Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by leni536 104 days ago
I meant unix and NTP times, which are supposedly just monotonic numbers marching forward (except for leap seconds), not the UTC representation over abstract time.

I know we just get a 60th second in a minute. What unix and NTP timestamps do (or originally did) was repeating a second. Then we got other hacks to keep monotonicity, like smearing. Not without tradeoffs.

1 comments

Thanks for explaining! It's indeed crazy that "this is still a thing".

(I regret I did not put in the research prior to answering to your comment: https://www.meinbergglobal.com/english/info/leap-second.htm#... )