> It sounds like Meta wants to change the definition of time for everyone just to make their programming a little easier. I find the very premise just out right ridiculous. ... Meta is just trying to make their problem someone else's problem.
Meta's argument is: we should get rid of leap seconds because even though they're helpful for astronomers, they're bad for everyone else.
Your counterpoint was: Actually leap seconds are _also_ bad for astronomers.
Which implies then that Meta is even more right to suggest that we get rid of leap seconds, because it seems like they help nobody.
The decision to ignore leap seconds reminds of the decision by Russian and some other orthodox churches to ignore changes introduced by Gregorian calendar. The decision saved them some internal political problems, like the need to decide which saints will have their celebrations missing, but now the Orthodox Christmas is moving to summer with the speed of about 1 day per 100 years. Eventually somebody will have to deal with this, but not now - there’s a lot of time - same thinking.
Meanwhile, if you leave in a Gregorian country you can have your Christmas tree for free on Orthodox December 12th…
#borealocentrism
Guilty as charged. Thinking of that - there could be no more Russian winter as we used to it at all, even in the Northern hemisphere. My friends are now growing apricots in the Russian temperate zone. Apricots! - in the place there the “Baptismal Frosts” (to happen each year just before Christmas) used to kill all such fancy vegetation.
#climateasitwasbeforechangecentrism
The Islamic calendar drifts by about 10 days a year, and Muslims seems to be able to cope fine with their holidays not consistently being in the same season.
> If the change is implemented, “the old meaning of time will become ambiguous,” warns Steve Allen, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California.
This does seem like a problem that is solvable.
In 2015 the ITU (mentioned in that 2003 story as studying the problem) announced:
> The ITU World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-15), currently in session in Geneva from 2 to 27 November, has decided that further studies are required on the impact and application of a future reference time-scale, including the modification of coordinated universal time (UTC) and suppressing the so-called “leap second”
https://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/53.a...
In 2012 they also decided to defer:
> ITU Press Release of 19 January 2012 - ‘ITU Radiocommunication Assembly defers decision to eliminate the leap second’
I'm with Allen. It's fine to drop leap-seconds; but then it's not UTC any more, it's a new time scale, and it needs a new name.
We've made this mistake before: in fact GMT has been redefined many times, and as a result the time interval between two GMT timestamps depends on which versions of GMT the two timestamps use, and so on the dates of the timestamps.
Allen has an instructive page on time scales here: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/timescales.html
It's not a quote, but the article also has Allen saying that "it could cost between US$10,000 and US$100,000 for each telescope to correct the problem, and that corrections will be tricky to implement."
It also has another astronomer claiming problems: "But separating time from rotation would mean that telescopes would no longer function properly, according to Patrick Wallace, an astronomer at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford, UK. Most telescopes with a viewfinder wouldn't be immediately affected, but instruments that track satellites and other moving objects could feel the effects within a few years, Wallace warns."
It sounds like FB/Meta is correct in saying that Astronomers did object. I'd suggest (like Mata does) those objections are not especially important considering the trade-offs though.
But, for the latter problem, a better solution would probably be to have a service similar to NTP, that gives the current Greenwhich sidereal time, rather than UTC. Then it could be corrected more often than the current leap seconds. That doesn't solve the problem for existing telescope systems though.
> Meta is just trying to make their problem someone else's problem.
It sounds like you agree that leap seconds themselves are a problem for people besides Meta?
I agree with gmiller here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229049 that the whole thing smells like Facebook's engineers wanting to save themselves some work, at the cost of generating more problems for the future.
This kind of garbage attitude is why we have climate change, covid-19 and so many other things wrong with the world. Befitting that this one came from facebook.
It's not Facebook. Even the examples of the post include non-Meta. It's not "some work". It's how we conceptualize time moving linearly, and that logic encoded on software.
People just want a reason to dig on Meta.
It sounds like you agree that leap seconds themselves are a problem for people besides Meta?
However, in the past 50 years, we've only had 27. So at the current rate, probably more like 6667 years to be off by an hour.
