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Comment by lycos | Hacker News Reader

I gave up after having to include a leap year (Rule 15), I don't know if this is a spoiler but I ended up with January99Pepsi?XXXVggd7maboutZrJapan (there was an emoji in there for the current moon phase but HN stripped it out)

Looking at the code it should be possible to get a lot further, in theory. Wonder how Paul is doing!

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The country is randomized; mine was Albania (that was NOT easy to figure out!)

I saw a hot spring and got a very lucky guess, I can imagine there are a lot of hard ones in there yeah!

Google a street name.

If it lands on a street it lets you roam around, but others only let you look and zoom around, they are harder if not impossible for mere mortals.

My country was El Salvador. I would not have guessed it (I kept trying equatorial countries). I had to reverse engineer the URL encoding of the embedded map.

Spoiler: There is !1d and !2d, followed by coordinates.

Mine gave me a place a Qatar, which doesn't even seem to have real photos but 3D renders instead: https://goo.gl/maps/YynAc2JSfKJzeAwWA

I had albania which was easy -- there was a nearby poster with some writing on, and a short ddg led to albanian sites.

Spoiler: You can save a couple characters by using PepSi (Pepsi + Silicon) which answers 2 requests.

2000 was a leap year and it doesn’t screw with your numeric total too badly :)

leap year? what? I guess I had passed that by accident, 4 and 8 were leap years I guess?

8 AD was a leap year.

so where 0 and 4 ;)

Debatable - the concept of leap years was invented before 0 AD/CE but I'm not aware of any reason to believe that particular year (which certainly wasn't called 0 AD at the time, it was possibly the Roman year 753) was considered to be one.

0 isn't a year anyway, 1AD is preceded by 1BC.

Wikipedia has some information on leap years around this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...

Interesting that there seem to be a large number of scholars who would accept either 4 AD or 8 AD was the first AD leap year. But less clear what such a year would have been called by Romans at the time. I'm assuming it wasn't common to include full dates (including the year #) on written documents at the time, otherwise surely we'd know pretty much exactly. I gather AD-based year numbering wasn't actually introduced until ~525 AD (but before that a number of systems had been in use).

0 is a year if we say it is, which astronomers have for hundreds of years (because its extremely mathematically convenient), and which ISO-8601 does.

Year 0 is what historians like to call 1 BC, but historians are also just making that up. Nobody numbered years from Anno Domini anywhere near year 0.

I'm sure it's clear to everybody here why year 0, -1, and -2 are significantly better arbitrary, ahistorical names for the three years preceding year 1.

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