Freedom Clock
domsson.github.io
domsson.github.io
In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format.
But honestly both formats (M/D/Y and D/M/Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y/M/D.
>>> 3/25/2023
5.931784478497281e-05For a few thousand more years, sure!
JSYK, a more native phrasing would be "follows the numbers". "Proceeds" would be too easily confused for "precedes".
It's annoying, and I just ALWAYS use YYYY-MM-DD, and everyone is happy. Please join my cause. If there's one thing we can all agree makes the world just a little better, it's using YYYY-MM-DD to get people used to it.
In my opinion though, using a number for the month at all is silly. Nobody ever answered "What month is it?" with "Five." A better format would be to use standard 3-letter codes for the month, e.g. MAR:25:23.
Hell, the weird American "write it like you say it month dayeth of year" would be fine if they didn't use slashes. Sure it doesn't sort well but at least it wouldn't be ambiguous. Nobody would be confused if today was written 03-25/2023.
No, it doesn't. I mean, in certain contexts it can, but it doesn't exclusively in general, any more than it means “and/or” exclusively in general (though, it does mean “and/or” in “and/or” which probably isn’t something you should think about too much.)
It can just be a separator, as it is in American dates.
"of": like one half (1/2) meaning one of two, or km/h meaning kilometers per hour, or page 14/55. In these contexts it means something within something else. In both cases there's the strong mathematical connotation of a numerator and a denominator.
"or": like in and/or or he/she.
The symbol has clear connotations, and the American date-format deviates from those.
M/D/Y should never be a default for any software without the user explicitly selecting it or specifying their country.
M/D/Y seems to be the most practical because it reflects how dates are spoken in American English. It separates the date (month/day) from the year, which in many cases can be omitted, while also keeping the larger unit, the month, up front.
The majority of English speakers and people in general don't speak American English, so it makes zero sense to default to "M/D/Y", unless the user explicitly states to use American English, over a more logical order, ideally Y-M-D.
Pretty much all defence in this thread of M/D/Y is just American exceptionalism.
As for practicality, I don't think closely mirroring English grammar makes it any more practical for written communication.
Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human.
in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc.
Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers. We're not feeding a number into a machine, we're speaking to humans.
Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25"
Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.
and you say 3rd street, not Street 3. and 4th of july
i do prefer the american decimal point 1,000.00 , it makes more sense. But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards.
I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.
This is a stretch. How is being 70% water relevant? It’s not like I’m routinely measuring the water in my body to make sure I don’t let it boil or freeze.
Of course kilogram is a mess in itself, being base unit with a prefix. While SI is mostly okay system, lets not forget that it has its own warts.
> You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25",
We say 25th March in German.
Saying the whole date follows the importance: day, month, year: fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig.
Many traditions have their quirks. But at least very few German-speakers will try to defend this format.
Interestingly, I've rarely seen it being an issue with dates. Maybe because the amount is too small and people got used to it.
What I’m impressed with is the duration of time it takes to say todays date in Germany. I guess it’s rather “German-friendly” though. ;-)
It looks scary too btw. Had to double-check it too because you rarely write it as words in German (I'm not German too).
The English equivalent for 1125 would be onethousand-onehundred-five-and-twenty.
It’s less of an inherent part of the system, and more of a fact I just grew up with it and it’s what I’m used to.
Also isn't it better to just say 25th March rather than March 25? Because most people will be aware of the month we're talking abt and date is the most important thing there which should come first.
I don’t think there’s a strong preference for 25 March over March 25 in Europe or elsewhere. I think I might write either one of those.
That's informally known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy
The bottom end is much harder to justify but I believe the idea was that you wouldn't have to regularly deal with negative numbers.
But both F and C are completely arbitrary. That's the least messed up part of the non-SI unit system.
0°C: cold, 100°C: dead
0 K: dead, 100 K: dead
< 300 K: cold
> 300 K: hot
Let's switch to Kelvins
The original idea of Farenheit was that 0-100 was the range between the freezing point of salt water and human body temperature, and it was designed to be convenient for use in labs. At the time, 0F was the coldest temperature you could reliably make in a lab environment (using a saltwater ice bath). 100F was when the thing started to be uncomfortable to touch, I guess?
