Hacker News Reader

Is it? It's mixed-endian with 3 inversions instead of 2.

If the "correct" date encoding is 2018-03-14, is 14-03-2018 not one inversion instead of three?

Your numerals are big-endian, so the 0 of the month is a MSD than the 4 of the day, likewise the 2 of the year vs the 3 of the month.