71–80 of 112 posts
> I call it rock solid durability. Literally! But this is survivor bias: you only see a piece that remained intact for 5k years, and I bet 99% of them were eroded/destroyed over time.
While survivor bias is relevant, I strongly doubt any modern transaction stored digitally in a DB such as Postgres could last 5k years.
Think about how the museum physical text book store it, as simple text with processing offloaded to the reader (ie: circa 4000BC, Before 2000BC, After ...)
I wonder, if for some problems, we'll move to LLM computation instead of a developer coded solution.
Your variables will be
let date_1 = "2000 BC"
let date_2 = "3000 B.C."
if date_1 > date_2 { .. do something .. }
Interesting write-up marred by the injection of politics: Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep -theft- inventory details Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
Interesting write-up marred by the injection of politics: Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep -theft- inventory details Ideological jabs like this are fine in political discussions but they don't add anything elsewhere and serve only to lower the trustworthiness of what is written due to implied bias.
As an aside to this aside on the aside… I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era. But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!"…
Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> The answer: Text. That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601? Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.
IMHO if code is doing extra parsing to handle -ve years, they should have enough logic to know to how to skip the zeroth year when converting to and from the human readable form.
I expected there would be constraints, but the chosen range is quite intriguing. The PostgreSQL spec says the 4-byte date type spans 4713 BC to 5,874,897 AD. It gives much more headroom for future dates—did they assume preserving data before 4713 BC is unlikely?
Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> The answer: Text. That was my immediate thought too and led to me wondering: How do you represent BCE dates in ISO 8601? Apparently ISO 8601 always supports YYYY from 0000 (1 BCE) to 9999 (9999 CE). ISO 8601 can also extend beyond those limits if agreed upon by sender and receiver: e.g. -0001 (2 BCE), -0002 (3 BCE), etc.
edit: Apparently that’s how they do dates in astronomy since it makes the math easier. Can’t even count on years being gregorian these days…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an aside to this aside on the aside… I've gotten into reading Tintin books with my kid, as I did when I was about his age. They're grand adventures and sort-of progressive, for their era. But the basic structure of many of the stories is still basically "let's get this rare artifact from [South America, Africa, Asia] out of the hands of the thieves stealing it, and back into a museum in England, where it belongs!"…
I imagine the location of the museum would have been different in the original French, but the same European colonial attitude applies.
I'm 52 years old and it has been this way since I can remember but for some reason I can't make it not bug me. Any time we have the biggest/oldest/smallest/fastest/etc example of something, it's described without any qualification of seen, known, observed, etc. For example, this isn't oldest recorded transaction, it's the oldest widely known record of a transaction (probably). Why does that still bother me? Obviously…
Quote: I wonder how people store dates older than this. Maybe if I’m a British Museum manager, and I want to keep theft inventory details. How do I do it? As an epoch? Store it as text? The answer: Text. Many items in museums have no specific date but Circa X. I have spent a lot of time in the early 2000s to enable "Sort by date" in museum registrars software I was maintaining despite having it textual
> Sort by date" in museum registrars software This sounds like the perfect invitation for some old school over engineering. I'm already having so much fun running through every possible input in my head, and I would inevitably write a serious mountain of steaming code to support it.
My main testing dataset is the 470,000 records from the Met, with 33k unique date values. Fortunately they include machine-readable dates I can validate against.