this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Obligatory "Falsehoods programmers believe about time"
Does anyone know what is untrue about "Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970."?
When a leap second happens, unix time decreases by one second. See the section about leap seconds here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
As a side effect, this means some unix timestamps are ambiguous, because the timestamps at the beginning and the end of a leap second are the same.
It might be more accurate to say that Unix time is the number of days since Jan 1st, 1970, scaled by 24×60×60. Though it gets a bit odd around the actual leap second since they aren't spread over the whole day. (In some ways that would be a more reasonable way to handle it; rather than repeating a second at midnight, just make all the seconds slightly longer that day.)