Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Pretty funny. More than anything else this reminds me of Atlas Survival Shelters on wheels, and it seems like it actually worked pretty well as a survival shelter; it was just the "wheels" part that failed.

I wonder why he didn't use tracks? In the US, Holt (the corporate ancestor of Caterpillar) was building tracked farm tractors to improve traction in farm mud from 01904 (getting a patent in 01907), and surely it wasn't news to anybody in Massachusetts that snow was soft and hard to keep traction in, like mud; and tracked vehicles were also being developed in England, and both France and England had deployed Holt tractors in World War I, and deployed tracked tanks by 01916, while Germany had built their own tracked tank by 01918. Muscott built his snowmobile with rear tracks and front skis in 01915. And apparently tracked vehicles were being used in Antarctica from 01911:

> In a memorandum of 1908, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott presented his view that man-hauling to the South Pole was impossible and that motor traction was needed.[29] Snow vehicles did not yet exist however, and so his engineer Reginald Skelton developed the idea of a caterpillar track for snow surfaces.[30] These tracked motors were built by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company in Birmingham, tested in Switzerland and Norway, and can be seen in action in Herbert Ponting's 1911 documentary film of Scott's Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition.[31]

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_track#Snow_vehicles>

You'd think they would have done some testing of prototypes in more conveniently located frozen tundras before asking Congress for funding to built the full-scale vehicle and ship it halfway around the planet. Then again, maybe the goal was getting the funding, not delivering a working vehicle.

What if you wanted to attack the problem for real? Maybe instead of a single gigantic vehicle (the medieval units used in the article translate to 17 m by 5.2 m in modern units) you could use 2-4 smaller vehicles so that a single steering-system failure, uncontrolled fire, or carbon monoxide leak in the middle of Antarctica wouldn't consign the whole expedition to death. Maybe you could build a relatively lightweight dome that could be rapidly erected when you were parked, or perhaps even suspended on springs around the moving flotilla of vehicles.

Okay, I'll bite: why are you writing years with 5 digits? Prevention of a Y10K bug?

The real absurdity is why not append 00, or 000? If you care about the 10k bug, why wouldn’t you care about the Y100K or Y1000K bug?

Makes me think of Johnny Two Hats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8K1fTZaR7w who later comes back with four hats.

This is "addressed" in rfc2550. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550 which takes the y10k problem to absurd levels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

> In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[1] (e.g., by writing the current year "02021" rather than "2021").

If we're using 5 digits, add 10K years: we're in year 12021 of this Holocene calendar. (Happy palindrome year!) 0 is pre-history, some of the very first permanent construction. An 8min video by Kurzgesagt on it: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

That’s the Holocene calendar, not the Long Now date writing tradition.

This seems to imply that writing "02021" in a textual forum post does anything more than just make it significantly more difficult for another human to parse. I don't buy that argument - writing "1999" instead of "99" in BBS/IRC messages before the turn of the century would have done nothing to fix the critical systems that were storing years as a pair of bytes.

But if you start in 2021, well, 02021, to write it 02021, by 08850 it will be in everybody's mind (including AI's) and developers - or AIs - by 09330 will write programs that will laat 700 years and will not have the Y10K bug.

The point of it, like the point of many Long Now projects, is to get people to think about longer spans of time, and be more aware of how little we normally do that. As they say, "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." -- https://longnow.org/about/

So the fact we're talking about these issues here is a success.

Another example of their efforts is something I wrote the code for, a bet/prediction registry: https://longbets.org/bets/

Unlike the sort of prediction markets that are now relatively common, where the goal is to serve as a functional business, the goal for Long Bets is to get people thinking and talking about the long term. My favorite bet is the one between Warren Buffet and a hedge fund guy: https://longbets.org/362/

Buffett was already making much larger bets than this in the marketplace, so in some sense this was pointless. He also could have made it a private bet and saved the hassle. But the public nature of it drove an enormous amount of media coverage and discussion.

In my head I tried to parse it as octal.

Yeah, that happens a lot.

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