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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

One thing I always felt was an anti-pattern was in any input where months are numbers they don't explicitly mention in an adjacent label the name of the month. Besides the US/UK order confusion, you'd be surprised how often people think August is the 7th month of the year.

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When I registered for Lufthansa FF, the form was just numbers. My birthdate has two single-digit numbers in it, and I ended up with Month-Date backwards (US vs. rest of the world conventions - e.g., 4/8 is either April 8, or Aug 4).

It wasn't an issue, but a minor annoyance to fix it every time I traveled, so that it matched my travel documents.

Until a couple of years ago, when I was traveling back from Germany and the flight crew thought it would be nice to surprise me with a bottle of champagne at midnight on my "birthday".

They were so proud of doing this over the top "random kindness" (it was pretty thoughtful), and couldn't figure out why I was confused and annoyed. I still feel bad for not acting more excited or grateful...

There's an unspoken privilege in being born on a day beyond the 12th of any given month, because you'll get a validation error if you mix up the day and month in a form

Even better, just have the same value for each

Yup. 11/11 for me. Can't go to far wrong. Just wish I was born in 2011 (for reasons other than having the same number!) :)

oh wow, you don't even need to move your finger when entering digits - it's "one"s all along!

There’s a Norwegian joke here.

I was born on December 9. The doctors wanted to do a C-section for my kid on December 9 but I said to my wife that my kid shouldn't have to share a birthday with me, so they scheduled for December 14 instead. This might have been a better argument than not wanting to share.

I have, occasionally, thought that (for example) October = 8th month because it starts with "Octo".

Yes, I know, historically it was.

That would be cool. So June would be Hexember, Hexober, or Hexuabry. January would be odd though - Mono-vember.

Not quite - they're off by two. Historically July and August were Quintilis (fifth) and Sextilis (sixth) before they were renamed in terms of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar.

I heard a standup with a very dark joke, something to the effect of, 9/11 had a silver lining because now he could remember what number month September was.

It took me years to figure out that 9/11 was not on the 9th November. I always wondered why there was no snow on the images of the incident. Americans and their correct date system...

Well, it doesn't snow in New York in November, either.

Confession: I'm nearly 40 damn years old, and I still second-guess month numbers enough that I usually just count starting from January, ticking them off on my fingers, and going through them one by one, to reach the one I need.

Same here, but only for July and August!

I don't know why, but I can easily map 1-6 to Jan-Jun. And I can easily map 9-12 with Sep-Dec. But July and August always trip me up.

For me, it's Sep, Oct, (and sometimes Nov) that confuse me.

It depends on what the date input is for. If it’s for e.g. a credit card expiry date, then the date is already in numbers, so you may have the August=7 mental conversion errors but in the other direction.

I have to take off a shoe when it gets to the tail end months of the year.

Only two that don't fit on fingers, so you could leave your shoes on and count feet for November and December. :)

well well, I think you might be on to something. This is going to save me quite a lot of time, not to mention that I might be able to go back to wearing shoes with laces again and not having my productivity totally destroyed.

How about a month dropdown with the options below?

Jan01, Fev02, Mar03, Apr04, May05, Jun06, Jul07, Ago08, Sep09, Oct10, Nov11, Dec12

Must be software engineers.

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