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No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026

No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026

speckx

Comments (147)

  • imglorp
    Responding to a deleted comment:> ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ...The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely.At $work around 2014 we had three different hardware GPS types which we used for precision timekeeping; some chips, daughterboards, and firmware. One day a leap second arrived -- it gets broadcast to aGPS hardware a day ahead of time -- and all three implementations handled it differently. One handled it, one did something else like ignore it, and I think one even bricked itself. That situation was less than bueno.
  • Ozzie_osman
    The worst bug I ever dealt with in a 20 year career was a leap second bug (back in 2012). Servers all slowed down dramatically very suddenly, CPU saturated. No relevant code changes or changes in traffic. Turns out, they just got into that state due to a leap second. Some Livelock bug.A restart fixed everything.It wasn't just our site that went down. If I recall correctly, many other large sites (like Reddit, LinkedIn, etc) also had the same issue. Guess no one thought of the "did you try restarting it?"
  • fuoqi
    Computer systems (most importantly, UNIX) should've been using TAI [0] from the beginning. Human-readable time in turn should be computed from it using periodically updated time zones database which would include offset between TAI and UTC. By eliminating leap seconds we effectively re-invented TAI with a weird offset. While I am in favor of eliminating leap seconds as a hacky way to fix the current mess, it's sad to see that we added yet another quirk to the already complicated system of datetime keeping.[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
  • rappatic
    Google and lots of other firms use a "leap smear" to hide the leap second from end users, essentially "smearing" the second across the hours before and after each leap.https://developers.google.com/time/smear
  • wanhandle
    Back in the early 2010s my company was maintaining a Spring application processing ActiveMQ messages. We'd received word that the application wasn't processing work. One of us goes and looks at logs and sees just endless volumes of stack traces. Eventually the suggestion is made and accepted to just reboot the application. That fixed it.Turns out the JVM simply lost its mind when leap seconds were introduced. So, for the next several years, we watched that French society's website that announced when leap seconds would be introduced and scheduled application restarts accordingly.
  • wlkr
    Interesting! There's a lot I don't know about this, but I know a little more now. I'll admit, I naively thought this would be more regular than it appears to be [0].[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
  • arwineap
    I thought the state of the art here was to elongate seconds collectively over the course of a long range of time to compensate
  • Vvector
    Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain.Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.
  • sarchertech
    The idea that if being dark at 12pm in 20k years will bother anyone is absurd. The shift will happen so slowly that the only people who will even realize it happened are historians and history buffs.Really the idea that there will enough civilizational continuity that our current timekeeping infrastructure and systems will continue unbroken for that long is insane.
  • idiotsecant
    We should just have a standards body that meets each decade and decides what epoch time every day for the next 10 years officially starts on. Everyone knows ahead of time how it will work, software updates have predictable change intervals, it allows us to refresh time based on policy decisions, and it uses something sane as the backbone of the system.
  • throw0101d
    There was some talk about a negative leap second† a few years ago:* https://www.npr.org/2024/03/30/1241674216/climate-change-tim...† T23:59:58Z would have skipped/suppressed :59 and gone to T00:00:00Z.
  • NooneAtAll3
    all I want for christmas is a negative leap secondhttps://qntm.org/leap
  • himata4113
    How about a leap minute instead so we only have to worry about this when it's not a problem anymore :)? We will either hit the fermi filter or accend intelligence.
  • SeanDav
    I assumed that leap seconds could be determined algorithmically, it appears I assumed badly. This is a bit of a can of worms...
  • shablulman
    [flagged]
  • OhNoNotAgain_99
    [dead]
  • unit149
    [dead]
  • sltr
    Next up: DOGE cancels leap seconds. /s
  • saltyoldman
    [flagged]