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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've come to learn is that American formats are human-friendly rather than machine-friendly.

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.

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Yeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your units make no sense, you're drawing the bullseye afterwards if remember my idioms correctly.

> you're drawing the bullseye afterwards if remember my idioms correctly.

That's informally known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy

So is the few examples from the OP...

I believe that cratermoon is helpfully reminding 5e92cb50239222b of the name of the formal fallacy 5e92cb50239222b is talking about.

If your body temp is over 100 F, you have a fever. If the outside is 100 F, it's too damn hot.

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.

Freezing and boiling water really does not seem that arbitrary to me.

What's the pressure for your nonarbitrary boiling point? In SI units please.

It know it's not SI level scientific, but still, it's not as arbitrary as the "temperature of a normal human body".

I think of <0F and >100F as being when weather starts becoming lethal if you are poorly prepared.

People can die from "low" temperature as high as 10 C or 50 F.

While we're pointing out extreme outliers out of context to the discussion, water can also remain liquid well below 0c https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling

The lethality greatly depends from place to place and that's hardly "extreme outliers". For example Hong Kong's record low temperature is 0.0 °C [1] and a single digit Celcius is considered "very cold"; people can and do die of hypothermia at that range if they are "poorly prepared".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong#Climate

0°F: cold, 100°F: warm

0°C: cold, 100°C: dead

0 K: dead, 100 K: dead

There is no degree symbol in Kelvin.

Thanks, updated.

300 K: about ideal

< 300 K: cold

> 300 K: hot

Let's switch to Kelvins

In what scenario have you checked the temperature of the water on your stove to see how close it is to boiling?

I am usually an apologist for imperial units thanks to the divisibility by 3 and "human" scale, but temperature is ironically the one that I think is the silliest. It's basically arbitrary.

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.

> 100F was when the thing started to be uncomfortable to touch, I guess?

“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.

> Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.

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.

As a weird contradiction, don't Americans also generally say '4th of July' when referring to the holiday?

A relic of being a colony.

As an American I can confirm that, not only do we say “4th of July,” both phrasings are in common use for any date of the year.

March 5th is more commonly heard in USA than 5th of March, but nobody would look at you funny either way.

>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.

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.

> Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25"

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.

I’ve heard that a few times, but personally as someone that is a human as far as I know, I've never been able to grok Fahrenheit like I can Celsius! Celsius slots into nice groups of 10 where 0ish is very cold, 10ish is cold, 20ish room temp, 30ish is summer heat.

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.

Firstly this logic doesn't hold water. Month is not the most important, day of month is. "What date did you mean?" can easily be answered with "the 25th" if it's a nearby date, month only becomes relevant if disambiguation is needed.

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.

> it works well when thinking like a human.

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).

> The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human".

Well this takes the cake for the most bad faith reading I’ve ever seen on HN.

I'm biased since I grew up with mm/dd/yy format, but I do find month first more useful simply because the 30-day period something takes place in gives me more context immediately about an event, at least when talking about scheduling things.

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.

50 being the middle is region specific it doesn't work the same way in all countries.

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.

water freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale. and more importantly, sanely decimal.

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.

> 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.

Arguably human imperfections are already deeply reflected in computer design and programming.

> water freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water.

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.

That’s why I say 11rd Street and set my hot pot to 1100100 degrees. The added benefit is I can now do math on my fingers with a 100x greater range! Bring in toes and it gets insane.

I feel like people like you should be required to use | and O instead of 0 and 1. You don't get to spoil our perfect arabic numerals for your numerical travesty. begone, you wasters of bytes

In reality I encode everything in raw bits but for these Europeans I convert to their hippy Unicode whatever. Why use 7 bits for a character when you can use UTF-8/16/32 - the “metric system” of encodings.

You will love this: https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/how-10-fingers-became-12-...

I guess it’s good they didn’t use base 2 finger counting or we would have 1024 hours

> The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale

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.

