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Comment by synalx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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