Why Leap Seconds Cause Glitches

(EDIT: Of all the things not to fact-check! It's UTC, not UCT. Which is short for Coordinated Universal Time, because reasons. Well, that's embarrassing.)

[tylerburney]

I swear to god, Tom could talk about dirt and it'd be interesting.

[Moorby]

Are the stock markets closing for an hour or for 60 minutes and 1 second?

[positronwildhawk]

I was staring at that clock, waiting for it to glitch.

[ahlpym]

Ah yes, UTC, the abbreviation compromise. The English wanted CUT (Coordinated Universal Time) and the French wanted TUC (Temps Universel Coordonné), so they compromised and chose UTC. That way, everyone is wrong!

[kronos]

We're surpassing the leader with this one 🗣️

[AliJardz]

I've said it before, but I'd love to know how you do your research. You seem to find elements of topics that nobody else seems to be writing / making videos about.

[ChoCoBenchMarker]

Try dragging the time bar, and see the little thumbnail, you can see that the clock in the thumbnail always at .60

[saintdonoghue]

You know, every time I watch a video of yours, I think "the James Burke torch has been passed - and it's in very, very good hands." Please keep up the great work.

[adammullarkey]

Yeah, I definitely misread the title. I thought "Why leap seconds cause chickens" was a weird video...

[cdur]

For the ball drop of 1988, organizers acknowledged the addition of a leap second earlier that day (leap seconds are appended at midnight UTC, which is five hours before midnight in New York) by extending the drop to 61 seconds, and by including a special one-second light show during the extra second.

[judithkolk]

Your videos never seem to bore me. I learned so much from your YouTube channel! I love it. I saw that this video was recorded on June the 30th. I had just arrived in London that day so I'm really sad that I missed an opportunity to tell you how much I appreciate your hard work for this YouTube channel. But anyway, keep up the good work and I am looking forward to see more interesting, entertaining and informative videos in the near future.

[bendaviskate]

I always love it when you do videos on computer science.

[emilyr]

Thank you so much for close captioning your videos!!! I'm hard of hearing, but love your work, and sometimes it can be difficult to understand what you're saying-but this solves is greatly, thank you!!

[BigFalopa]

I TOLD YOU. THAT I'D MAKE A COMEBACK

[KurakiN]

Meanwhile some internet forums tell you that you have to wait 15 seconds to post again just because you posted a few minutes before daylight saving time starts.

[citrusui]

I think the best way to deal with leap seconds is to have the client-side have a sort of "lookup table" that translates Unix time to whatever time format your country uses. That would mean Unix time would never have to change. Yes, you'd have to pull together a database of when these changes happen, but it would be in software separate from Unix.

In the case of the space shuttle, you could have the main computer on Earth translate Unix time and account for any leap seconds. You wouldn't have to update the shuttle, just update how the client PC interprets this data.

[SapphireCrook]

I would actually love for the stock market to crash because the Earth doesn't spin in human compliant measures.
That way, astrologers can finally blame the stars for your ill fortune... and be right. Sort of.
Just a lil bit.

[gravity]

I used to work in Computer Operations for a major bank. Daylight Saving was the headache (we didn't run Unix). At the start, setting the clock forward was easy, just pause processing, reset the clock, resume processing. Going back was harder. We would shut down everything for an hour (usually 2am), then during startup the clocks would reset to the standard time.

[noerd]

Occasionally I watch your video on programming time and timezones (possibly with some slight sadistic glee at the back of my mind), and I can only imagine what this news must've done for your hypothetical programmer, making his hypothetical timecounting program

[merciadragon]

We've had leap seconds before and I've never known all this discussion particular in the popular media about doom and gloom. It's almost like a Y2K revival and when it happens life will just carry on as normal like it's done with previous leap seconds.