[kragen]

Just to clarify, Greg Newby was not the CEO of Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 01971, but of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which he founded in 02000 or 02001. It has contributed immensely to Project Gutenberg, but they are not the same thing. Newby would never have attempted to take credit for PG.

Edit: the post title has been fixed now.

[ron_k]

Yes, the title has been changed. The one I posted clearly said "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation”.

[kragen]

Can you change it back? Currently it says "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, has died," which seems to be misleading people.

[ron_k]

I can’t, sorry, there’s no edit button, I guess because of low karma. Maybe the mods (or who changed it) can revert it to the old title.

[dredmorbius]

NB: You can email mods with such requests after the edit window has expired, or for submissions by others.

[kragen]

They seem to have done so now.

[rom1v]

Are the years intended to be read in octal?

[kijin]

According to javascript, 01971 is just 1971. Meanwhile, 01671 is 953.

[kragen]

Man! JS never stops trolling you.

[nappy-doo]

It's one of these Long Now things. The goal is to get people to think in long term time frames.

[drfuchs]

That’s a ZipCode.

[walkabout]

They’re intended to derail every thread that includes them into discussions about this stupid date format, thus wasting lifetimes of person-hours.

It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.

[dinkelberg]

I'm sorry, but this reads somewhat misanthropical itself. Let people have some fun?

[walkabout]

They’re trolls. They’ve been doing this for years. It’s just trolling.

[benterix]

You got me curious about the leading zero.

[kragen]

Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.

[armarr]

The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.

[dkga]

I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it

[casenmgreen]

I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.

We should count from the beginning of time.

[daeken]

I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era. For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE.

Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...

[quuxplusone]

That just sounds like Anno Mundi with extra steps. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Mundi

1. Pick an epoch date so far in the past that nothing of interest could possibly have taken place before it.

2. ???

3. Profit!

The two problems with this idea are, first, that everyone argues about the exact value of the epoch; and second, that something always ends up having happened before that.

You can also invert the scheme, to get the Before Present system. This has the same two problems (s/before/after/).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present

[zozbot234]

It's better to call this Holocene Era even though Holocene didn't exactly start in 10,000 BCE, because modern humans were around for a long time prior to the 10,000 BCE epoch. Some people have proposed 8,000 BCE as an epoch, styling this "After the development of Agriculture". According to this epoch, we'd currently be in year 10025 A.D.A., which is neat.

[kragen]

An unfortunate suggestion of that nomenclature is that it suggests that "humanity" came into existence only 12025 years ago, which would mean that the creatures before that time were all non-human. This is especially unfortunate given that it strongly implies that, for example, either Khoisan people, Australian people, or European people are human, but not more than one of the three, since they diverged genetically before that date. While, on one level, this is merely a semantic issue about the definition of the word "human", on another level it mirrors the ideological justifications for mass enslavement and genocide that caused historically unprecedented atrocities in the 20th century (unsurpassed until Mao surpassed them), because most people's ethical systems accord special privileges to "humans", for example holding that killing any number of nonhumans is justifiable if it saves even one human's life, or, in most cases, even if it merely provides them with meat to eat.

While I don't believe the Kurzgesagt staff endorse genocide and cannibalism, I think they may not have clearly thought out the implications of their choice of terminology.

Premack's timeline that you link does not make the same error, calling it the "Holocene Era", as Emiliani did.

[thechao]

It's October 22, 14 billionish. Been that way for a while.

[DannyBee]

My birthday was October 17th, 14000000005, but after some new physics estimates, it turns out it’s really October 13th, 14000000008.

[sangeeth96]

There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist already.

[imdsm]

Long term optimist perhaps