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Comment by alecbz | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a straw man because Meta's not really attacking that position, they're ceding that point.

Like a straw man would be Meta saying "astronomers think that leap seconds are helpful but in fact they're not useful for anything!"

Here, if anything, Meta is attempting to steel man leap seconds a bit by saying "look, sure, leap seconds are at least useful for some things, like astronomy, but they're still not worth it overall". And GP is claiming that it's not a very good steel man because even astronomers don't like leap seconds.

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But Meta's not actually ceding the point. They're essentially arguing that (1) leap seconds are an esoteric concept that only astronomers care about, and that (2) we shouldn't care about their esoteric concerns, so (3) we should therefore dispose of leap seconds.

The GP's point is that astronomers find leap seconds annoying too, so Meta's argument is based on a faulty premise.

Ok sure, I don't think I quite got that from what GP wrote, but I can see that as a valid argument: "There are actually valid uses for leap seconds, but just not within astronomy. Meta's claiming that leap seconds were made for astronomy so that we assume that's why they exist and ignore the other real reasons leap seconds exist and the benefits they provide."

They do not provide any.

Unless it is "programmers' employment assurance".

Yup, that's precisely how I interpreted GP's comment.

No. Astronomers deal with the problem leap seconds pretend to do with their own, more precise methods.

If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, and do not benefit anyone else, they are purely a tax on us all.

Abandon leap seconds in UTC, and literally everybody is better off. Even astronomers, who would go from managing 3 time systems to just two.

> If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, and do not benefit anyone else, they are purely a tax on us all.

May as well dispense with the calendar entirely and just measure time in powers of ten.

An day is about 80 kiloseconds, and a year about 30 megaseconds.

Maybe many gigaseconds into the future our descendants will learn about old Earth time keeping in school, along with Roman numerals and the imperial system.

Yes, you will certainly persuade 100% of the world to rewrite all their code to your thing, and buy all new equipment with your thing in ROM.

Astronomers whose software uses UTC and isn’t able to change to UT1, and who don’t need precision less than 1 second, but more than 3-5 seconds or so will be worse off. This seems like much less net inconvenience than what the tech industry has to deal with when it comes to leap seconds.

I hear the argument that we have to deal with this eventually to keep time in track with mean solar time, but the adjustments are so small that I don’t see any real impact on regular people.

You could very likely fund fixing the software of every astronomer on the planet for less than the cost of one outage caused by adding/removing a leap second when you look at Meta + Google + a few telcos.

> The GP's point is that astronomers find leap seconds annoying too

That just means that Meta is even more correct.

So you would be arguing that meta was being to charitable to the opposing side, and is even more correct than they originally appeared.

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