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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Burroughs MCP was released in 01961 and seems to still be supported. The latest release was 20.0 in May. That's probably the oldest.

z/OS was released in 01966. BOS/360 made it out the door earlier, in 01965, thanks to the disastrous delays in z/OS, but it's no longer supported; DOS/360 (z/VSE) also beat z/OS out, is still supported, and is arguably the continuation of BOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS/360_and_successors

Unix wasn't released in 01969. I think it wasn't released until Fifth Edition in 01974, though Thompson and Ritchie described the Fourth Edition in CACM in 01973. Fourth Edition had "over 20" installations, but I think all within AT&T. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Unix

View on HN

Long Now promoting NFTs, lost my respect.

https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1436364868131586054

Dang, that's too bad. Never follow your heroes on Twitter, I guess.

It's really unfortunate that the top-voted reply to my comment is some kind of partisan struggle applause light that has no relationship whatever to anything I said, to me, or to the topic at hand.

(Edit: fortunately no longer the top-voted reply.)

You chose to make a statement by using a method of formatting dates almost no one recognizes, and is therefor predictably confusing and distracting. If you didn't want to start a conversation about this topic, why did you make this statement in the first place?

If you'd your conversations not be derailed by discussion of esoteric date formats, that can achieved very simply: use the typical date formats everyone is familiar with.

You've implicitly glossed mattl's comment as "discussion of esoteric date formats". But it didn't discuss any date formats; instead, it launched into an unprovoked and irrelevant attack on an organization that date formats reminded them of, presumably in hopes that I was somehow associated with them.

The problem is that there are bullies posting personal attacks, not that I'm the one being attacked. It's true that when griefers and bullies are around, it's the tall poppies that get cut down. But locating the problem in the poppies rather than the scythe-wielder is obvious nonsense. Someone looking hard enough for an excuse to attack others, Twitter-style, can always find a victim.

I don’t care if you’re associated with them. I do want people to see them for what they’re doing.

But you also brought this on by using their propaganda, perhaps in an attempt to promote them or perhaps not.

I'm not responsible for your antisocial behavior. Knock it off.

It’s anti-social to call out an organization for their bullshit? Knock off posting 5 digit dates and people won’t call out their bullshit. Or yours.

HN isn't here to give you a platform for callouts, particularly irrelevant and content-free callouts. It exists for the sake of curious exploration, not chimpanzee dominance games. Offering me ultimatums in this way because you are unable to control yourself at the sight of a five-digit date is a particularly egregious violation of these norms.

Knock it off.

I love how mad you’re getting that someone called you out. Guess what? I’m going to keep calling out bullshit.

Long Now doing NFTs is bullshit. You can choose to show your love for them and people should absolutely call you on that.

To clarify, you seem to be saying:

1. Your intent was indeed to attack me.

2. Your attack is motivated by my perceived affiliation with a group to which you consider yourself superior; indeed, a group you despise.

3. If this angers me, you consider that a very desirable result.

4. You intend to keep attacking me every time you see me posting a 5-digit year, because you interpret that as a sign of affiliation with the group toward which your antipathy is directed.

5. There is nothing I, or anybody else, can do to change your mind.

Am I interpreting you correctly? It's possible there's something I've misunderstood, so please correct me if that is the case.

If that is correct, you are expressing an intention to convert HN into an open sewer. I will say again: please immediately desist from this contemptible misconduct.

My intention is to make people aware of the bullshit the Long Now foundation is doing.

If it makes you mad, so be it. I don’t care about how it makes you feel. You do seem incredibly mad about it that you’re still replying to the thread days later, so I’ll assume you’re annoyed by the fact someone replied to you with something you don’t like, so yes I will continue to reply to anyone using 5 digit years pointing out the Long Now bullshit.

If you feel attacked by this, don’t. It’s not about you. You’re not something I need to worry about. We know some common people.

I will say this and please take this with jest and not any illwill, but stop fucking replying to this thread.

