from Hacker News

How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself

by psuter on 1/18/19, 4:36 PM with 69 comments

  • by DKnoll on 1/19/19, 5:38 PM

    Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin?

    http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html

    In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have government shutdowns.

  • by mxuribe on 1/19/19, 3:32 PM

    Such an informative post; thanks for sharing this!

    Also, and somewhat sad and just plain crazy: some functions of NIST are not considered essential!?! It seems to me someone in the gov. is not clearly reporting who and what functions are truly essential to the higher ups in the gov. Then again, maybe they have, but the higher ups ignore them. sigh

    Nevertheless, cool post.

  • by justtopost on 1/18/19, 10:54 PM

    *could possibly affect an edge case of utc leap second distribution if Another shutdown happens during a leap second year (this is not one), AND lasts over 6 months. I get that it acks the clickbaity title at the beginning, but that coy bs doesnt help.

  • by torstenvl on 1/19/19, 8:38 AM

    > Because TAI is not based on the Earth’s rotation, it’s not ever-so-slowly changing. It’s the measure of time against which UTC’s watch is occasionally correct. That correction is called a leap second: a 61st second that is sometimes added to particular minutes in UTC, like the very last minute of December 31, 2016. As of January 2019 there have been 27 such leap seconds inserted.

    This seems backwards. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what the author is trying to say, and another poster could help clarify?

    If UTC is based on the earth's rotation and TAI is based on cesium-atomic timekeeping, and UTC is slowing down, and TAI is "the measure of time against which UTC's watch is occasionally corrected," then how can UTC have leap seconds? Delaying for an additional second on December 31st would only make it one second even slower, exacerbating the problem.

    I don't see how adding a delay to the slower clock is going to put it in sync with the faster one.

    Is it instead that UTC is TAI, plus leap seconds to slow it down to keep it in sync with the rotation of the Earth?

  • by detaro on 1/19/19, 2:20 PM

    The license stuff seems weird without further context: even if they can't copy that file, what's the hold up to just "encode" the information from the bulletin on their own and putting it into their file?

  • by qrbLPHiKpiux on 1/19/19, 2:00 PM

    We still can't migrate to the metric system. Let's work on that first!

  • by bibyte on 1/19/19, 12:57 PM

    So if I am reading this right people who use NTP aren't affected. Is that right or does OpenNTPD depends on tzdata ?

  • by dvh on 1/19/19, 8:12 AM

    Leap seconds are the most stupidest thing ever. It's time to abandon UTC and start using what professional astronomers use: UT1

  • by bayesian_horse on 1/19/19, 12:39 PM

    In my opinion it's possible the Democrats will cave. The strategic situation is that Democrats care about the country, and Trump does not. However, not enough Americans are convinced of the latter fact. Once they are, the only rational decision is to cave - and then remove him from office as quickly as possible.

  • by dooglius on 1/19/19, 2:15 PM

    I have to wonder, if something like VLC can exist, which blatantly flies in the face of copywright law unchallenged, why do so many open-source projects get ridiculously anal about license issues? The problem here appears to be that the license (CC-BY 4.0) is only specified in the README file, not in the timezone data file itself. Like, do they really think that it only applies to the README, and if they use the data they're going to get sued? I get that it's important to cover one's ass, but if it gets to the point where software breaks as a result, it's gone much too far.

    I wonder if the right solution here is to have some kind of body provide insurance against frivolous litigation over licensing issues for open-source projects, so that this kind of stupidity doesn't arise.

    Edit: It appears I was mistaken about the legal status of VLC: it is about software patent licenses, not software copywright licenses.