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Comment by meowster | Hacker News Reader

What is "BP"? I tried searching the Inernet but couldn't find it.

It normally refers to a timescale called "Before Present" where Present is defined as = Jan 1, 1950. You see it a lot in radio- dating. GP has invented their own dating system with the same name based around ~2021.

Fun fact, there's no corresponding After Present system for dates after 1950. Instead you subtract negative years. E.g. 1957 AD = -7 BP.

That's interesting. The creation date for Dungeons and Dragons (1974) would be -24 BP then.

Talking about abbreviations:

https://blog.mitchjlee.com/2020/your-writing-style-is-costly

Before Present? (Just guessing)

My guess is "before present", not sure why you wouldn't use BCE/CE though.

BP (when properly explained) emphasizes that the important aspect of the timeline is its relativity to the current time.

So it saves 2 characters compared to ###y ago but requires an explanation.

    2500 BP
    2500y ago

Agreed, I was explaining a contrast to using BC/BCE.

"ya" is an equally short abbreviation for "years ago".

I've never see that before so I'd have to look it up just like BP.

I can see why it makes sense in archaeology, but using it here without any explanation just led to confusion. Everybody knows BC/AD (or BCE/CE if you're wanting to be cross cultural) so using it is just poor communication in this case.

It's trivial to Google and then we are part of today's 10,000.

Yes we can easily Google "BP".

BP conventionally being relative to an epoch date of 1 Jan 1950, which is at an ever increasing distance from the actual present, is something of an issue (and while “before actual present” is useful, using BP for it, given the conventional use, is problematic.)

"ya" (years ago) as a suffix is better, in that it doesn't have a conventional use with a particular epoch date.

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