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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

“the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019”

Years started being numbered at 1 so the decade ends on December 31 2020.

Well that's a technicality. There's no reason to base practical realities of Jan 1 2020 being the start of the "2020s" with the fact that Year 0 was missing.

I recall a CNN article recently about this: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/21/us/when-does-the-decade-end-b...

> Those technicalities, however, don't change the fact that as a society, we seem to have collectively determined that decades begin in years ending in zero and end on years ending in nine.

It's not even a technicality, really. A decade is any span of ten years, and in modern English we refer to decades by their tens digit. If someone wanted to talk about the 202nd decade or something, then sure, that'd end next year, but instead we merely talk about the 60s, 90s, or whatever. Calendar shifts in the interim even make the "technical" approach a bit of a farce, though.

While millennia and centuries are numbered ordinally (e.g. the 18th century or 2nd millennium), in modern speech decades are not numbered ordinally, they're declared based upon the tens digit (e.g. 60s, 80s, or 90s), so your point is false.

It's worth noting that ISO 8601:2004 actually defines 1BC as Year 0 – mostly to keep the leap years algorithm correct for negative years.

With a zero-based numbering system it makes sense to consider the decade to be ending in 3 days.

That argument was lost 20 years ago next week I'm afraid

I just think the 5 day notice with 10 year running is a bit short notice.

What? No. If Y2K was the beginning of a new millennium then Jan 1 2020 is the beginning of a new decade.

Someone clearly did not pay much attention in 1999 to the incessant pedantry that the new millennium didn't really start until 2001.

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