTC for any application that could be disrupted by leap seconds, instead of butchering UTC and turning it into just a worse version of TAI.
[1]: https://www.bipm.org/en/cgpm-2022/resolution-4
> The models for this are IIRC trigonometric polynomials of fairly low order, so even if we could model the unpredictability perfectly, truncation error would limit our ability to distribute the model at super high accuracy. The existing models are built in to, eg, satellites, so you can't just make them arbitrarily complex.
What are the satellites doing with the models? They're not deciding leap seconds on their own, I hope. So I don't see why the leap second decision would be locked to low accuracy.
Also I would expect doubling the precision to give you a 3-4x slowdown on the math or adding orders to have less effect, and the amount of available computation spent on those models to be like a tenth of a percent at most, so the extra cycles wouldn't be an issue. What am I missing here?
To me it seems like unpredictability is the only real issue.
> because Russia needed time to update glonass satellites.
Why is this? As leap seconds don’t occur on a regular frequency, I assume they are not hardcoded on the software or hardware on board, but the control centre uploads them on the satellites enough in advance once they have been scheduled. So why can’t the control centre just stop sending those updates?
My understanding the problem is that GLONASS is aware of leap seconds at all. It sends messages in UTC, which has this leap second funny business. GPS uses a special "GPS time" (sometimes abbreviated UT) that doesn't have a leap second. For further confusion, the leap second ensures that UTC is never more than 0.9 seconds off of mean solar time, aka UT1.
This type of assumption that was made early in a massive software and hardware project that's now been ossified for ~50 years is going to be hard to change.
> Russia needed time to update glassnoss satellites
GLONASS maybe? or really glasnost era satellites?
Glonass is correct. On mobile, thanks for the correction.
I prefer ephemeris time
A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and we lose a leap second.