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Comment by knorker | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can tell. You just hire an investigator to find out who wrote the memo, and find where in the world they grew up, in what culture.

If the answer comes back very US, then it's middle endian US format. Else it's DMY.

Note that the article is wrong to just say "dd.mm.yy" is used in "Europe". Some countries use yyyy-mm-dd and others dd/mm/yy.

The US format is the only one that's retarded, though.

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Canada is even worse, we can't decide which one to use so you never know what format it's in.

I was once sent paperwork to fill out that had dates requested in both MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY formats on different pages.

the upside of Canada's incredibly stupid date formats is that nobody complains when you try to use ISO8601 format instead, we're all somewhat used to date formatting being flexible.

My american users get very angry when they see a date that isn't in dd/mm/yy format.

Corrections: Most but not all government forms in Canada use yyyy-mm-dd format, which is a positive change. But indeed we are used to living in a mishmash of American, European, and ISO influences. Americans might get angry if you don't use mm/dd/yy format; I'm not aware of them being attached to dd/mm/yy.

> The US format is the only one that's retarded, though.

I wonder how it started? A skim of the internets hasn’t enlightened me.

It’s a representation of how us Americans talk - we rarely say 26th of February and instead say February 26 - and if necessary tack on the year. It feels exceptionally awkward to say 26 February, thought saying “twenty twenty one February 26” sounds very strange, too.

But people are very good at verbally saying different than is written.

So write YYYY-MM-DD!

But also, the most sacret of all days has been honored by the one day of the year "said properly" fourth of july!

Changing formats is just asking for a large event on 9 November.

No native speaker but isn't 4th of July more common than July 4th?

You could even say "The Fourth" and almost all Americans would understand. I think that's why; [begin speculation] it's such an exceptional date it necessitates saying it differently.

The Fourth of July and Cinco de Mayo are exceptional days.

Tax day is the ides of April, but we just say April 15th.

Somehow the rest of the anglosphere doesn't use that format.

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