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

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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wmf 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Bender 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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d00d0ff000 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

NTP.

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

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subscribed 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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cyanydeez 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	subscribed 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.