9 ms·
https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di..
by compressedgas 5y ago
https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...
- hayleox 5y agoLol, that's completely silly. Who even knows if we'll still be using the same calendar in 8,000 years? Y10K is not worth dealing with until the 100th century.
- kragen 5y agoYes, it is!
- _jal 5y agoSo then why not Y100K? Does preparation become pointless sometime after 8,000 years from now, but before 92,000 have elapsed?
- kragen 5y agoGo wild!
- qot 5y agoI'm genuinely curious and haven't found an answer online so I'll ask you: why stop at 10K and not 100K? Also we represent 3-digit years like 770 without problems, so what does this solve? Is the hypothetical problem so bad that solving it is worth the ambiguity between octal numbers and the extra effort for readers to parse 02022 as year?
- kragen 5y agoStop at 100K if you like! Or 1000K! You're a free being!
- jecel 5y agoI only know a little about the Long Now Foundation so I could be getting it wrong, but I understood their goal was to help people think about problems beyond the short term. For example, why would anyone plant a tree if they will be long dead before that tree reaches its normal height? Instead of just sitting around discussing vague ideas they thought it would be interesting to design and build something to showcase their ideas, so the "ten thousand year clock" was proposed. It is amazing how many problems you have to solve to build a clock that has even the slightest chance of still be running ten thousand years from now. A side effect of the clock project was that some of the dates involved would have five digit years, so they thought using five digit years for current dates would be a good way of shocking people and exposing them to their ideas.
- kragen 5y agoIndeed! But it can be difficult to talk about any kind of new idea on a site full of people who are driven into uncontrollable rages when they see someone deviating from a social convention, however minor.
- retrocryptid 5y agoi think the deal was you always prepend a zero to highlight "the future." it's supposed to remind you of how much more work there is to go to get to the imagined, wonderful future. or at least that's what i always thought.
- _jal 5y agoAh, OK, gotcha. sprintf for a better tomorrow.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoYes, it is completely silly? And you admit it? Then why do you do it? It's also annoying to read. It costs a half-second to think every time we read a year. That's rather reader-hostile.
- kragen 5y agoWell, it's fun! Also, surprisingly, it flushes out the people who would have supported Turing's ultimately fatal prosecution because OMG he's such a weirdo, before their support is required for anything important. It makes super clear the distinction between who's here to have interesting discussions and who's here to attack other users.
- avar 5y ago"it flushes out the people who would have supported Turing's ultimately fatal prosecution [...]" That's possibly the most hyperbolic thing I've ever read on HN (from someone who looks as though they're just a bit idiosyncratic, and not intentionally trolling) :)
- kragen 5y agoIt's not hyperbole. I explained the reasoning in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507179. I'm interested to hear what you think.
- edgyquant 5y agoI’m not convinced that person isn’t trolling after the comment you replied to
- kragen 5y agoFlushing out vicious people who are here to launch personal attacks, by offering them a target for obviously indefensible personal attacks, is indeed trolling, in the sense of "posting something to get a reaction", but it's a kind of trolling that doesn't involve cruelty or dishonesty—unlike the responses it gets! See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506275.
- mod50ack 5y agoEven if we do, the year 900 is not written "0900".
- tomjakubowski 5y agoRight, it's written "00900".
- int_19h 5y agoYep, that would be 01440.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- radford-neal 5y ago"It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated." Sounds like a good thing to me. It quickly identifies you as someone who prioritizes personal idiosyncrasies over communicating whatever it is you want to communicate - since pretty much every reader will do a double-take on the date (or is it a date?) and be distracted from reading the content. That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago> That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful. "Anyone who shows noticeable personal idiosyncrasies in their writing must not have anything useful to say" strikes me as a heuristic of exceedingly little value.
- radford-neal 5y agoIt's not just any idiosyncrasy. For example, someone might have the idiosyncrasy that whenever they mention some not-completely-common concept they put in a link to the wikipedia article on it, which I think might get rather annoying. However, I would believe that they thought they were being helpful to the reader, even if they weren't. So in that case, I wouldn't think, "if they don't care about communicating this, why should I bother reading it?"
- kragen 5y agoIt sounds like you're only posting here in order to launch personal attacks on other people rather than because you have anything to say about old operating systems. The contrast between the amount of relevant and interesting information communicated by your comment, the only one you've posted on this thread, and the comment of mine that you're attacking, is extremely glaring, and it is not in the direction you assert. Please don't do that.
- coolso 5y agoI will say this, sometimes there needs to be a "bad guy" who says what we're all thinking, even if it comes across as mean. Otherwise, how would any of us know what behaviors of ours that other people find irritating, so we can adjust accordingly (since most people don't purposely want to irritate others, usually, and within reason)?
- ttyyzz 5y agoThis will come into effect in about 8,000 years. It must be Satire, I laughed anyway.
- neilv 5y agoMy "2022" has no arbitrary limit to size. "02022" looks like it's padded to 5 fixed digits, repeating mistakes of the past.
- kazinator 5y ago02022 also looks like octal. :) $ echo $(( 02022 + 0 )) 1042
- kazinator 5y agoIt's 02022 which has a problem which 2022 doesn't. 2022 says "I'm an abstract integer expressed in decimal: two-thousand and twenty-two", whereas 02022 says: "Likewise, but I'm a five-digit data type requiring a padding zero for some reason that will likely cause a problem when I'm eventually replaced by 99999, and that then needs to be replaced by it successor."
- MisterSandman 5y agoThe most hilarious thing is that, on that page, they encourage you to change the date on OSX by hardcoding a prefix 0 to your year. Which means that when we do actually reach the year 9999, you would theoretically have to remember to go in and remove the 0.