Time’s up for the leap second as scientists swap it for the leap hour

3 days ago by Kwerl to c/science

Delegates from 69 countries approve clock changeover after decades of debate – but switch may not take effect for thousands of years

NeatNit 34 points 3 days ago

"We already have daylight saving where we change by an hour and no one gets bothered about that,"

What the fuck. EVERYONE gets bothered about that!

I can actually get behind this leap hour idea, but holy crap that is a bad way to present it

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Windex007 16 points 3 days ago

I know this is intended to help, but as a software Dev who does work where absolute time between two arbitrary clock times does need to resolve to the second... This is that xkcd comic about a 14th standard.

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otp 16 points 3 days ago

This was a vote to basically say "the future will deal with it".

An hour is a long time! This means that, in an area that observes DST, they could be off by 2 hours. Not to mention China's one timezone situation.

I feel like a leap minute would've been more reasonable to deal with. Unless they're just betting on humans not needing computers (or, uh...time tracking) by the time a leap hour would be relevant

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NeatNit 7 points 3 days ago

I agree about leap minute, I really don't see why they leaped (ha) straight to an hour.

Well, I kinda do - working with whole-hour offsets is kind of a solved issue (timezones, DST) whereas there isn't really a solution for a minute. The clever people at Google (IIRC) came up with the "smear second" as a pretty elegant way to implement a leap second, but the same approach wouldn't scale all that well to a full minute. You'd have to smear it over 2 months or something.

But if the time does come to implement a leap hour, that's going to be just as hard to deal with! You basically have to redefine UTC to be what was previously UTC+1:00, and then what? Computers can't deal with that any more than that can deal with 61 seconds in a minute.

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Tanoh 3 points 3 days ago

There are already timezones with 15 min offsets. 15, 30, 45. India standard time for example is +5:30 from GMT.

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Flower 5 points 3 days ago

3 hours. Some places are in the wrong timezone for economic reasons. Lot's of western european countries should be in GMT according to longitude.

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Kirp123 7 points 3 days ago

Spain is in CET even though most of the country is at the same longitude as the UK. Time zones have been turned into a political concept more than a purely geographic one.

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