Sure, as an American living in the northeast, it is pretty convenient for my current use - temperatures vary from 0 (sometimes below) to a little less than 100 over the year and I know what "jacket weather" is - but that doesn't really mean anything if you don't live in this exact climate. I imagine that if we switched to Celsius tomorrow, after re-learning the numbers for "put on a sweater" and "put on a jacket," it would be about the same.
“Uncomfortable to touch” heavily depends on thermal capacity (how much heat there is in the object to touch) and thermal conductivity (how fast the object can get that heat into your skin), so I would think defining that exact point to be quite the challenge.
As to the Fahrenheit scale, it’s worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit:
“The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F (about 2.6 °F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale)”
So, Fahrenheit arbitrarily picked 100 °F as some distance above the point for average human body temperature, changed it to 96 °F, and the scale was later redefined.
And still people claim that scale is less arbitrary than Celsius, Kelvin, Réaumur, etc.
Depending on where you live, 50F could be considered cold. It's certainly not warm enough to be comfortable when lightly dressed.
There's nothing special about Fahrenheit in this respect. 20C is really what I'd call "not cold, not hot". 0 is freezing, 5 is cold, 10 is chilly, 15 is cool, 20 is comfortable, 25 is warm, 30 is high warm, 35 is hot, 37 is body temperature, and 40 is really hot.
You could say the exact same with Celsius. Also, how is 50 the middle in Africa and also Northern Europe? Average temperature is very different.
>Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.
So 25 is clearly the most important by your own logic hence day/month/year is the logic choice. If someone asked the date do you say “the 25th” more or less often than “March 25th”? Most people know the year so that can be skipped. Many know the month so that can frequently also be skipped. Hardley anyone that ask for the date know the day of the month though so why is that not the first part of information you reply with?
Seems you are just stating what you are used to.
Secondly this is 1000% purely what you're used too. After a month in California Fahrenheit felt very natural to me despite being used to Celcius.
If I’m giving or getting a response with the month I expect “25th of March”.
If I ask for the time and it’s the evening I expect someone to say “3:30” without the PM. It’s expected that I know it’s PM. In continental Europe I would expect “15 hours 30”.
Going to your address analogy, don’t you typically give the building number first? “1220 Something Street”. Again, with numbered streets in North America they tend to write and say “122nd Street” or “5th Avenue”. It’s the number that comes first. Not “Street 122” or “Avenue 5” or “Something Street 1220”. I don’t think your analogy holds well.
That’s very obviously cherry-picked though. The opposite is true for the names of numbered streets (“9th Street”) and house numbers (“1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”). You picked the only component of an address where the number comes after the label.
Sorry to break it to you, but in the UK, Australia or India you wouldn't say March 25, you would say 25 March or 25th March. Just as you would in Spanish, French or German. The fact that you say March 25 reflects the atypical American date standard. They do say March 25 in Chinese, but that's because they use YMD order (and when saying a full date, they will say "2023 year, 3 month, 25 day") which also makes sense.
There's nothing more "human-friendly" about saying March 25. It's a purely American thing. There's also nothing more "human-friendly" about Fahrenheit. If you grow with Celsius, 20-25 is optimal, 10-20 cool, below 10 cold, below 0 freezing, over 30 very hot, nothing difficult about it.
Sorry if this sounds harsh but your comment is pure distilled bias.
March 5th is more commonly heard in USA than 5th of March, but nobody would look at you funny either way.
I think this is the cognitive bias from having grown up with the system.
The year is typically implied, so it's not needed. The actual day of month gives you more specificity, but the month is an easier "chunk" to keep in my head when thinking about a date. If I think about my next dentist appointment, just knowing that it's in September is more useful to me than just knowing the actual day of the month.
The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human".
> Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers.
If I say March 30, the year number is implied (probably this year) and I probably have omitted it because it is not as important enough to say again.
If I say 2023-03-30, the year number is probably important. Might not that important, but at the least I'm looking for future readers who might not realize that I've made this comment in 2023. The year number is thus as important as month and day of month here, so consistency matters more. And the American mixed endian date format is as inconsistent as mixed byte endianness (which is thankfully gone by now).
Well this takes the cake for the most bad faith reading I’ve ever seen on HN.
Maybe if you are an American. But non-Americans are puzzled when they see 10/03/08 and are told that that's October 3rd, 2008.
I guess it's fitting that the tech world gets particularly up in arms about this; we're certainly a group who enjoys demanding standardization while refusing to change our own practices.
