[to3m]

You could add an extra second by having the previous 1,000 seconds (16 hours) last 1,001ms each, say. Then the scope for confusion is more likely to be limited to software that reads human time, and counts milliseconds, and requires the two to match over time. Probably a much smaller percentage of all programs.

When you know what the problems are likely to be, you can of course pick the approach that's least likely to cause you problems! But if you're going in blind, then this seems like it could be a safer way to do it.

(You might use some kind of a curve to do this, so it's smooth like. I imagine this is what the comment about weighting refers to.)

[bad_user]

So the problem is that seconds were measured relative to the duration of a day, but that standard changed and now seconds are measured with atomic clocks, making a day to not be equal to 24 hours, yet we pretend that it is, hence the need for leap seconds.

I understand that this isn't ideal for people dealing with actual dates and times, but the upside is that timespans expressed in seconds are now universal, so for example Unix timestamps actually have meaning that doesn't change according to earth's rotation.

[ucho]

That's how Google does that: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/05/Got-a-second... . The drawback is that their clock will be "wrong" for most of that day.