alt Hacker NewsExplain why negative leap seconds are worse? Intuitively it seems like normal leap seconds would cause way more issues, or at least not more.
Explain why negative leap seconds are worse? Intuitively it seems like normal leap seconds would cause way more issues, or at least not more.
I am not an expert in Time systems but I imagine the problem is similar to daylight savings problems. With a leap second it's like putting the clocks forward an hour. With daylight savings, In your time series database you suddenly go from 0059 to 0200. 0100-0159 are missing, but that's fine. Most systems are fine with missing data, because we assume there will be occasional outages and such
When you go the other direction there's a potential problem. You have records with times from 0100-0159, then the daylight savings shift happens and you repeat 0100-0159. Now you have records with (apparently) duplicate timestamps.
I think it's probably the same problem with leap seconds and negative leap seconds, but I'm not 100% sure