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He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)


Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.


Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.


So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now...

And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.


Are you surprised that on HN, of all places, we find a date format pedant? :-D


And a wrong one, at that.


My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.


> My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.

"My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others."

There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.


> So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

In eight thousand years.




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