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Shorn | 3 months ago

> 01852, 173 years ago

That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.

OTOH, if it was just a typo - keep it to yourself, I don't wanna know. I'm all in - 5 digit years is a thing now.

discuss

order

jacquesm|3 months ago

> I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.

Please don't, it's highly irritating and usually just serves as a way to get people to discuss the leading zero rather than the subject they were really interested in in the first place. Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason. It's about as useful as expressing the temperature in Kelvin.

aydyn|3 months ago

Coincidentally, the temperatures in the Farmer's Almanac are all in Kelvin.

do_not_redeem|3 months ago

Well said. Five-digit years are the Shadow the Hedgehog of rationalism. But he successfully derailed the thread and took the spotlight for himself, so... mission accomplished, I guess.

kstrauser|3 months ago

It’s big “look at me” energy, coupled with that user citing years way more often than most.

Some person: I like yams.

Person in question: Me too, since I had my first one in 01985 or so.

euroderf|3 months ago

Octal schmoctal eh

9rx|3 months ago

> Leading zeros aren't a thing for a reason.

If they aren't a thing, why are we talking about them? Clearly they're a thing. And not even an obscure thing. If you've ever used commonly used representations like ZIP codes, bank account numbers, or serial numbers you'll no doubt have encountered it before. And that even goes for dates. ISO 8601, for example, requires leading zeros, including for the year component. "1" is not considered a valid year under that standard. It must be represented as "0001". Granted, ISO 8601 only requires a minimum of four characters to represent the year, but expecting at least five characters is conceptually just as valid.

cadamsdotcom|3 months ago

You might find your crowd among the Long Now Foundation, they love their 5-digit years.

dingnuts|3 months ago

this thing where someone performs an in group practice (the leading zero behavior) to garner interest, and then another in group member appears to try to recruit the curious person who takes the bait, that y'all are doing?

it's creepy cult behavior, and the "Long Now" name and framing focused on the infinite isn't helping

silisili|3 months ago

Nobody seems to care about the y100k problem this introduces.

001852 is safe for a million years!

Alive-in-2025|3 months ago

Only losers don't pad dates out to 10 digits to account for when Donald Trump passes off his earthly coil.

echelon|3 months ago

> That's some serious forward thinking you've got going on with your date format there. I like it, I will be formatting all my years to 5 digits from now on.

I like this.

I wonder what other conventions we could break by being "forward-thinking" in this sense.

Past tense for all proper names ("America was...", "Google was..."), prices pegged to energy equivalents (bananas were priced at 10 kWh). Describing life on the North American Plate under Alpha Centauri aligned constellations...

Those are all awkward. The date thing is just smooth.