[tvb]

Author of the web site (leapsecond.com) here if you have any questions. I don't know how the title of the HN post was chosen. The actual title of the web page is "GPS, UTC, and TAI Clocks".

The page is a javascript animation of "GPS system time", UTC, and TAI showing how they all tick together but are offset from each other by an integer number of seconds. It's a fixed integer in the case of TAI and GPS and a variable integer in the case of UTC.

[pencilguin]

Leap seconds are an abomination. Anybody who needs astronomical time is not using UTC anyway. If necessary, we could have a leap minute in a century or two.

Google's 24-hour smear makes leap seconds, bad enough already, ever so much worse.

We could fix the problem just by never announcing another one.