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South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoUpdate title: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting
- simonjgreen 3y agoYet another battle won in the 0 indexing vs. 1 indexing war
- kazinator 3y agoIt just shows you how reality-denying the 1 indexers can be, going as far as calling a newborn 1 even though (if normal term) it was conceived roughly 0.75 years ago.
- user982 3y agoDon't consider it an age then, think of it as "the count of calendar years within which a person has existed." A newborn has only seen 1 year, 2023. An infant born any time in 2022 has lived across 2 years. This simplifies things when you only need, or only have, someone's year of birth.
- kazinator 3y agoWhy restrict to years? I have existed in two calendar millennia.
- creatonez 3y agoThere is no indexing standard that is more fundamental than another. For example zero-indexing is particularly unnatural when working with mathematical series (https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1203057 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1203057 ). It made a ton of sense for computing because every arbitrary sequence of bits represents a valid index, but it falls short in some other domains.
- kelipso 3y agoThe more reality denying part is when you ignore that age is calculated on distance and not counting.
- petesergeant 3y agoeven weirder than that, as far as I can tell, as the whole year cohort ages together on the same day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
- rhplus 3y agoIt's not that weird - I'm sure most folks spend their school-years referring to other kids as "the same year (grade) as me" or "the year (grade) above/below me". Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in.
- petesergeant 3y ago> Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in How far out of school are you?
- Symbiote 3y agoI left university over 10 years ago, but I'm still aware of those friends who were in my year, vs others who were a year or two ahead or behind. People from my year are the ones I lived with, did group projects with, worked until midnight trying to solve a difficult task that had been set, celebrated the last exam with, etc. I certainly don't know the year for everyone. Students I mostly saw at parties, who studied different subjects (or went to different universities, for it was London) could easily be my year ±3 or more.
- petesergeant 3y agoI feel like the op was mentally translating people they’d never shared an academic context with into how many academic years above or below them they were — I’d noticed myself doing this for a couple of years after I left education
- fosk 3y agoLua is the “last standing man” now.
- adregan 3y agoHold your horses, APL[1] is not dead yet. However, at some point in its history, APL did gain the ability to assign the Index Origin[2] to 0 if the problem called for it via: ⎕IO←0 0: intentionally started the indexes from 1 ;) 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) 2: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Index_origin https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Index_origin
- pif 3y agoAnd FORTRAN
- goosedragons 3y agoR still uses 1 indexing, Julia as well.
- nine_k 3y agoEvery language for scientific computation uses 1-based indexes, to follow the tradition of using them in formulas. FORTRAN, APL, Julia, R, MATLAB, GNU Octane, etc. I remember that (some versions of) BASIC back in the day had an option to switch between 1-based and 0-based indexing, to appeal to both Fortran and C folks.
- Y_Y 3y agoIn physics, relativists usually count from 0. Furthermore on the numerical side, C is at least as popular as Fortran. Julia lets you switch the index base too. Finally a special mention for Mathematica, which appears to be 1-based, but in fact is a thinly disguised 0-based lisp, {a,b} is just List[a,b] is really just (List a b) so of course if you want b you ask for element 2, element 0 is the head and is just List.
- frozenport 3y agoNumpy
- xeonmc 3y agoI prefer calling it "floor-index" vs "ceil-index" rather than 0/1 or offset/count based
- rcme 3y agoBoth 0 and 1 indexing aim to answer the question: "what is the index of the 1st element?" floor(1) = 1 and ceil(1) = 1 so I'm not sure how your names apply.
- edgineer 3y agofloor and ceil ideas apply to age and calendar years nicely because the underlying value, time, is on the real number line.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- altvali 3y agoThe article is interesting on its own, but giving it a clickbaity title goes against the HN guidelines.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe title is accurate and captures the significance, because they aren’t change legal minimum ages, so its not just an age counting change: everyone is getting a year younger (or maybe two for some people, if the article’s description is correct) with respect to legal age criteria.
- dang 3y agoOk, we've replaced it with the subtitle, which is cromulent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Qem 3y agoI actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.
- tekla 3y agoYou think the moment of birth is more arbitrary than trying to figure out when a clump of cells/a fetus is viable?