It sounds like you're saying that I shouldn't "feel attacked by this" because your intent is to attack not just me personally, but everyone like me? And you confirm that your intent is to continue harassing not only me, but anyone else you see using a 5-digit year?

It sounds like you're saying I interpreted you correctly on points 2, 4, and 5.

I don't understand the contradiction between "I don’t care about how it makes you feel.", and your previous comment, "I love how mad you’re getting". That seems like a direct contradiction to me. Are you saying your previous comment was not an accurate description of your motivations, or that you were previously motivated by angering me, but have now ceased to care how I feel?

I have considered your request for me to shut the fuck up ("stop fucking replying"), and I decline it.

As far as I can tell, promoting the longnow movement is the sole purpose of using that confusing and distracting date format. So critiques of the movement you're promoting seem completely germane.

If you're fundamentally driven by anger and hatred, looking for a target, sure. But if you're driven by curiosity and goodwill, it's just an unwanted distraction from the discussion of the history of operating systems.

You chose to use your comment to promote longnow movement (there's no other reason to use that esoteric and confusing date format), and the conversation turned to the longnow movement. If you don't want to discuss the longnow movement in the future, don't bring it up.

Hacker News exists for curious, open-minded discussion of ideas, whether they're esoteric and confusing date formats, the history of operating systems, or the future of work in the wake of the pandemic. It does not exist for partisan struggles in which people compete to most vehemently condemn whoever they consider to be the other side, which is what mattl was doing. If you're looking for that, go back to Twitter; don't try to turn Hacker News into yet another wasteland of content-free dunking and ultimatums.

The other option for you here is to simply ignore comments that bother you. You don't have to engage with what you consider a "partisan struggle."

And here I thought they were just a weird coffee shop in Fort Mason.

Also, when you start claiming to be gods, you better be real sure that there really aren't any other gods.

Mythology and literature is full of really bad things that happen to people when they claim to be gods.

I was entertained to see jwz as the second tweet on that thread; a voice and tone that hasn't changed in 20 years of reading his stuff. It's comforting.

He’s the best. I figured this too late.

I find it interesting that you write years using 5 digits with leading zeroes. Can you tell me more about that choice?

Y10K problem: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_10,000_problem#:~:tex....

See also, the Long Now Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

Do you blame him? He can probably make more than $400k a year grifting with NFTs, doing an order of magnitude less work.

I don't blame anyone for fooling around with alternative date formats but I do find it a bit silly, and distracting from whatever serious point they were trying to make. I can't imagine the hubris of believing anything we say or do now will matter (or even exist) 7900 years from now, and it's not going to be a problem before then-- if our date system is somehow still in use by that point!

...I think this might have been meant for another comment/thread anyway.

Whoops, yes my comment was meant for a totally different thread.

Yeah, I wish I made US$400k a year. Shit, I'd be satisfied with AR$400k a year, at least until inflation gets a bit worse.

Pretty sure the distraction of people complaining about people fooling around with alternative date formats is at least 100 times greater than the distraction of people using them.

I think it's plausible that things we say or do now will matter 7900 years from now. The languages we speak today, and the beef, pork, and wheat we eat, are to a significant extent the result of the Bug-Dniester culture 7900 years ago; and Voyager 2 will very likely still exist 7900 years from now unless we catch up with it. And the advent of writing has made it much easier for direct cultural influence to span vast gaps of time.

I think it's very likely that the human species will become extinct within a century, but quite possible that something will survive because of what we say and do today.

Writing with four digits doesn't induce any Y10k problem. We write dates with as many digits as they need; for example, we write the year 327 with three digits.

In the best interest of future generations, we should specify that this count is in the Christian Era. Our descendants may want to reset the count (and change the duration of a standard year) at some point.

You should probably include when you count the Julian-Gregorian calendar switch too. Especially today and if you are from Sweden and perhaps using relative dates, since 310 years ago that was february 30th.

