I find it interesting that you write years using 5 digits with leading zeroes. Can you tell me more about that choice?
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.
Please don't do that.
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.
It's superior in every way: minimal, unconstrained, universal.
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.
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.
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.
You're welcome to use the date formats you've proposed if you think they're better.
False; see US vs ISO date formatting.
How do they write BCE years?
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.
On what account is the Earth disappearing in a mere 8000 years?
"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.
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.
I'm glad you enjoyed the conversation, though, and found it worthwhile.
One of the best ways to be polite is Principle of Charity and that's mostly what I saw here.
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?
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."
It's also annoying to read. It costs a half-second to think every time we read a year. That's rather reader-hostile.
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 [...]"
Does preparation become pointless sometime after 8,000 years from now, but before 92,000 have elapsed?
sprintf for a better tomorrow.
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?
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.
$ echo $(( 02022 + 0 ))
1042Basically, Excel has a numbering system that uses A-Z for 1 to 26, but no 0. But the system still works just fine.
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!
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.
(Hint: look at the publication date.)
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!
(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.)
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.
...I think this might have been meant for another comment/thread anyway.
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.