(But also, if you're not using ISO 8601 in a code context, what are you doing?)
Also, it's nice to see that this simple page isn't using any framework. One quick performance win is to cache the `querySelector` calls. Those will be the slowest part of the computation, and the nodes themselves never change.
I just ran into this/ noticed it on something I rebuilt, both using setInterval. It was fine before… but the new setInterval is … “off” visually.
TY
As an analogy, some languages put the verb at the end of the sentence (e.g. Latin, certain German grammatical structures). As an English speaker, this is weird because I don't really know what's going on until the sentence is done, and it feels like I'm putting together a little puzzle in my head. Whereas to a fluent speaker, it presumably just makes sense and you don't really find it difficult. Same thing with dates.
As an American, I like our convention for writing dates. I usually care about month first. Immediately upon seeing a date, I know the rough time frame. Is it this month? Next month? Around Christmas? Around my birthday? Then the day pins it down to something specific. I will assume a date is referring to the current year, unless I see a different year, in which case it's a quick update to my mental model. April 12 flows as "soon, and exactly 18 days away" and September 12 flows "far away, and the middle part of the month".
I get that computers are a different use case, and there I'm a ISO 8601 advocate.
I say "in the spirit of" because, as I recall (it's been years since I read it), the standard is quite focused, whereas I just want to do Year/month/day regardless of other little details like punctuation / numeric vs named month / zero padded digits or whether there should be a timezone etc etc. Usually I'm just adding a date to private notes, so it really doesn't matter.
When I have to fill out official forms on paper, I have to make an effort to change my habit.
What date format was used to land on the moon?
> Should we use imperial or metric system?
Those two seem very clear-cut. I haven’t ever seen time in any other format (HH:MM does not count as a different format), and there is zero benefit to the imperial system, other than Americans being used to it.
> Should we drive on the right side of the road or left?
I don’t think there’s much benefit in picking one over the other that isn’t related to economic factors (such as being able to import cars from neighbouring countries, but also the cost of redesigning all roads).
Don't blame the other culture, blame your inept communication medium.
<p>Today is <date year=2023 month=3 day=25 />.</p>That way if neither option is exercised, it's still just text.
The biggest problem to me is time zones and summer/winter time. I wish we all used UTC.
%d %b %Y
not coincidentally, this format is in common use in the american military. Occasionally my use of it has had people ask me where i served, though i never have.
* You don't specify the year and the time zone
* ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are better when it comes to naming files
* It's not a valid date in the healthcare industry where the month must be in uppercase letters like "25 MAR 2023"
Since ISO 8601 is baked into so many modern systems and standards, and since software has eaten the world, there's a real sense in which we are all using it as our primary calendar - and thus for those of us who were celebrating on 1st January 2000, we can retro-canonically rest in peace knowing the fireworks were not mistimed after all.
[0] OK, there's some fuzziness in the wording, where "mutual agreement" must be sought before exchanging such earlier dates.
We think units that are used in different countries/cultures/continents are weird, because we’re not used to it. I can get behind the Fahrenheit bit, being more “human-readable” but for me 30C will always be hot.
Developers who do devops tasks might run into this one.
I'm a proponent of the metric system, but that's either a wild straw man or very lazy thinking. An obvious justification (which has lots of merit) is "I've been using imperial all my life and it's what I know, what I think in, etc." Changing systems would be very disruptive for a lot of people. IMHO that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but it is something that should at least be acknowledged before a massive forced upheaval of a system.
Just thinking about driving for a minute, even little things like the speedometers in cars being primarily mph, millions of miles of mileposts all around the country that would need removing and changing. Every road sign with miles on it, etc. Those things are a little more than just "you're not the boss of me"
That's a pretty major assumption that does not jive with experience. Date formatting inconsistentices were the bane of my existence in my last role. Maintaining clean databases that has input streams that came from Canada, the US and Poland constantly caused problems. Yes the company had standards of how to properly do things. Were those standards followed? Not all the time. Especially when data sources came from 2nd and 3rd tier downstream suppliers. Did people try their best? Yeah, for the most part. But that doesn't prevent mistakes.
Or, replace the alien with the founding fathers of this formerly great nation, or replace these hearings with most anything we do.
The winds of change are blowing though, it seems a rare in history movement may be coalescing on TikTok as we speak...TTFN, nodes!!