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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how), when everyone around you uses a different standard.

If I decided, IDK, to write "cnow" instead of "know", or "J" instead of "I", I wouldn't be able to do so consistently. Not in a world that massively uses the other word.

Or it would take me twice as much time to double-check everything that I have typed.

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Wait, I can guess at why (somebody's probably still going to be alive in 8k more years), but is that really the reason? In case somebody's gonna care enough to read this comment on HN that long from now? And not realize that of course we didn't bother adding leading zeros? Why not 0001970s in that case?

(I'm sincerely hoping I'm missing something here and am going to look really silly asking this question.)

Go wild, man. I fully support your right to talk about the 0001970s.

I'd put my money on it flipping back to 0 after 9999

From past evidence, I think it's more likely to start a new calendar at 0 somewhere around 4000-5000.

>An offtopic question: how do you manage to write all the years consistently with 0 at the start (I know why, but how), when everyone around you uses a different standard.

Never underestimate what lengths someone will go through to appear to be unique.

More importantly, why stop at five digits? That seems to be taking quite a limited outlook, and I can already see the Y100K bugs it will cause.

You get into the habit fairly quickly. I type organise rather than organize despite everyone around me not doing that, but it is legitimately difficult for me to do it the popular way.

Organise is the British english spelling. So you're right somewhere!

Indeed, I picked it up working with Brits early in my professional English learning journey.

I usually double-check everything I write anyway. I just have to be careful not to "correct" literal quotes that include dates or accidentally talk about the Intel 08008 and the 06502.

Why just one leading zero?

I don't even know the why. Why?

I assume they're a fan of https://longnow.org/

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