6 ms·
Lol, 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.
by hayleox 5y ago
Lol, 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]