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Comment by Xelbair | Hacker News Reader

solution is simple.

Lets get rid of all date-time formats except the iso(YYY-MM-DD) one...

These differences exist because of the freedom given to everybody about their choice. So countries make their operating standard and citizens follow it.

It is simple to think that this format would work but the people who are not familiar with this format will be completely lost with it. People who are not educated but somehow learnt to follow one format; ask them to learn a new format; it will be so complicated.

This is like arguing that nobody should adopt the meter because each country has their local feet, yards, furlongs, cubits, els, steps, rods, lacters, and canas. I mean think about it: countries decide their units of measurements and their citizens follow it. It's freedom!

Sigh...

You're not even from the United States, so you should full well know how important standardisation is across country borders. There are literally only three countries that haven't adopted metric, zero that haven't adopted the standard 24 hour / 60 minute day, and only four that haven't adopted the Gregorian calendar[1].

So why is it so hard to accept the one consistent date format? Seriously? Why?

Tell you what: If you can tell me which day the following date represents, I'll give you USD 100. Seriously. I'm not even kidding.

    03/04/05

Go ahead. Guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_calendar

It is a Tuesday(1)

(1) standard probabilities apply.

But seriously, yes. I am French and write the date as 2009-03-01 and get weird looks.

I work in a French company and some people seem to assume that it is fancy to use a US format for the dates. I refuse to read a document which did not have an obvious format.

Heck, even MAR/01/2020 could be acceptable but why? Why?

There are a myriad of debates in email threads about standardizing on ISO 8601. I would love to see it happen, but I would not hold my breath. People code date formats into their applications and db schemas and many other reasons. In most cases I have seen, people could have used epoch and then simply displayed the date based on the user preference.

I just imagined a dystopian world controlled by a malicious AI that outlaws everything that can't pass the modern turing tests.

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