Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?

4 comments

• wmf 6 hours ago
  Systems are absolutely not ready. Leap seconds are a bad idea and negative leap seconds are worse. Just don't do it and let the drift cancel out.
• Bender 5 hours ago
  Google's proposal is a smear. [1] Most time servers do not use smear. No idea what behavior it may introduce in places where sub-second time is important. Curious if all these bugs [2] were fixed specifically to deal with going backwards.

  [1] - https://developers.google.com/time/smear

  [2] - https://rivassec.com/leap-second-chaos-2012.html
• d00d0ff000 6 hours ago
  NTP.

  By any other standard, most manually set clocks are up to a full minute off all the time.

  [-]
  • subscribed 3 hours ago
    Yeah, but we're thinking of systems where nanoseconds matter.

    MiFID 2 alone forces sub-μs precision. Million times less than the leap 1 second.

    NTP minute away is good for displaying date on the workstation, not for many of the devices that are critical to the modern world.

    [-]
    • cyanydeez 3 hours ago
      dont most systems that rely on sharp timing simply manage it themselves.
      [-]
      • subscribed 2 hours ago
        Yesno.

        Sure they have their own time servers fed from the GPS, but they need to be _accurate_ in relation to the world.

        But timestamps used by companies forced to use very accurate timing must be synchronised to UTC.
• rezvovmobile 4 hours ago
  [flagged]