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Comment by hokobomo | Hacker News Reader

> March 14 (represented as 3/14 in many parts of the world)

haha

I wanted to comment the same part, but I wanted to let them the benefit of the doubt, so I went to Wikipedia «date format by country» page [1], and summed up from the table how many people have "MD" vs "DM" in their date format:

DM -> 3392/5550 ~= 61.1% MD -> 2158/5550 ~= 38.9%

Note: I ignored both green and red regions that have both "DM" and "MD" in their format.

So it is definitively not the majority of people. Using the word "some" instead would have been better, but "Many" is not totally wrong… I guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Usage_m...

But that is population not a number of countries. If you look at it from a country perspective, the percentage is tiny.

Probably. The statement talk about "parts of the world", and this concept of "parts" can be seen as countries, continents, surface of earth, atoms, etc. I chose to reduce it to the smallest meaningful entity concerning the concept of dates: humans. It is arbitrary, but justifiable :)

You seem to imply it’s wrong to refer to 40% of the population as “many” — which seems odd.

I treat "some" as an informal expression of relative quantity and "many" as an informal expression of absolute quantity. So it is valid to say many countries use "MD" and many countries use "DM", though most countries use "DM" and only some use "MD".

The US and Philippines use month-day-year.

The rest of the world doesn't. The most popular format is Day-Month-Year, followed by Year-Month-Day.

Yes. ISO chooses year-month-day, which puts largest component first and smallest last. This has the nice benefit that treating it as a string and doing alphanumerical sort matches the actual day sort. Ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

There are benefits to both little endian and big endian

Yes, but the US uses middle endian.

The main benefit of Y-M-D, is that no-one uses Y-D-M, and the 'Y' component is easily recognisable. So if you use Y-M-D, then everyone knows it's Y-M-D and there is no ambiguity.

I found out recently the x509/tls certa are YYMMDD

200122

For example. Amazing.

My two favourite date formats are: (1) yyyy-MMM-dd and (2): yyyyMMdd.

Why?

(1) eliminates any ambiguity regarding interpretation. You can have an instance of a server of an unknown provenience and/or regional settings and still count on yyyy-MMM-dd to be correctly recognized.

(2) on the other hand has a nice feature of being sortable and can also be stored as an integer value if needed.

The US standard of MM/dd/yyyy is ridiculous. But it's just one of many and I'm not going to fix the world ;)

On the main topic: if anyone needs to calculate the circumference of the Universe (radius: 50bn lightyears ish) with the accuracy of the Planck distance (approximately 1.6 x 10^-30 meters), they need less than 65 digits of Pi to do so. So, as already stated, it's just a PR stunt, nothing more.

yyyy-MM-dd is sortable (2019-03-14)

yyyy-MMM-dd is not (2019-MAR-14)

Yeah, but we can't celebrate on the other way around, because there's no 14th month.

We can celebrate Pi day every month at 3 14:15:92.65359.

And April only has 30 days.

There's the 22nd of July (22/7), also known as Pi Approximation Day, which in any case is more accurate than 3.14.

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