Just for redundancy, we should include the Hebrew calendar year (5782), the Mayan Long Count date (13.0.9.5.16—sorry, I don't have my keybindings set up to type Maya numerals), and the Hindu calendar (Kali Yuga year 5123). You can't be too careful!

Almost all software that stores numbers in fixed precision is just because they copy int semantics from C and its derivatives as opposed to any real resource constraint problem. This is braindamage.

On HN you find all kinds, that's why.

01961 is not a valid year as '9' is not a valid octal digit.

It is in K&R!

Curses, you're right!

Basically, Excel has a numbering system that uses A-Z for 1 to 26, but no 0. But the system still works just fine.

Thanks, I'd never made that connection! I see it's mentioned in the Wikipedia article now.

There's lots of other fun numbering systems.

The book 'Purely Functional Data Structures' has lots more obscure numbering systems, and uses them to construct data structures.

To give a trivial example: unary numbers are basically equivalent to linked lists.

Skew binary number are equivalent to something more interesting!

It's often used to encourage long-term thinking. I most directly associate it with the Long Now Foundation [1], which encourages that format for dates as many of their initiatives strive to consider the Y10K view and beyond.

[1] https://longnow.org/

Since we are adding insignificant digits, I think there aren't enough zeros after the most significant digits; We need to focus on solving todays problems too.

For an extreme version of this, 1961 might be written in scientific notation: 0.196100e4

This is also future-proof as we will always have a built-in 0 at the beginning of the number implying that we never get to "1" and there will always be more time to solve the problems we can't even begin to understand that may exist 10k years from now.

Sorry for the sarcasm, it was the easiest way to make my point.

This is a great idea! I'll try it next week if I remember.

Next 0.1923e-1, you mean?

Next 0.1917e-1!

Really, it's an epoch problem of sorts. If we picked an epoch date with a longer view we might have a better feeling for it as large numbers. For instance we are roughly somewhere between Y12K and Y13K since the estimated start of the Holocene. On the other side, it might feel more scientific to pick a far future epoch date and negative numbers would be a greater reminder of time running out, such this being roughly Y-5e9 until the expected death of our sun.

(To be fair to the Long Now, not that they necessarily need fairness, and I'm not a member I just read about them here on HN mostly, adding the initial insignificant zero was intentionally an easy "hack" to keep things recognizable and not get into quagmires like changing the epoch date.)

There is the Holocene calendar which adds 10,000 to the year. The current year would be 12022 HE. It has advantages that gets rid of BC/year zero confusion and that all historical dates are positive numbers.

To me this seems like using the Unix time convention but changing the epoch time from midnight UTC to midnight at UTC-12:00, the timezone of Baker Island: it's close enough to produce confusing ambiguity (is "2020" or "02020" intended to mean two years ago, or an estimated date when Jericho's pre-pottery Neolithic A wall fell out of use, suggesting an abandonment of the site?), and it makes it more likely that your software will have untested cases with bugs in them.

In the case of the Holocene Calendar the bugs would just be a question of negative dates; in the case of UTC-12:00 it would be a nonnegative epoch time that is nevertheless in 01969 instead of 01970, which will only happen if someone adopts a more westerly timezone like UTC-13:00, pretty much guaranteeing you won't test that case beforehand. (Samoa did something similar in 02011, but it was in the other direction.)

Of course, as other people have pointed out, you shouldn't use fixed-width date fields in your software.

If we're going decimal I'd prefer it be the percent of time elapsed between the Big Bang and heat death of the universe.

The problem is understanding and measuring either of those events with any precision. Even if we somehow could, time also seems to move faster/slower depending on the strength of a gravity field in which it is being measured. I think this makes it really hard to pin down dates near super massive objects... and also means that our linear perspective of time completely breaks down on this scale. eg: where is the reference time located for a few billion years just after the big-bang?

RFC 2550 at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550 points out "Floating Point Is No Solution" in §1.2.3.2, and earlier stresses the importance of lexical sorting. The authors propose a time encoding scheme valid up to the year 10 ** 18308.

(Hint: look at the publication date.)

