No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

Wingy

Does this mean the negative leap second isn't happening anymore?

voidUpdate

I enjoy how Chrome asks me if I want to auto translate from German to English. Where did it get German from? It's French!

bombcar

"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time" is just the best preamble ever.

srean

What happens to systems such as Spanner under these circumstances? Is it a headache or a non-issue

ChrisArchitect

Notice they only said leap second . Meanwhile.... International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... ( https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329 )

delichon

Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.

returningfory2

As one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer. They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.

t1234s

They should have a global holiday to celebrate the people who maintain time/date related code in OS kernels that keeps the world from imploding.

exegete

> The difference between Coordinated Universal Time UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is : > > from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37s This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.

doctoboggan

What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?

dodoisdodo

The real Time Variance Authority

KboPAacDA3

If the UTC-TAI offset remains at -37s, then it also means the UTC-GPS offset remains at -18s. TAI and GPS have a constant 19s offset from each system.

da-x

My longevity will extend one second into the future in nominal terms, increasing the chance to reach the 22nd century a tiny bit.

clircle

Cool, I don't have to set my clocks back this December.

ComputerGuru

This announcement is very much a nothing burger; it’s already been more or less decided that adding leap seconds just isn’t going to be a thing anymore (in our lifetime). Here’s on article from 2022: https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/end-of-leap-secon...

Surac

World will end at 26 December so no leap second needed

AbstractH24

ELI5: How does this impact UNIX timestamps? Particularly for things that are in maintenance mode or otherwise minimally maintained. Nothing I do requires this level of precision, but certainly there are things that do.

BobbyTables2

Too expensive in this economy ?

yayamao

looks like tons of service will crash at the new year eve

usr1106

Isn't this anti-news? I vaguely remember they have stopped introducing leap seconds until further notice because they cause too much trouble with today's computing systems. On my phone now and did not research it, as I say vaguely remember. Now we are 37 seconds off. Nobody of us will have to worry that Christmas is around Easter time. We can leave that problem to future generations much more responsibly than many other problems. That the notice comes every 6 months is just to meet the letter of the original international treaty.