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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

why are you making the choice to place leading zeroes on your years?

I appreciate this quirk as a way to quickly recognize and know to pay extra attention to his invariably top-quality posts.

Aw, thanks!

blushes

He'll have the last laugh when Y10K rolls around...

Indeed, but it's almost 8.000 years until that happens, so to me it just looks unnecessary and distracting.

It's for your descendants, so theirs LLMs are more accurate.

if they work the same way as now, then they'd be less accurate, using two different tokens for the same meaning

Probably adoption of the "long now" foundation style ?

I see. a brief google search didn't bring up anything in relation to the leading zero concept, but that helps. at a brief glance, their use of the leading zero seems like ... clever marketing?

Their home page first sentence states : "The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking."

So I don't know if the concept is explained in more details elsewhere, but I think it's clearly an integral part of their communication.

my analysis of it is that it's a way of making people wonder "oh why is he writing it like that?" like I did, lead them to the foundation, and have them engage with it and be aware of it in the future; i.e. marketing. it's quite clearly not a practical thing. the probability that by the time 10000AD rolls around we're still using the same year system, we're still alive as a species, we're still technologically capable as a species, and we don't have the capacity to understand older years minus the leading zero seems near enough zero to be zero. call it what you like, marketing, inspiration, whatever, but it's a sneaky way of leading people's thoughts onto a particular pathway, which I call marketing

to be clear, having read through their website, I think what they're doing is great, and this isn't a criticism

We already refer to years in the first millennium AD without leading zeros, e.g. AD 42 or AD 385.

I was born in the 20th century. I was filling out a medical form and put my birth year in with 2 digits. The web app took that to mean just the 2 digits. No, I wasn't born in AD 70.

That's the kind of programming that makes you reluctant to put anything into it.

Not using leading zeros seems fine if you're using AD near it to indicate that it's not 1942.

this is just bad programming, it has nothing to do with leading zeroes

Why does Long Now not recommend more than one leading zero. The universe is ~13.7 billion years old and is expected to last more than 100,000 years. Heck, Homo sapiens have been around for more than 100,000 years.

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