Oh dear, I never thought about the year 922,337,203,685,477 problem before.

It's important if we want our time system to survive until the Degenerate Era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers...

128 bits isn't even enough to get to the putative half-life of proton decay.

There's some truly mind-boggling numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_univers... "the non-zero probability of producing a new Big Bang in roughly 10^10^10^56 years"(!).

These numbers are far beyond https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550#section-2.4.1 , which is only 10^14; about the time star formation ceases.

Time for an updated RFC!

https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

Lol, that's completely silly. Who even knows if we'll still be using the same calendar in 8,000 years? Y10K is not worth dealing with until the 100th century.

Yes, it is!

So then why not Y100K?

Does preparation become pointless sometime after 8,000 years from now, but before 92,000 have elapsed?

Go wild!

I'm genuinely curious and haven't found an answer online so I'll ask you: why stop at 10K and not 100K? Also we represent 3-digit years like 770 without problems, so what does this solve?

Is the hypothetical problem so bad that solving it is worth the ambiguity between octal numbers and the extra effort for readers to parse 02022 as year?

Stop at 100K if you like! Or 1000K! You're a free being!

I only know a little about the Long Now Foundation so I could be getting it wrong, but I understood their goal was to help people think about problems beyond the short term. For example, why would anyone plant a tree if they will be long dead before that tree reaches its normal height?

Instead of just sitting around discussing vague ideas they thought it would be interesting to design and build something to showcase their ideas, so the "ten thousand year clock" was proposed. It is amazing how many problems you have to solve to build a clock that has even the slightest chance of still be running ten thousand years from now.

A side effect of the clock project was that some of the dates involved would have five digit years, so they thought using five digit years for current dates would be a good way of shocking people and exposing them to their ideas.

Indeed! But it can be difficult to talk about any kind of new idea on a site full of people who are driven into uncontrollable rages when they see someone deviating from a social convention, however minor.

i think the deal was you always prepend a zero to highlight "the future." it's supposed to remind you of how much more work there is to go to get to the imagined, wonderful future. or at least that's what i always thought.

Ah, OK, gotcha.

sprintf for a better tomorrow.

Yes, it is completely silly? And you admit it? Then why do you do it?

It's also annoying to read. It costs a half-second to think every time we read a year. That's rather reader-hostile.

Well, it's fun!

Also, surprisingly, it flushes out the people who would have supported Turing's ultimately fatal prosecution because OMG he's such a weirdo, before their support is required for anything important. It makes super clear the distinction between who's here to have interesting discussions and who's here to attack other users.

    "it flushes out the people who would
     have supported Turing's ultimately
     fatal prosecution [...]"

That's possibly the most hyperbolic thing I've ever read on HN (from someone who looks as though they're just a bit idiosyncratic, and not intentionally trolling) :)

It's not hyperbole. I explained the reasoning in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30507179. I'm interested to hear what you think.

I’m not convinced that person isn’t trolling after the comment you replied to

Flushing out vicious people who are here to launch personal attacks, by offering them a target for obviously indefensible personal attacks, is indeed trolling, in the sense of "posting something to get a reaction", but it's a kind of trolling that doesn't involve cruelty or dishonesty—unlike the responses it gets! See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30506275.

alan turing died for my sins. yes, i am a member of the church of christ, computer scientist.

Have I told you about the beautiful gift of balanced ternary?

In the functional programming community, we don't just believe, we _know_ that Alonzo is our Church.

See eg http://liyang.hu/church.xhtml

I'm here to have interesting discussions. I resent you wasting my time and brain cycles with your silly crusade.

Even if we do, the year 900 is not written "0900".

Right, it's written "00900".

Aren’t there infinitely many leading zeros?

That hasn't been the case since a date which I unfortunately do not have enough space to write in this margin.

::900

Yep, that would be 01440.

"It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated."

Sounds like a good thing to me.

It quickly identifies you as someone who prioritizes personal idiosyncrasies over communicating whatever it is you want to communicate - since pretty much every reader will do a double-take on the date (or is it a date?) and be distracted from reading the content.

