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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> so we could stop it without breaking anything

Well, until some sufficiently influential government or organization gets annoyed with the discrepancy with solar time and comes up with their own correction to the local clocks under their jurisdiction. Then at the bare minimum you need all the commonly used date/time libraries to be updatable with this information. Existing solutions like the tz database [0] might already technically support this, although I have to imagine that the logistics will be annoying at best.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

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The timezone database supports offsets into the seconds, although I've heard some applications will not support files with such offsets iCalendar feeds that they'd otherwise support, so it'd be a bit of a mess still. I can't imagine why a country would feel the need to have an offset measured in seconds, but there are a lot of countries, some of which really don't seem to value global consistency, so it wouldn't be terribly surprising. Combined with countries that insist on applying DST without advanced scheduling, that would be a lot of fun.

The limiting factor here is that the local jurisdiction would have the same computer problems that the rest of us do. They also would need a way to update their own clocks to reflect their own local time. So presumably it would be done within an existing framework, like defining a new time zone that is one second further from UTC.

Time zones are wide enough that the error from (missing) leap seconds are infinitesimal compared to the quantization to the time zone.

Leap seconds are a poor band-aid "solution" to a problem that nobody has.

Right, but I'm talking about solar time drift.

The point is that you get significantly more 'drift' by just moving east or west within a timezone. No government is going to care if the local time at solar noon at a certain location changes a few seconds over the years, given that the time at solar noon changes much more as you move throughout the timezone.

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