4 ms·
Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.
by callalex 5y ago
Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoPerhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.
- pyuser583 5y agoDear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999. Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing. So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early. I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000. They never got back to me.
- r2_pilot 5y agoHe's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)
- j16sdiz 5y agoWikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.
- School-Cotton 5y agoGood point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.
- bruce511 5y agoSo, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse? While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now... And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.
- CRConrad 5y ago> So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse? In eight thousand years.
- oblio 5y agoAre you surprised that on HN, of all places, we find a date format pedant? :-D
- jacquesm 5y agoAnd a wrong one, at that.
- kragen 5y agoMy opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.
- CRConrad 5y ago> My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others. "My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others." There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.
- 3np 5y agoAs can be seen here, it’s really distracting. Writing years like that is a great way to have people ignore or forget what you’re actually wanting to communicate. Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.
- kragen 5y ago#notallpeople
- abecedarius 5y agoIt seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the aggressively conventional are something else.
- kragen 5y agoIt's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush. That way we know who would have cheered on the court's sentence on Turing or Galileo before it matters.
- CRConrad 5y ago> It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush. you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it. So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want? OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?