3 ms·

If they had only used 4 digits, then in eight thousand years or so, longbets.org would have felt really stupid about having to hire a historical programming re-

If they had only used 4 digits, then in eight thousand years or so, longbets.org would have felt really stupid about having to hire a historical programming re-enactor to show us how our ancestors used to adjust the width of a database column. But luckily they used 5 digits. 5 digits should be enough for anyone.

wpietri 9y ago
The 5-digit display year is definitely in keeping with our mission, which is to get people to think longer term. But under the hood, I represented all dates as 64-bit longs of ms since epoch. So I believe the farthest date the current code can represent is 17 Aug 292,278,994 AD. By that point the earth's day will be an hour longer [1], so whatever sucker has inherited this project will have bigger problems than just the size of the field. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future