Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

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> It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause.

I agree, but I'm also - sad to say - less than surprised to find engineers at a Big Tech firm taking a high-handed, not to mention narrow and ill-informed, approach over the issue and trying to impose their will on a global scale. My worry here is that, Meta being Meta, they carry quite a lot of influence and may actually gain some traction.

EDIT: I'll add a bit more colour here. At the core of our platform we manage a database containing billions of legacy timestamped records (or events, if you prefer), adding more and more every day. Without even giving it a great deal of thought I guarantee you that this proposal will cause us more problems that it solves and will distract us from making more valuable investments of time and effort that would benefit our business should it be implemented. Sure, we can no doubt fix all these problems, but we've got better things to do. I imagine that many other businesses would be similarly affected and would take a similar view.

I wholeheartedly oppose it.

I'm kinda impressed by the hubris, really. Usually it's emperors, kings, and big multinational governing bodies that try to screw around with the time standard that ordinary people have to live with. Occasionally strident revolutionaries who've already solved the "overthrow and replace the government" part of their problem and aren't content with just beheading people all day.

Says something about how Facebook sees itself, I guess.

Facebook is arguing to stop monkeying with the time Standard. Correctly.

Leap seconds are exactly the "screwing around" you criticize.

Leap seconds are added because the Earth is slowing down. Are you angry at celestial mechanics?

I totally don't care about the Earth slowing down. Nobody does except astronomers. Computers don't need to know.

>Your honor the nuclear attack on San Fransisco happened at 10.59.59 as per UTC-Facebook time and is as such part of WWIII and not a violation of the armistice.

By "UTC-Facebook" time, you of course mean UTC time, the time everybody already uses, and that has no need to be broken every year, two years, or three years, and wouldn't be broken at all if we simply stopped breaking it.

By a foot you of course mean the foot-meter, a measure good enough for everyone and one which will stop breaking metric conversions if we just defined three feet to be a meter.

You are still failing, but don't give up. Most people can get there in the end.

> I totally don't care about the Earth slowing down.

Neither do I in day to day life. But I do have to care about it when I or members of my team write code, or store and retrieve data to and from a database, or work across multiple timezones, because it can be critically important to unambiguously know whether something happened on one day or the next.

The reality is there aren't any nice, elegant solutions to this problem. Leap seconds aren't a nice solution. Meta's proposal isn't a nice solution. I don't necessarily even think it's worse than leap seconds, but it's certainly not substantially better. The key point is it's a change and one which, in my view, won't deliver enough value for everybody (beyond just Meta) to justify the level of disruption it will certainly cause if implemented.

The perfect solution is well known. Abandon leap seconds. Done.

And now you're simply employing bad faith argument, which is basically impossible to constructively engage with: please don't do that.

Lot's of folks care, what are you talking about? Accountants and lawyers the world over EXTREMELY care about keeping the computers idea of wall-clock time and your idea of time in sync, and if you're a customer faced with the side-effects of changing the standard after-the-fact, you probably care as well.

Let's paint a picture based on actual code I've actually seen in the real world. If you ignore the leap second but keep using UTC, then in about 5 years, UTC will differ from wall clock by about 5 seconds. So if, in some software used for, I don't know maybe billing customers, someone was calculating day boundaries by doing modulo division of UTC by the number of seconds in a day (I've seen it), then in 5 years we've got a 5 second discrepancy in the number of API calls made by customer X when comparing what the software says to what the customer measured. Customers don't like this, accountants and lawyers REALLY don't like this, and us engineers will have the wonderful experience of telling them all

> "this code used to be valid until some boneheaded engineers at Facebook convinced a ton of other engineers to break the agreed upon standard about what it means to measure time in this way, and now things that used to work fine need to be patched because we've got a Y2K EVERY DAY!"

Oops, I guess ignoring wall clock time might be something other human people care about after all.

That’s all it is, they ran into an engineering problem and they’re trying to get the world to bend to their will instead of solving the problem because they think it will be easier. Mark’s arrogance is nauseating.

Now expand this reasoning far beyond the scope of time keeping.

Big Tech companies/Anti Big Tech lobbyists massively oversimplify in their pitch to influential people to deregulate/overregulate certain areas. In both cases they end up making poor decisions for the general case both end up making the average case worse for everyone except themselves. It's about creating a market where none need exist. Facebook doesn't need to care about time really. It's not remotely important to their business.