- Qem 3y agoYes. I have a sister 15 years younger. My parents still keep her ultrasound plates around. Her ID states she is from this millennium. But yet the timestamps in the plates show she was already here with us in the end of the past millennium. Every time I see them, it gives me an uneasy feeling the way we're used to count our time is just wrong.
- ChrisClark 3y agoBut we call it a birthday.
- Qem 3y agoNot everywhere. In portuguese, for example, is called Aniversário. With roots from latin annus(year) + vertere (to come back), meaning what comes back every year. There's no reference to the specific event of being born. Only that it's something that happens every year.
- watwut 3y agoHer id states "birthday". It is quite literally called that and not just in English. The day she was born. Her id states the date she was born, stopped to nested inside another person, started to breath air and started to eat instead of getting oxygen and nutrition via placenta. Her id does not state the day mom and dad had sex, nor the day the sperm joined the egg, nor the day she crossed the line from "few cells" to "something that resembles human in some sense".
- simple10 3y agoAh standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
- kmeisthax 3y agoAnd, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.
- simple10 3y agoLet's go a step farther and reset the year counting from Jesus to L Ron Hubbard's death. Either that or reset on the singularity, but I'm impatient. [EDIT] I've just been informed LRH didn't completely die. I'll petition for the singularity reset.
- kibwen 3y agoThere already exists a notion of "the human era" that adds exactly 10,000 to the current year: > The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar (Of course, the choice to add exactly 10,000 is a compromise to make it trivial to interconvert between HE and AD.) You can even buy Human Era calendars: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
- gsich 3y agodecades too
- chungy 3y agoThe current century being the 21st will make that very confusing. The 2000/2001 start of the 21st century is reasonable debate. Mathematically, 2001 makes sense. In terms of being excited during the 1999→2000 transition with all the digits incrementing, it makes more sense socially to have celebrated the new millennium and century then.
- jmjerlecki 3y agoI can already imagine the arguments the team required to implement this change are having about the best way to make this change in the db.
- crazygringo 3y ago> South Koreans will become at least a year younger... "At least"? Who is becoming two years younger...?
- 6177c40f 3y agoWell you know how confusing datetime stuff can be, it's best to not be too certain.
- dragonwriter 3y agoAnyone with a birth day after the transition day will become two years younger when the change goes into effect, assuming the article’s description is correct (which it may not be.) Under the old system you were one year old at birth, and a year older at the beginning of the next year (not, as one might expect, at their next birth day.) That means at the beginning of the year on which under the more common system one would be not-yet-one, a person under the Korean system would be two (unless they were born on the first day of the year, when they would be only one.)
- crazygringo 3y agoOh whoops I missed that second part, that everybody's birthday is New Year's. Thanks!
- mrweasel 3y agoHold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Technically true, but what are you trying to convey?
- enkid 3y agoTheir concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."
- frankreyes 3y agoThe Argentinian maneuver: change the statistics to improve your numbers.
- middle_earth 3y agoAs a Korean who being confused by the age counting existed too many at the same time, I am so proud of being together within the international standard. But we will still keep 1 indexed age when it comes to calculating the age of compulsory military service. Anyway I hope it triggers loosening too stubborn age counting hierarchy inside us.
- AYBABTME 3y agoSo how old are you? Where did you study?
- middle_earth 3y agoI will become 30 this December again (which sounds a bit sad to me). I could not get the point by where did I study.
- madsbuch 3y agoPreviously in Korea 100 newborns would have a combined 100 years worth of experience at living :D
- pestatije 3y agowhich is almost true by a 3 month tolerance each
- zython 3y agoSaw this on twitter along with a snarky remark about raising the retirement age. Cant find the tweet anymore and the article doesnt say, but is retirement age affected by this reform ?
- creamyhorror 3y agoGuess it's going to be easier to "surprise and delight users by displaying their birthday", at least once Omega Star gets their shit together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
- rodric 3y agoThe day you turn 30 you begin your 31st year of life.
- ranguna 3y agoThe day you celebrate your 30th year living, you start your 31st.
- edgineer 3y agoSo, there was probably some person born in a manger a couple months after the first year AD, on the day after February 28th, in Korea... When did he turn 30 exactly?