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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

I mean, there is literally no way to confuse it with another date, unless you go back 100 years, when Slack didn't exist.

There is no 22nd month, so we know the 22s are the day and the year, leaving only the 2 to be the month. Is it really that difficult to parse?

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I'm so tired of having to do that game every time I see a date. It is not hard, but it is quite annoying. Especially since it isn't solvable in a lot of cases, so you try to reason your way to the most realistic interpretation.

It shouldn't be this hard.

It’s not really that hard. Like the imperial system, Americans just memorize how it works as children and don’t think about it anymore.

Think about it like speaking a different language, except with numbers and not words.

The complaint isn't about the particular other order, but the fact that the order is ambiguous. In this case that doesn't matter, but often it does.

Americans memorize inches and yards, and often also memorize centimeters and meters, and working with either is fine, but we're not so often faced with numbers where it might be inches or centimeters and we have to figure out which (and when we are, it's sometimes a pain - certainly a bigger pain that working with known units).

Or, working with your language analogy, please go fetch me some "pasta" without knowing whether I'm speaking Italian or Polish.

I instinctively felt that the ambiguity ought to not truly exist, but I wanted to find some backing. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

… all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format. So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation. We are annoyed simply because it’s not they way that we do things in a peculiar case, when otherwise the language is fully intelligible.

> … all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format.

Yes, which makes reasonable the complaint about mm-dd-yyy.

> So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

This is both more work and also error prone in the general case (although it works out fine in this case).

> Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation.

Not at all. Whether I read "lieutenant" or "leftenant", I know what you're talking about. If I read 2-10-23, I might miss your birthday party.

Even people in non-English-speaking countries write in English all the time, especially on the Internet.

Picking one default and back-tracking on failure really isn't that comforting nor the constant reminder that the date you thought it was might be something else.

Context matters in your pasta scenario.

Context also matters in the date parsing scenario. 11/12/22 could be several different dates depending on the context.

Yeah, and in this post, it's clear what it is.

It may not have happened to you yet, but someday you'll see a date somewhere other than this post.

This honestly has me laughing.

Since the text itself doesn't clarify, context is the only way of resolving any of the scenarios. In each case it's usually sufficient and often not all that hard. But it's always harder than if the system in use was made explicit, and I understand the complaint (even if my annoyance at the ambiguity is quite significantly below the level where I would have complained myself, particularly in this case).

> Think about it like speaking a different language

The correct analogy is I don't know which language is spoken and the same words get used in multiple languages with different meaning. Now I can apply heuristics to figure it out or in some cases I can only guess.

That particular date is possible to understand, but the date format is not. (Is is really that fun to try to figure out what 12-11-21 means ?)

Is there a different post where they used this date format?

None of their other incident reports even have a date in the title. Yet this one does, and in a weird format. Maybe there's something novel about the date, and it's written this was to emphasize the novelty, not to provide some vital information that happens to be excluded on every other incident report title they've posted.

November 21, 1812

What do I win?

So we could either:

a) Use a far superior date format which nearly the entire world uses by default and is better and simpler in many ways.

b) Do logic when we see dates to try workout what format the date is in.

Going with a seems like a no brainer...

Especially in this scenario where you are communicating to an international audience.

> leaving only the 2 to be the day

I think you meant "to be the month" there. qed■

Beautiful.

Yeah, but what about that party that I threw on 10/11/12. Did I set it for November 12, 2010, or October 11 in 2012? Or somewhen else?

It's a waste of effort and makes me wonder about the competence of the person who wrote it (when looking at a mangled date generally). Display dates are for humans so write the month name, then it doesn't matter what the order is.

22 Feb 22

Feb 22 22 (weird but still better)

22 22 Feb (very weird but still better)

This also goes to show that 2022 is a better choice. My own personal preference - the 22nd of February 2022.

I just thought it was a typo.

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