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Comment by dingledork69 | Hacker News Reader

That deadline passed 12 days ago

Impossible, what madman would use a date-format that goes $MONTH.$DAY.$YEAR that basically have a random order instead of $DAY.$MONTH.$YEAR or $YEAR.$MONTH.$DAY? No one would be that crazy, it's too ambiguous to be useful.

It's clearly intended to be 5th of October, 2023.

(This may or may not be sarcasm, in case people may not or may misunderstand)

Maybe that has something to do with feet and inches instead of metric.

I'm not american, but they always seem to do month.day.year for some bizarre reason

i'm aMerican and I always use year-month-day

Same here but I'm also a programmer, YYYY-MM-DD

Right ISO 8601... in SQL Server it's the unambiguous format

I'm an American who agrees. YY/MM/DD is the only reasonable order.

It's because we write the numerals in the same order as the longer form: May 10th, 2023 becomes 5/10/23.

Not American, and maybe it's a cultural difference but in England it's much more common to say "the 10th of May".

Then again, we write our dates in a more sensible manner. I suppose it's time to link to the old sapir whorf hypothesis[0] to explain the difference.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

> Then again, we write our dates in a more sensible manner.

yawn

Yeah we write our dates in a more sensible manner too. And also we drive on the correct side of the road and imperial units of measurement are superior.

I have been in the US for 30 years but metric is way better... all that nanometer stuff in your computer is metric not imperial as well

for example a 10cm cube filled with water weighs 1 kilo and is 1 liter, boils at 100 degrees. In the US you deal with cups pints, quarts, gallons... and you can't even convert easily between dry and liquid stuff

I do agree that steering wheels should be on the left :-)

> all that nanometer stuff in your computer is metric not imperial as well

Electronics is full of imperial standards.

Do share more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_in-line_package#Lead_coun...

DIP and DPI is a bit far from "loads" of imperial measures.

Flatcable pitch, disk sizes, screen sizes, passive SMD footprints (0805 is in use in EU as well ).

Usage of "Mil" in PCB design ( 1/1000th of an inch ).

If you look into an average computer or electronics device, lots and lots of stuff is imperial.

I was being sarcastic because none is better, it's what we're used to. I can do measurements in both imperial and metric, but because imperial is widely used in MY country, I find it "superior", same with everything else.

I'm an American but I'd say metric is superior, even though I'm not used to it. It has more consistency and is easier to actually do science with.

Decimals proceed in order of refinement to smaller increments. Years are long, months are collections of days, and days are collections of hours, and so forth.

By that logic, all formatted dates should follow a progression of precision. This is, in fact, a standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Also agreed, and what i personally use.

I thought the Americans use MM/dd/YY. As soon as I see a dot "." instead of "/" I assume a "normal" day-month order.

I wouldn't expect them to be that precise, especially when they misspell their client's name as OPENAL

I use MM.DD.YY just to confuse people :)

Why not YD.MD.YM ?

WDYM?

I'm not american, but they always seem to do month.day.year for some bizarre reason

It's one of those things that America inherited from England, and then when England changed its method, the Americans saw no need to change because it wasn't part of England anymore.†

If you go into antiques stores in England, you will find that with items that are engraved, the older it is, the more likely it will have the now-American date format.

There was an item on Antiques Roadshow a couple of months ago that was a gift from Queen Victoria to someone that had an engraving that included the American date format.

† This is true for a surprising number of minor differences between America and England. In life, it's often better to understand the history of things, rather than just ignorantly write off a group of people as bizarre.

I think that's because that's how the full date is spoken. It's "September Eleventh" not "Eleventh of September". If someone said "My birthday is twenty-seventh of November" I would wonder if they're a synth.

But outside US, '11th of September' IS how it's said

I'm American (South American, to be more precise) and we do DD/MM/YYYY around here.

I wonder how that would play out in court. Is it a valid defence to say that you responded a few months late because your local jurisdiction uses DD-MM-YYYY?

Response not due till October though.

And that's why I always write month as a word

irb(main):008:0> Date.parse("05.10.2023") => #<Date: 2023-10-05 ((2460223j,0s,0n),+0s,2299161j)>

Should be for October 5, according to that format.

Yeah, if you insist on using your weird American date format, use "May 10th, 2023" or at least "05/10/2023" to make it less ambiguous, using dots implies DD.MM.YYYY the same way as using dashes implies YYYY-MM-DD...

> use "May 10th, 2023" or at least "05/10/2023" to make it less ambiguous, using dots implies DD.MM.YYYY the same way as using dashes implies YYYY-MM-DD...

For most of the world, using slashes also implies DD/MM/YYYY. For instance, I would write today's date as 17/05/2023.

The good news is on a dozen days during the year the US and the ROW are on the same page (MM/MM/YYYY or DD/DD/YYYY if you prefer).

Somebody should check if those days are generally associated with fewer accidents, higher stock returns and a pronounced sense of global peace and harmony

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