[userbinator]

I'm curious what if anything would be problematic if everything just effectively "ignored" leap seconds (i.e. would this outage not have occurred?) --- one minute is always 60 seconds, an hour is always 60 minutes, and a day always 24h. I mean, if you consider the fact that human society has managed to function perfectly well with almost everyone not knowing nor caring what a leap second is, and yet apparently some software does --- leading to problems like this --- something doesn't feel right.

[DigitalJack]

100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 20 hours a day. New seconds are 0.432 old seconds, or whatever ratio they need to make to quit leaping around.

[colejohnson66]

Fun fact: the reason we use 60 seconds and 60 minutes is because of the Babylonians who used base-60. IIRC, it's also why we use 360° for a circle.

[fnj]

It might also have something to do with the fact that 60 is evenly divisible by 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2.

[rz2k]

The metric system is a great system because it is almost universal. Base 10, as well as the other choices for what is ideal might be argued as inferior to other measurement systems.

Since the time we are talking about is going to be used by computers it might as well be base 2.

64 seconds per minute, 64 minutes per hour, 36 hours per day. You could then choose 8 days a week, 32 days per month, and 11 months (44 weeks) per year followed by 4.24... days of festivals to the pagan gods.

Just like before, the problem is that there are exogenous values: a non-constant length of year at an Earth location, a non-constant length of day at an Earth location, and a more constant period of time defined by a lower level process of nature like caesium atom vibrations for the seconds that scientists use.

[na85]

Financial systems need very precise timekeeping.

I'm sure other fields do as well.

[userbinator]

They do, and actually HFT did come to mind when I was writing that comment, but then I realised that, as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13294747 , they have no need to precisely synchronise time with the rotation of the Earth, and would be fine without leap seconds.

[rspeer]

But financial systems don't care if the position of the sun in the sky is a couple of seconds off from where a model says it should be. Astronomers would care about that, but they already don't use UTC.

[XorNot]

But they do care what GPS reference time is. Which are satellites very much dependent on holding an accurate position in the sky (which is dependent on the Earth's rotational speed, which changes, which is why we have leap seconds).

So go figure: which part of this system should be broken because people keep ignoring that leap seconds happen?

[userbinator]

Actually, GPS time is not adjusted for leap seconds:

http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html

[XorNot]

That's neither here nor there: GPS receivers, and the GPS satellites, do broadcast the leap-second insertions (though they don't reset their own clocks, they simply maintain the differential as additional information).