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Comment by Biganon | Hacker News Reader

Also: "Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin (22 September 1863 – 1 March 1943) was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis."

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Ooh, that's pretty important! And that was in 01894. I've probably omitted lots of important things like that.

Your octal year notation is very much throwing me off.

That's the notation adopted by the Long Now Foundation (https://longnow.org/) rather than octal, I believe

Ah, thank you, I was wondering.

Me too. It is interesting how such a small anomaly in writing can be so annoying and disruptive to the smooth flow of reading.

My thoughts exactly, I couldn't believe how completely I failed to parse these as dates just because of a tiny leading zero.

I guess it's because dates aren't numbers any more, but names. It would be like adding an "O" in front of every name, like "Ojohn", "Omary".

Like the Hackaday blog, [stavros]? On some other fora people use @: @stavros.

The powerful effect of such small things can be very thought-provoking.

Interestingly, it's true for me too, even though I've been trying this Long Now date format experiment for a year or so now. I just had to stop myself from writing the Intel 8080 as "08080", suggesting that I'm mentally parsing these dates as "0 1774" and the like.

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