Let's stop counting centuries • Hacker News Board

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#321

Post by istrice » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

There is no such thing as a word for "1700s" in most European languages.

Also in English it sounds weird, as you have to pronounce it "seventeen-hundreds" whereas the correct pronunciation is "one-thousand-seven-hundred". So 1700s is unsuitable for formal writing or speaking and doesn't map naturally to most languages of Western civilization.

But yeah, I guess the author finds it hard to subtract 1 in his mind :) I could go off about the typical US-centric arrogance that I see on this site, but I think it's already pretty funny as it is.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#322

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 2:44 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #242

IshKebab wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1-based works just fine It really doesn't. You can make it work obviously but you end up with much less elegant code, with +1 and -1 all over the place. E.g. for accessing a row of a matrix you get [width (i-1)+1, width i+1) instead of the far saner [width i, (width+1) i) Generic code also becomes much more awkward.

Both are less elegant in different scenarios. In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation. Neither is a true one-size-fits-all solution. They're different kinds of indexes that serve different purposes. The choice of zero-based everywhere is an engineering tradeoff, nothing more.

> In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation.

Perhaps, but this is extremely rare compared to tasks that are far more elegant with 0-based indexing. Also the worst you can get there is a single +1 in the display code, while trying to shoe-horn algorithms into 1-based code can get much more awkward.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#323

Post by LocalH » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 2:54 PM UTC

jonathan_landy wrote: post #317

swyx wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oooor we can slowly migrate towards sensibility as we did celsius and centimeters

Re temp, I’m glad we use F for daily life in the USA. The most common application I have for temp is to understand the weather and I like the 0-100 range for F as that’s the typical range for weather near me. For scientific work I obviously prefer kelvin. Celsius is nearly useless.

At least conversion between Celsius degrees and Kelvin is easy and lossless

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#324

Post by beachy » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 2:54 PM UTC

jonathan_landy wrote: post #317

swyx wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oooor we can slowly migrate towards sensibility as we did celsius and centimeters

Re temp, I’m glad we use F for daily life in the USA. The most common application I have for temp is to understand the weather and I like the 0-100 range for F as that’s the typical range for weather near me. For scientific work I obviously prefer kelvin. Celsius is nearly useless.

> Celsius is nearly useless.

That's like ... your opinion man.

Personally I like knowing that water boils at exactly 100 degrees.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#325

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #307

You need to count from 0. 1 BC should be renamed year 0. Then the years 0-99 are the 0th century, the years 1900-1999 are the 19th century, etc. To avoid confusion between new style and old style centuries, create a new word, "centan", meaning "100 years" and use cardinal instead of ordinal numbers, for conciseness. Then the years 1900-1999 are the 19-centan.

It's always fun how to debate how to square circles, something has to give, but what? My proposed solution is to make the first "century" 99 years.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#326

Post by eddieroger » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 3:01 PM UTC

milliams wrote: post #11

It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought t…

Your metaphor is comparing apples and oranges. When we could life, it's "one year old" or "aged one year," both of which mark the completion of a milestone. Using the term "18th century" is all-encompassing of that year, which is a different use case. When one recollects over the course of someone's life, like in a memoir, it would be normal to say "in my 21st year", referring to the time between turn 20 years old and 21 years old.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#327

Post by hombre_fatal » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 3:03 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #316

tempodox wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logic is in short supply and off-by-one errors are everywhere. Most people don't care. I think it's more doable to learn to just live with that than to reprogram mankind.

What's "more logical" about "the seventeenth century" compared to "the sixteen hundreds"?

I’d say more sensible. It’s always weird to me to use the number 17 to talk about years that start with 16. Makes more sense to just say the 1600s.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#328

Post by linearrust » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 3:04 PM UTC

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #283

ineedaj0b wrote: post #281

"There’s no good way to refer to 2000-2009, sorry." I believe this time is called 'the aughts', at least online. I say it in person but I might be the outlier.

Fuck that. It's "the 2000s".

That only works for now because we are so close to 2000. So there is little ambiguity whether "the 2000s" refer to the century or the decade. But in the future, "the 2000s" will refer to the century. Just like the 1900s refer to the 20th century rather than the decade (1900-1909).

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#329

Post by jessekv » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 3:11 PM UTC

worstspotgain wrote: post #130

rcoveson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context. It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers an…

Yes but, is there such a thing as a zeroth-order pedant, someone not pedantic about year ordinality? As a first-order meta-pedant, this would be my claim. Moreover, I definitely find the ordinality of pedantry more interesting than the pedantry of ordinality.

Interesting indeed. I suppose third-order pedantry must be "jerk".

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#330

Post by card_zero » Sat, Jul 06, 2024, 3:12 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #239

Perseids wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that is just elitist bullshit. First, even if we accept your implicit premise, that it is a training hurdle only, there is enormous value in accessible science, literature and education. In our connected society and in a democracy everyone benefits from everybody else understanding more of our world. In software engineering we have a common understanding that accidental complexity reduces our ability t…

> I'm sorry, but that is just elitist bullshit. That's fine, the thought-stopping accusation of "elitism" doesn't bother me. It's a preoccupation for people preferring equality based on dumbing things for the lowest common denominator, lest - god forbid - someone has to make an effort. I don't think lowly and condescedingly of people like that, I think they're capable of learning and making the effort - they're just…

There are a lot of shibboleths and pointless conventions in the world. Flutists are called "flautists" because classical musicians aspire to be Italian, and if you don't pretend to be Italian too you'll embarrass yourself. Minute hands were originally long because they pointed to an outer dial of minutes, while hour hands were distinguished by being decorated, but now being slightly longer is just a stylization that means minute hand (even though "minute" means "small") and we have two pointers using the same dial for different enumerations, one without the relevant numbers and distinguished by fractional differences in its width and length. British English spellings are substantially French, and this is perpetuated as a matter of national pride.

Like the word shibboleth, these examples are all kinds of language. Even the clock hands are a sort of visual language. Nth century is another language element. The conventions make outsiders stumble, but for insiders they're familiar and shedding them would be disturbing. Over time they become detached from their origins, and more subtle and arbitrary.

In programming we have "best practise", which takes good intentions and turns them into more arbitrary conventions. These decisions are unworked again later by people saying "no that's dumb, I'm not going to do that", even if it is "how we do it" and even if learning it is a sign of cleverness. We have to be smart to learn to do dumb pointless things like all the other smart people.

Is this good? Keeps us on our toes, maybe? Or keeps us aligned with bodies of knowledge? I think it's definitely good that we have the force of reformist skeptics to erode these pointless edifices, otherwise we'd be buried in them. But new ones are clearly being built up, naturally, all the time. Is that force also good? Alright, yes, it probably is. Put together, this is a knowledge-forming process with hypothesises (I don't like using Latin plurals, personally) and criticisms, and it's never clear whether tradition or reform is on the dumb or overcomplicated side: it remains to be seen, as each case is debated (if we can be bothered).