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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

I can't quite reconcile the FB attitude of "we only hire the best and brightest after making them demonstrate their technical prowess" vs "computers are a bit hard please can everyone change everything to make it easier?"

Why not just agitate for a move to French Revolutionary Decimal Time as well?

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This is not a case of "computers are a bit hard", it's a system that we've imposed upon ourselves that has been repeatedly demonstrated to be unsafe. because of this, we've ended up with many (many) solutions baked into software that attempt to abstract away the sharp edges of this problem from individual engineers, which leads to inconsistent assumptions about what you need to consider when writing code.

even with the best and brightest engineers there is a non-trivial probability that someone will make an assumption that is invalid based on their understanding of what can happen (ex. leap seconds never go negative!) or the library their using (this ensures monotonic time!) that could lead to disastrous results. and especially at meta scale, that probability is no longer "will someone make this mistake in our code?" but is "how many times will people make this mistake in our code?", so systemic solutions that eliminate this as a class of problem an individual can create is something we should consider.

> could lead to disastrous results

You mean some influencer's timeline could get messed up? The horror!

Reddit was down for almost an hour!

whether you like it or not, people are using facebook (and google, and amazon, and so on) as critical infrastructure.

there are also all the other companies out there who do not have the platform that meta has that can also hit the same issues. i'm sure some of them have products you wouldn't be so glib about.

Let the infrastructure fail at the next leap second. If it’s enough of a problem eventually everyone who can’t cope will go out of business.

>whether you like it or not, people are using facebook (and google, and amazon, and so on) as critical infrastructure.

Only facebook here is the one suggesting we should change things, so who is using facebook as critical infra and what is your definition of "critical" here.

Is UTC as a system inherently unsafe or does it just expose unwary programmers to bugs, the vast majority of which are somewhere between benign and inconvenient in impact?

It generates gratuitous, totally unnecessary bugs with impact wholly unpredictable.

If you want a system with no leap seconds use TAI. This is not rocket science. I implemented this in my first real job for a broker trader in 2009 who had exposure in Japan and Australia (leap seconds happen at 10/11am there).

If a 21 year old grad can move 200 terabytes of historical data 15 years ago what are the best and brightest at FB doing with their lives?

A pretty big part of being good at software is deciding if a problem is worth solving.

My exact first thought as well, which I will readily admit comes mostly from my bottomless contempt for the company and its employees. The thing that really needs to be left in the past is Facebook.

Even Facebook can be right twice a day.

This is one of those cases.

Looks like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have joined in, so yeah.

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