That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful.

It sounds like you're only posting here in order to launch personal attacks on other people rather than because you have anything to say about old operating systems. The contrast between the amount of relevant and interesting information communicated by your comment, the only one you've posted on this thread, and the comment of mine that you're attacking, is extremely glaring, and it is not in the direction you assert.

Please don't do that.

I will say this, sometimes there needs to be a "bad guy" who says what we're all thinking, even if it comes across as mean. Otherwise, how would any of us know what behaviors of ours that other people find irritating, so we can adjust accordingly (since most people don't purposely want to irritate others, usually, and within reason)?

Sure, if I had bad breath or if I was walking around with my fly open, your comment would apply. But, in this case, the only useful information conveyed is that I'm violating an arbitrary date formatting convention, and that some people become unreasonably angry whenever they see an arbitrary convention being violated.

But, obviously enough, I already know I'm violating the date formatting convention, and I could hardly be more aware of those people. My theory is that, like Carmen Ortiz, they like attacking people because it makes them feel powerful, and violations of arbitrary conventions give them the opportunity.

I think it's less that you're violating an "arbitrary date formatting convention" and more that you know the formatting convention everyone uses (4 digits), and decide to use your own arbitrary convention that maybe a hundred people in the world use. In fact, you're putting in extra effort just to use this convention that, by the time it's relevant, the earth probably won't even exist anymore.

Most people will interpret this sort of thing as extremely pretentious and also assume that you're fishing for "compliments" and trying to look cooler than everyone else. Like an inside joke only you know about, so will someone please ask you about it?

This type of behavior is typical in a classroom but becomes a lot less culturally acceptable the older you get.

The convention "everyone" uses doesn't stop being arbitrary just because most people use it.

Who cares what most people think?

And, yeah, it's true that most human cultures are very conformist, although I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that social groups full of old people are the most conformist. That conformism is why, for example, it took the humans 2000 years from recognizing that light darkens silver chloride until they invented photography, and they're constantly killing each other en masse in warfare, and 50 years after the first Moon landing there are still no cities off Earth.

So, lighten up. Play a little. Violate arbitrary conventions. The mind you save could be your own.

The problem with yours is that I can't help but read numbers starting with 0 in octal.

How do they write BCE years?

Yeah, I have the same problem with octal. At least I'm young enough that I don't automatically do the conversion in my head.

I commonly say things like "Troy fell around 01100 BCE". Except that usually I look up the date so I don't get it wrong like that. I don't know what the Long Now folks do.

I'm so glad that I'm getting karam for all this polite discourse! :-)

How do you express years beyond 99999?

Maybe 099999, 0100000, 0100001, ...? Dunno! Ask me again in 97976 years.

> The convention "everyone" uses doesn't stop being arbitrary just because most people use it.

Except conventions derive their value from the proportion of people using it. If a convention is stupid for other reasons, it may be worth trying to convert people. But writing numbers without a leading 0 is not stupid; in fact the opposite is. Why not write the current year as 0000000000002022 to preemptively protect against the Y(10^16)k problem? Why not write your age as 027 so that you're prepared when you hit 100?

> The mind you save could be your own.

You telling people you're liberating their sheeple mind, like literally every conspiracy theorist says, is not helping your case.

> Except conventions derive their value from the proportion of people using it.

False; see US vs ISO date formatting.

If conspiracy theorists are the first thing that comes to mind when someone says someone is acting foolishly and against their own interests, using a snowclone from a 30-year-old Michael Jackson song, rethink your social circles. Get a grip.

You're welcome to use the date formats you've proposed if you think they're better.

> by the time it's relevant, the earth probably won't even exist anymore.

On what account is the Earth disappearing in a mere 8000 years?

It doesn't make me feel powerful, I feel bewildered that you waste other people's time by having to parse an uncommon 5-digit format, rather than using the near-universal convention of only displaying the minimum digits needed.

It's superior in every way: minimal, unconstrained, universal.

