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Comment by BoppreH

There is a very good reason to eventually abandon it: leap seconds. Unix time goes back one second whenever there is a leap second on Earth.

It's extremely weird and IMHO completely ruins the purpose of a timestamp, but it's a compromise for backwards compatibility, since Unix time was created before leap seconds. This hack ensures that the number of seconds in a day remains fixed, an assumption of many systems at the time.

parent BoppreH 6 years ago

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