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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, I know this is slightly offtopic, but there's nothing more I dislike than B.C.E and C.E. I can understand not trying to promote a Christian-centric worldview, but by only changing the labels, they accomplish nothing. Now, the birth of Christ sets a 'common era,' which arguable makes it _more_ 'offensive' than just acknowledging what happened on that particular day.

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The switch to B.C.E. and C.E. is also because the year of Jesus' birth is debated. Some believe he was born in 4 C.E. At least that's what I recall from school many many years ago. Personally, I prefer "B.C." and "A.D." because those two are more different from each other (edit distance of two) than "B.C.E." and "C.E." (edit distance of one, unless you count periods).

Edit: Wikipedia says Jesus was born in 5 B.C. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus)

While you are correct that most scholars don't believe that Jesus was born in 1 AD, the reason the change was made was to distance scholarship from Christianity.

Don't forget, though, AD stands for Anno Domini, which means "in the year of our Lord." Which is a little more than just acknowledgement.

The "our" translation is just convention, not actually there in the latin.

Actually, AD is the shortened form for "the year of our Lord". The "Year of our Lord" came first, before the initials.

I don't know what you folks are on about. My ddate clearly tells me

<pre>Today is Prickle-Prickle, the 33rd day of Confusion in the YOLD 3176</pre>

There is another dating system which aims to get around this, by actually changing the numbers, which is called Before Present (BP). It sets 0 to be January 1, 1950, as an arbitrary date of the present. So, 1500 BP is 450 AD. I see it used most often it dealing with archaeology.

Are you sure that April 20, 2010 isn't 0 BP? :)

Unix epoch had it right. Let's just all count seconds before/after 1 Jan 1970.

A slight complication to this solution is that the length of a year is not exactly divisible to seconds, or even of constant length. So counting seconds is fundamentally different from, though pretty close to, counting years.

Why can't we dispense with the annotation completely? BC/BCE counts backwards, so let's just say 1970 or -1970.

edit: posted this before I saw Groxx's reply below

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