What foundation?

The Long Now Foundation

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

To be consistent, you should pad the other numbers you use too. Like money amounts. And I think you should pad dates out to eight digits, just to be safe.

I think I'll also pad out your name, Nate______.

Ok that's funny. Thank you for not padding me with zeros.

That would be inhumane.

It makes your post come off as an ad for this foundation that 99.9% of people don’t care about and that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed; it’s as if I inserted [DRINK MORE COCA-COLA] into random parts of my comment.

Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.

People who are looking for an excuse to give others grief for harmlessly violating social conventions probably should not be posting on a site named "Hacker News"—after all, hackers have always been weird, think of Turing. In any case they are not capable of engaging with my substantive points, should I have any, so I'm not losing anything by discomforting them.

And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.

It is totally useless to zero pad a date in a sentence, it is human to human communication.

BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.