Governments vote to retire the leap second by 2035

The days of the leap second creating headaches for software engineers are coming to an end. On Friday, government representatives at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris, France voted nearly unanimously to retire the practice of occasionally adding one second to official clocks (via The New York Times ). Introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to reconcile discrepancies that can come up between atomic time and observed solar time , the leap secon...