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Comment by saltmate | Hacker News Reader

1,3k years ago is such a weird way to write it. Makes sense if we are talking millions of years, but why not write "in 700" or just "1300 years ago"

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The title is from the HN user, the actual post uses 1,300 everywhere.

So you can write it down to tech brainrot.

it was 1.3e-6 billion years ago!

Century would be plenty. And having Rome mentioned with some weird negative number leads to first thought being English in Roman era? How does this deduct...

Probably a German or French speaker forgetting that , is never a valid decimal separator in English.

Most countries use the decimal comma, including English in South Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...

Yeah, I felt the same. Especially since 1300 uses the same numbers of characters as 1.3k

Probably they mean to convey significant digits, though I feel it's safe to assume people would read "1300" as an approximation, not pointing to the year 726. I found it odd too.

Edit: "The newly-discovered manuscript in the National Central Library of Rome of Caedmon’s Hymn dates from between the years 800 and 830, making it the third oldest surviving text of the poem." So... 1.2k then?

The manuscript is ~1200 years old, but the poem was composed earlier. The Venerable Bede, who died in 735, includes it and the story of its composition in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People: according to that story, it was composed while Saint Hilda was abbess of Whitby, c.660-680.

Another commentator mentions that the poem may have been published 1200 years ago, but authored much earlier.

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