alt Hacker News2035 is the agreed drop dead date.
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally identical to "Just turn them off" but without legal problems.
Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack. You may have heard that controversial UK politician Nigel Farage "resigned" as a Westminster MP recently and that's not technically true because you can't resign, historically people hated that job and so you can't resign and we never changed that, but what you can do, and everybody does, is get assigned an "Office of profit" in which legally the King is paying you, an MP can't work for the King so you can't be an MP any more. The "Offices of profit" in question aren't real jobs† and don't pay real money, like this "Leap Hour" they'd be a legal fiction. So everybody says you "resigned" but in fact you legally can't do that...
† I mean, historically they were real jobs that made sense which is why the King paid somebody to do them, but England is very, very old so they haven't made sense for centuries and serve only as a legal fiction today.
Replies
What does "technically legal" mean here, what authority is that coming from?
just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.
So, it's solving a real problem, why are we dropping it? I mean, why does everybody agree it's a bad solution?
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea
No. Not everybody. I prefer accurate time, and all the complaints I've heard hold little water.
My servers need to timesync forwards and back all the time, eg timedrift. They need to jump to new times, or slowly drift, depending.
VMs can be hypervisor starved, or need to move to a new host.
Servers also need to handle missing time. Any daemon or program which cannot handle this is buggy, broken, and needs to deal.
Leap seconds are just part of all of this, and present no new issues compared to normal time change. I question the capabilities of any engineer who singles out time second as difficult to deal with, time is constantly changing on servers. Constantly.
So back to the start, no... everybody doesn't agree. Google isn't "everybody".
Farage is such an ass, the King should make him feed donkeys or something.
On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century.
For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.