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Comment by doe88 | Hacker News Reader

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doe88·

You're absolutely right, I stand corrected, they seem to have released some information as early as 10/4/17.

http://www.irsn.fr/FR/Actualites_presse/Actualites/Pages/201...

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April?

No, for all those outside USA the date of the article is 4/10/17, ie 4 October 2017.

That's still ambiguous. Safest to use ISO format 2017-10-04. Nobody will be confused and it's the national standard for some countries.

I never realised how obscure the US date format is [1]. Nobody should be using that on the internet except for specially local sites. It makes no sense to just about anybody. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

I use ISO format for whenever I'm working with computers.

If I have to write down the date on paper, I always use "10 NOV 2017." It's not terribly international, but it is unambiguous for many European languages.

I have also seen "10 XI 2017" (using the Roman numeral for the month) when dealing with NATO and European Union documents (especially meeting notices.) I think it's a little fiddly because it doesn't appear to be in great use, but it also works.

At the last place I worked, I was responsible for the labels that tracked parts around the plant. I tried to talk them into using ISO format, as we had one plant in the US and one in Ireland and consistency was a requirement. They wouldn't go for it, the closest I could come was 2017-Nov-10.

On top of all their other advantages, ISO dates are sortable without requiring conversions - just sort them alphabetically. I try to evangelize them whenever I can.

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