> 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.

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.

It only is human-firendly if you grew up with it, so it's rather "American-friendly".

> 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.

I think their point is that the American date format is natural in the context of English grammar. Which it is, but written dates serve more purposes than acting as a record of things people said.

This is my point too: all of this is not "human-friendly" but "American-friendly" or in the case of dates "english-friendly".

Also the standard in French. Day (optional ordinal) Month.

Same in Polish.

Optional ordinal? Afaik for some reason day 1 is always ordinal (1er mai) and the others are always cardinal (25 mars)

Sorry yes you’re right, “optional” was the wrong word to use.

Why would you start with '5' and not '20'? :)

Many traditions have their quirks. But at least very few German-speakers will try to defend this format.

I feel you...I'm not German myself. It's quite annoying, and every time I want to be sure that the number I speak is understood properly, I give it number by number. I've seen too many Germans having issues with that myself, and it's just too risky with foreigners.

Interestingly, I've rarely seen it being an issue with dates. Maybe because the amount is too small and people got used to it.

“fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig”

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's just 2 syllables more than in English, is that really that much of a difference?

It looks longer than it is if you speak it 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).

Even in English 25th of March is perfectly valid expression, so not sure if OPs point is really valid.

On the other hand, the German way of speaking numbers with the order of just the 2 least significant digits flipped between numerical notation and speaking/writing is also easier explained by culture and history, rather than good logic.

The English equivalent for 1125 would be onethousand-onehundred-five-and-twenty.

If someone at work asks me the date or if I’m signing in somewhere as a visitor and I ask the date, the response is the same: “the 25th”. The month is expected to be somewhat obvious. The year even more so.

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.

I think you are just used to the format. I don't see how it's any more human friendly than metric/celsius/normal time. All perspective

I keep seeing Americans claim that, but I really think your perception of this as more "more human-friendly" is really just a result of growing up with it.

> Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human.

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.

Well March 25 is not ambiguous. 25/03 is also not really ambiguous. 04/03 is ambiguous.

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.

Date format should flow from smalles to largest units. That is human friendly. When the rest of the world says 25th March, it's more human friendly for two reasons: 1. The most important part is the day, and that comes first. 2. The month only changes every 30/31 days, so for that duration it is enough to just say "Today is the 25th" therefore cutting the need for the bit that we already know (that is March). Similarly for the year, you don't mention that it's 2023 for a whole year pretty much.

All of this is a matter of habit. I assure you as someone who grew up with Celsius system, we have no problem translating temperature ranges to the levels of comfort and clothes layering. European mailing addresses start with the biggest addressable unit (country) and then drill down to region, city, street, house number, unit number which is actually closer in spirit to your “lead with important information” example.

But usually I know what the month is. Pre-qualifying a unit number with the "type" makes sense because I don't necessarily know what the number refers to advance. And sure, just for grammatical consistency and flow it's fine to say the month before the day. But it's another story in writing, especially on forms, or even worse, in data sets.

You seem to be the lucky lightning rod comment on this!

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?)

> it works well when thinking like a human.

I think this is the cognitive bias from having grown up with the system.

Excuse me, but can you please expand upon how Fahrenheit is easier "when thinking like a human"? Why 50? Why not 100? Why not simply use something that is easily compared, such as the freezing and boiling point of water? You know... Celsius?

you may as well ask why 100% doesn't represent "half". Fahrenheit is best thought of as a range from 0 to 100, the numbers outside of which are extreme outliers

Outliers of what? People's opinion of hot and cold?

Tjis comment illustrates the Stockholm syndrome in a nutshell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I don’t think Fahrenheit is more “human” then Celsius. We think 25 is normal, above 40 is hot and below 0 is freezing.

In Celsius 20 is fine. And your clothes change 10 degrees up or down. That’s it. Now you know Celsius.

so to tell someone a meeting's at 8:45, do you write 1/4:9 because that's how humans say it, or still the non-stupid way?

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