Of course, if the earth's rotation changed speed by so much that 2 leap seconds per year wasn't enough, we'd find a way to cram more in. In fact, in that case, the case for leap seconds would probably get stronger.
How long has the 9-5 even existed? Less than 200 years? At no point in 6667 years would anyone notice any consequences of the drift, culture and work schedules change so much faster than that.
The Julian calendar being off with regards to leap years wasn't a problem… until it was. And then someone had to fix it:
Computers are another story though, perhaps in the past "a typical computer clock" could be on the order of seconds off and be fine. When computers start to control things like wireless networks (cellular is a problem today, time accuracy is a design factor in evolving Wifi as well), those seconds turn into microseconds very, very quickly. The whole point of the article is to reduce unnecessary complexity in the existing complex time synchronization systems.
If you're running large infrastructure, the next leap second is going to cause an outage somewhere in your org, and the cost may be very large.
Can we switch to leap minutes instead? In the worst case it would mean to adjust the time once in 30 years, which means that astronomers and software engineers would have to deal with this problem no more than 3 times in a century. Fair enough IMHO.
So no real change to the status quo?
My understanding was that leap seconds are only ever added. It’s not like this averages out over time. The problem is that because they are only added the effect is cumulative and eventually some future generation will be eating lunch at 00:00:00.
And how often does time code mess that up? We have leap years regularly every ~4 years, and how does time code mess that up?
And you think that a one-off event is going to go smoothly?
I think your comment is a precursor to what would happen if we tried to get a one-off event right…
It's less than a minute in a life span. Just skip summer time once every millenium something.
I’m not saying that abandoning leap seconds is a good idea, just that abandoning them wouldn’t consign future generations to whacky schedules.
Like a straw man would be Meta saying "astronomers think that leap seconds are helpful but in fact they're not useful for anything!"
Here, if anything, Meta is attempting to steel man leap seconds a bit by saying "look, sure, leap seconds are at least useful for some things, like astronomy, but they're still not worth it overall". And GP is claiming that it's not a very good steel man because even astronomers don't like leap seconds.
The GP's point is that astronomers find leap seconds annoying too, so Meta's argument is based on a faulty premise.
Unless it is "programmers' employment assurance".
If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, and do not benefit anyone else, they are purely a tax on us all.
Abandon leap seconds in UTC, and literally everybody is better off. Even astronomers, who would go from managing 3 time systems to just two.
May as well dispense with the calendar entirely and just measure time in powers of ten.
An day is about 80 kiloseconds, and a year about 30 megaseconds.
Maybe many gigaseconds into the future our descendants will learn about old Earth time keeping in school, along with Roman numerals and the imperial system.
I hear the argument that we have to deal with this eventually to keep time in track with mean solar time, but the adjustments are so small that I don’t see any real impact on regular people.
That just means that Meta is even more correct.
So you would be arguing that meta was being to charitable to the opposing side, and is even more correct than they originally appeared.
But you seem to be implying that you do not want to get rid of them, which surprised me. After you made your case for how they actually make things harder for astronomers, I thought you'd be in favor of eliminating them.
You seem to be against eliminating them, but are not saying so clearly, or explaining why. Unless I am misunderstanding. Can you explain why you object to getting rid of leap seconds? Is it because of value to astronomy, or because of value in other domains despite the inconvenience to astronomy? Other? Or do I misunderstand?
I also misread their argument until this point. But there is no reading that makes sense except that Meta’s programming problems protect everyone else from dealing with the drifting time.
I think this is right. There will still be calculations for sunrise and sunset which will have to make the calculations.
The shifting will be invisible, and someone can update the formula once a century.
"Everyone should change how they do things because it isn't valuable to us personally"
Nah
Personally, I think we should return to the Julian calendar. Leap years are too complicated otherwise, not worth the trouble.
Meta (and everyone else behind this proposal) are arguing that leap seconds are more trouble than they're worth. Just as you are in the specific case of astronomy.