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A comment on Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay online is 'embarrassing'. Parent comment

Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by userbinator on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:15PM (#25770974)
Dates were represented as strings in "YYYYMMDD" format (so today would be "20210113053923") instead of UNIX timestamps

Such a representation naturally avoids the Y2K38 problem, and could go beyond Y10K. It's traditional in Windows and DOS (neither of which have the Y2K38 problem) to store timestamps as a structure of fields.

The other things you noted I agree with, however.

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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by CoolGuySteve on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:49PM (#25771221)
If they're using a javascript 53bit int representation for the seconds (or an int64_t cast down to a javascript big int) then it's a Y142711K problem, by which point the Imperium of Mankind will hopefully have settled on a more robust format.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by wmil on Thursday January 14, 2021 @03:18AM (#25773621)
The tech-priests will have lost the ability to fix it.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by freeone3000 on Thursday January 14, 2021 @01:15AM (#25772774)
That's how we ended up with the 2038 problem!
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by toyg on Thursday January 14, 2021 @03:52AM (#25773854)
I expect Slaanesh and friends will manage to sabotage that somehow.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by Quarrelsome on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:46PM (#25771199)
You can also instantly read them which makes troubleshooting easier. I mean sure, if your shit is too slow maybe switch to less text in release mode but YAGNI.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by 3np on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:40PM (#25771152)
Well, assuming they're storing the strings as ASCII, that's 98 bits - the y2k38 problem is for 32 bit integers, so a 64 bit integer would be way, way more than needed for human needs for foreseeable generations.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by swerwath on Thursday January 14, 2021 @12:52AM (#25772631)
Doesn't seem to me like Parler will have to worry about Y2K38...
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by throwawayboise on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:51PM (#25772192)
A timestamp is a timestamp. It isn't a date. If you need a date, use a proper date/time data type.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by gerikson on Thursday January 14, 2021 @02:58AM (#25773475)
All timestamps have to start somewhere. If you want to avoid DST changes and leap seconds, you can use MJD, TAI or GPS time instead of UTC, but you might as well format it nicely so that you can see roughly at what (civil) date something happened.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by mixmastamyk on Thursday January 14, 2021 @03:23AM (#25773653)
ISO 8601 is a good one.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by formalsystems on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:49PM (#25771222)
Nice that makes sense. I was unaware and found it strange when I plugged it into JavaScript's Date constructor and got an "Invalid Date" error.
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Re:Pirate Bay founder thinks Parler’s inability to stay onli... by BrandonMarc on Thursday January 14, 2021 @09:25AM (#25776596)
This.

Plus, it's unambiguously human readable, for users, bystanders, platform developers, everyone. There's a useful usability principle in there.

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