I've built and worked on platforms with sub microsecond measuring requirements and this stuff didn't bother me. This is idle bad money finding work for itself at the expense of everyone else.

Disclosure: I am/was an early investor in facebook in 2012. Mark is turning it all to dirt because he's run out of ideas

> arrogance is nauseating

Right back atcha.

We have three alternative time systems and a big bag of issues with each of them, but you think the extremely mundane argument that we should prefer one bag represents nauseating arrogance because you think that your favorite bag -- a different one -- is obviously correct? Come on. Do better. Be civil.

FB is not making the mundane argument that we should pick one time system over another. They are literally proposing that the world should redefine UTC to be TAI with a permanent fixed offset, which is functionally equivalent to just using TAI.

That is effectively proposing the deletion of the most commonly used time system of the three primary time systems from existence and forcing everybody and all existing systems that use it to convert to what is effectively TAI.

That is not mundane. Mundane is arguing that everybody should use TAI. Arrogant is arguing that we should force everyone to do it by redefining their dependencies under them.

That is the smallest change that eliminates all the pain.

Arrogant is imposing a big nuisance on everyone every year or two. It is not arrogant to ask for a nuisance affecting millions to be dropped.

No, it is a change that breaks everybody using UTC correctly, TAI with a offset to synchronize with UT1, in order to fix everybody who did not know what they were doing and used UTC when they actually wanted TAI.

If there was a scheme that fixed only the wrong usages, that would be fine. But, it is frankly absurd that we should even consider breaking carefully designed programs correctly using their dependencies to fix programs incorrectly using their dependencies especially when it is trivial for the wrong usages to be fixed manually.

They will still be using UTC. Just, without bugs that show up every year or two.

Not announcing any more leap seconds will break exactly nothing.

No, UTC is TAI kept in sync with UT1. Changing UTC to being TAI with a offset is a fundamental breaking change in what it means. Anybody relying on UTC doing what it is designed and advertised to do, keep in sync with UT1, will be broken. The only people who will not be broken are people using UTC incorrectly as TAI. The only reason this is interesting is that basically everybody uses UTC incorrectly as TAI, but that is not a valid excuse to break the programs using it correctly.

People using the wrong dependency should fix their system to use the right dependency. They should not campaign to steal the name and replace it, that is absurd.

Literally nobody depends on any relationship between UTC and overhead sun angle.

The only people who care or need to do not use UTC. They use TAI, and a separate continuous log of fractional seconds.

UTC has one role, and that is Standard worldwide civil time. Telling people who need Standard civil time to use TAI makes everything strictly worse: not only do you then not match most of the world, but you still have to track irregular, unpredictable corrections to be able to sync with everybody else.

Except that standard civil time cares about the overhead sun angle for some reason, that is why we use the day demarcations of UT1 instead of TAI. If we really decided as a society that we really no longer care, then we should switch standard civil time to TAI and do away with UTC entirely, not calcify it as some arbitrary offset from TAI.

> "cares about the overhead sun angle for some reason"

That is what is proposed to be fixed and that you are arguing against for reasons you don't know or, apparently, care about.

Switching civil time to TAI would break everything, most of which cannot be fixed. Random breakage is the problem. More breakage would be strictly worse.

Well we could introduce negative leap seconds until they align. The problem (UT1 deviating from UTC by more than one second) would be the same as in this proposal.

> Literally nobody depends on any relationship between UTC and overhead sun angle.

That's just... completely incorrect and totally false? Have you ever even worked for a business? Have you ever read how time libraries are actually written?

Please, go read the Python `datetime` library: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0fe645d6fd22a6f57e777... which is used to calculate a UTC timestamp: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0fe645d6fd22a6f57e777...

It is literally built on the exact assumption that 0 means January 1, 1970 and that right now is (number of seconds in a day) x (number of days since Jan 1 1970). If we stop adjusting UTC, then by this time next year UTC will be one second out of date with our wall-clock times, and calling `datetime.now().isoformat()` will give us a timestamp that's 1 second off from the wall-time of a user. At one-second past midnight on the 20th of the month, your computer will incorrectly be spitting out timestamps saying it's exactly midnight of the 19th. That's what you might call a major breaking change.

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