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

AAsmod4n about 5 hours ago 6 comments

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It’s been 10 years since we had the last leap second and it looks like we will get the first negative one soonish. Are systems ready for that?

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Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wmf•about 4 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•about 4 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•about 5 hours ago

NTP.

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

subscribed•about 2 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•about 2 hours ago

dont most systems that rely on sharp timing simply manage it themselves.

subscribed•about 1 hour 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.