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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Even just labelling the days would help.

There's room for confusion with unlabelled days even when it's "right", though. The author says "Since when is Feb 2 on a Thursday", but I assume that's because he's used to a Sunday->Saturday layout on a calendar, whereas for me I'd assume the 2nd were a Friday based on that position as I'm used to Monday->Sunday calendars.

(Update: OK, the days ARE labelled - incorrectly. You have to click on the screenshot on Twitter to see the full screenshot. Keeping this comment here for posterity only ;-))

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The thing is, the screenshot _has_ labeled days. The calendar helpfully labeled February 2 as a Thursday.

Not the screenshot I'm looking at from the link. [ADDED: Ah, you have to click through on the twitter image. Yes, it's just flat-out wrong.]

Click through

Neither was I, but turns out sturgill is right. If you click on the image in the tweet it expands to a fuller version that shows the calendar is, indeed, totally screwed :-D

You also fell victim to a broken UI: the one that clips a screenshot and doesn't let you know that there's more to it!

It's worse then that!

Keep in mind that I open all links in a new private windows except for few services for which I stay logged in.

On twitter, clicking sometime opens a new link, sometime shows the full version of an image. Trying to right clicking all the time doesn't work, because it doesn't do anything when it is a small image that needs to be disaplayed in its full version - because they change the click behaviour via javascript.

you need to click it, otherwise it only shows a portion of the screenshot. above "February 2019" there's a menu bar with days on it (which is incorrect).

Wow, that is extremely bad UI from twitter to crop image like that.

Twitter is known for horrible UI, so nothing new there.

Their cropping uses deep learning for the crop[1], but I often notice that screenshots are clipped weirdly. It makes me wonder if their training set was all photographs.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

Are you viewing it cropped or something? There’s definitely weekday labels above the dates.

To those confused: the new Twitter UI (you have to opt-in) displays the calendar without cropping.

This, I don't think it's an issue of week-start-conventions.

That sounds like l10n gone seriously wrong -- maybe they literally wrote something like translation_helper(0) in that header which translates to Monday in $asian language and Sunday in English.

The bug looks like it occurs because the date picker aligns days/dates from 2017. February and March both begin on a Wednesday in the screenshot. I don't have iOS to test, but if this is the case, a flight for 1st Jan 2020 will incorrectly be aligned under Sunday instead of Wednesday.

Pretty poor bug

That calendar picker seems clearly somewhere between confusing and outright broken. [ADDED: Just broken. Click through and they do have incorrect days labeled.] But there are at least two conventions: Sun->Sat and Sat->Fri (or Mon->Sun); the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.

They should label the days to minimize confusion--I come close enough to messing up reservations as it is--but there isn't really a universal standard for the layout of weeks.

> ... the US tends to be the former and Europe the latter.

Australia is the latter, and so is most of Asia, and .. well, it's probably just bits of the USA that likes to have Sunday as the first day of the week. Date pickers in many US-originating software assume this, which is insanely frustrating for those of us not in the USA / not expecting / not wanting this.

> Australia is the latter,

Australian here. I was taught Sun is the first day of the week.

Where were you educated, may I ask? Do you recall if this was encouraged at school or in the home?

(Did you ever wonder why 'weekend' included only one day at the end, along with one day at the start, of a week?)

Growing up I never saw a (physical) calendar that had Sunday as the first day. It's only the past ten years or so they seem to crop up more, almost exclusively online.

I suspect the relatively recent incidence is from shipped-in American culture of course. Similarly I'm seeing increasing occurrence of "February 5th, 2019" rather than the standard Australian / British format of "5th of February, 2019" (noting these sequences aligns with mm/dd/yy and dd/mm/yy preferences for US and rest-of-world respectively).

> Where were you educated, may I ask?

Country Victoria. :)

> Growing up I never saw a (physical) calendar that had Sunday as the first day. It's only the past ten years or so they seem to crop up more, almost exclusively online.

Hmmm... thinking about it a bit, it shouldn't be too hard to locate historical sources of calendars over the years (scanned in, etc). "Pin up girls" (etc) were popular in places like mechanical workshops, and I'm fairly sure there would be hobbyist collectors out there with collections online. Cultural heritage kind of thing. :)

Interesting. Suburban Sydney here.

I did a brief trawl through historical calendars on the ebay, most dating back from the mid 1960's, most from NAB or other large institutions. Surprisingly I noted that they showed Sunday as the first day of the week.

So now I'm trying to remember what calendars we had in the house growing up, and how that fits with locale settings on most OS's assuming that Australians have Monday as the first day of the week.

Checked here on our macOS (High Sierra) build server. In the system locale settings (set to "Australia") it has the first day of the week as Sunday. Which is what I'd expect, as that's the first day of the week I was taught and am used to. :)

Note - I don't think that's as change I made, as I doubt I've gone into these settings before. Not 100% sure though.

Very interesting. GMail uses Monday, but I'd have changed that a decade or so ago had it been otherwise. I checked on kde calendar (something I've never run before) and it's using my en_AU locale - and it's picked Monday. But http://demo.icu-project.org/icu-bin/locexp?d_=en&_=en_AU suggests the CLDR identifies AU as 'Sunday as first day of week', which is highly alarming. Do you know if MacOS uses CLDR, or would it be picking up Apple's assumption about AU locale preferences? (Do you have colour or color settings in your control panel?)

Wasn't sure what CLDR is ;), though a quick search online turned up a relevant sounding Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository

In that, it mentions macOS does use it.

The macOS "System Preferences" (system wide control panel) does have a colour settings area. No mention of CLDR, it's more about the locally connected displays and their display gamut (eg Adobe RGB, sRGB, etc).

To be clear, I was wondering if the regional preferences for AU meant their colour settings spelled colour with an ou not just two o's.

I think we can probably chalk this up to my insulated childhood, and a subsequent cultivated intolerance to Sunday-first calendars.

Ahhh. The System Preferences spelling of colour is ... "Color". Looks like it's hard coded, not picking up the correct spelling for Oz. :/

And yeah, no worries. :)

>Even just labelling the days would help

>I assume that's because he's used to...

Perhaps you should actually look at the screenshot instead of assuming?

The column February 2nd is in is clearly labeled as Thursday. There's no room for ambiguity there.

It's a bug. #stopuserblaming

It is. However, the screenshot they posted on twitter did not show the relevant part of the image unless you clicked through.

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