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Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

My retirement planning is to work on the Y10K problem. When the year 9997 comes along, everyone is going to start worrying about the rollover to five digit years. In about the year 9995 I will start seriously brushing up on my COBOL.

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Yes, I know some of us will never retire. 8000 years in the future career planning is an interesting thing to think of though. 8000 years ago the only thing that was going on was some neolithic agriculture. Domestication of the Jungle Fowl (modern day chicken) in India and the beginning of irrigated agriculture in Sumeria were probably the biggest news items of that millennium. I guess someone from 8000 years ago could have said he'd be raising chickens or doing irrigated agriculture in 8000 years and wouldn't have been wrong had he lived that long. Makes me think of F.H King's book "Farmers of Forty Centuries" about how Chinese agriculture has been farming the same fields without artificial fertilizer for 4000 years.

Yes, technology is subject to the Lindy Effect. [0] It's a good reason to learn both Unix and farming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

There was almost certainly some forms of relatively advanced seafaring 8000 years ago possibly including skin boats, sails and paddles, ropes, sealants and astronomy. Also, fairly sophisticated metallurgy was widespread with at least silver/iron/gold, possibly bronze. Writing was known to some cultures. Horses, camels and water buffalo were likely all domesticated. Use of drying/smoking for preservation and curing of meat. Yogurt may have been known in some areas. Advanced pottery. Probably nontrivial herbalist / medicinal / architectural / construction knowledge. Plus of course trapping, fishing, textiles, stonework, etc.

I can believe seafaring, astronomy, and metallurgy. But yogurt? Now you're just pulling my chain.

I don't know how much you know about yogurt, so I apologize in advance if this sounds condescending; but yogurt has been eaten since at least the 5000s BC, and is easy to produce, probably even by accident. It's obtained by controlled souring of unpasteurized milk; clabber, which is almost too sour to be edible but is safe to eat if you can stand the taste, comes from spontaneous souring.

Fernand Braudel (in The Structures of Everyday Life) talks of how it was the staple food of the poor in Turkey, and I think in Persia. US commercial yogurt is weak and sugary; the Eastern variety is much more lifelike.

Without artificial fertilizer but I recall reading that they massively improved yields from 1000-1500, let alone a span of 4000 years.

Why make "artificial fertilizer" a goalpost? Yield is what matters, there's apparently a million things that go into improving rice paddy yields.

This is obviously a joke, but here's a serious reply to it: There will already be serious Y10K problems in 9997, just like there were Y2K problems earlier than 1997.

Epochs & date formats aren't only used to represent & display the current date, but dates in the future, e.g. think about reservation systems, graphing libraries that display things 10-15-50 years in the future etc.

My bank's website allowed me to set a recurring monthly transfer until the year 9999.

The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates like 02017 in their work. :)

> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates like 02017 in their work. :)

Hopefully they don't have any octal-related bugs.

Probably only in their front end code.

People get bans on XBox Live until 9999-12-31 I guess it's probably just an Input validation thing. Also I think it's fair to given most people their account back after that amount of time.

To really future proof themselves they should have gone with 2.017*10^3

Nobody will care about significant year digits in a few billion years

The only codebase I've checked personally can't handle Y10K, so there should be plenty of business: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6f0eb93183519024cb360...

That one, however, will have a catchy little slogan:

   PIC 9(5) for 9995!

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