You know, in base 36, 2022 is "1k6". That's one digit less!

I mean this with sincerity (it's a genuine question).

Why write such a lengthy comment telling someone you're dismissing them rather than just dismissing them? Is it to discourage their behavior, or to warn other readers? Or simply to share how you feel?

Because the world is a garden of ideas and some of us feel the urge to weed it occasionally.

Kid, get the hell out of my flowerbed, and hand over those damned gardenias. Now. No, those aren't weeds, and you aren't helping. I'm going to have a talk with your parents when they get home. Now scram.

> That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful.

"Anyone who shows noticeable personal idiosyncrasies in their writing must not have anything useful to say" strikes me as a heuristic of exceedingly little value.

It's not just any idiosyncrasy. For example, someone might have the idiosyncrasy that whenever they mention some not-completely-common concept they put in a link to the wikipedia article on it, which I think might get rather annoying. However, I would believe that they thought they were being helpful to the reader, even if they weren't. So in that case, I wouldn't think, "if they don't care about communicating this, why should I bother reading it?"

I both agree that it's an idiosyncrasy that prioritizes the interests of the writer over the comfort of the reader, and love to see stuff like this on HN, because it's the only place in the world I'm exposed to it.

I was familiar with the general Long Now ethos, but seeing prefixed years in the wild and going down this HN rabbit hole has been worthwhile.

Also seeing how politely & reasonably you folks debated back and forth on this usage makes me love the HN community (if we can even call it that?) even more.

Man, if this seems polite and reasonable to you, I'd hate to see the kind of conversations you're accustomed to! The person you're responding to said my post about operating systems wasn't communicating anything useful, and I compared him to a prosecutor who bullied a friend of mine to suicide with ridiculously disproportionate criminal charges.

I'm glad you enjoyed the conversation, though, and found it worthwhile.

I guess I'm comparing to Reddit, so my baseline is way out of kilter. But you all stayed on topic and brought up solid reasoning for your positions, and that's a rarity on the internet.

One of the best ways to be polite is Principle of Charity and that's mostly what I saw here.

This will come into effect in about 8,000 years. It must be Satire, I laughed anyway.

My "2022" has no arbitrary limit to size. "02022" looks like it's padded to 5 fixed digits, repeating mistakes of the past.

02022 also looks like octal. :)

  $ echo $(( 02022 + 0 ))
  1042

It's 02022 which has a problem which 2022 doesn't.

2022 says "I'm an abstract integer expressed in decimal: two-thousand and twenty-two", whereas 02022 says: "Likewise, but I'm a five-digit data type requiring a padding zero for some reason that will likely cause a problem when I'm eventually replaced by 99999, and that then needs to be replaced by it successor."

The most hilarious thing is that, on that page, they encourage you to change the date on OSX by hardcoding a prefix 0 to your year. Which means that when we do actually reach the year 9999, you would theoretically have to remember to go in and remove the 0.

in case you live 7977 years, of course

So you mean Apple has solved the Y2038 problem ?

Probably a time traveling technology historian?

I thought it was interesting that I've noticed someone doing that twice today, and never before in my life, but it turns out it was just another one of kragen's comments from earlier today on a different thread.

I think this means I've spent far too much time on HN today.

And there's my cue to turn on noprocrast for the day.

I'd like to see these long-now dates with a Y included - to clearly identify a year, like y01960 - so it's not confused with things like hex/octal or post-codes.

Seems pretty silly to me. If you want to do leading zeros, why stop at one leading zero?

They're only empathetic enough to think of those in 8k years, not to those in 92k years.

I was a bit uncharitable in my original comment:

If you assume that the convention is to just always add exactly one leading zero, it works out.

(It's still a bit silly overall, but there's nothing special about five digits then.)

Except on the third Tuesday of the month. Then you add two zeroes.

I used MCP around 1982 and it seemed very old then.

In 1982 MCP would have been the same age as Linux was in 2012.

(Just an interesting point of reference.)

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