Hacker News Reader

Comment by user261 | Hacker News Reader

It's something that I agree with and increasingly I add dates in my notes. In addition to that, using one single format is really important. if the article was published on say November 2nd. I wouldn't know if it was 11th February or 2nd November. DD MMM YYYY is safest. The 3Ms being Jan, Feb, Mar....

View on HN

You can just use ISO 8601, YYYY-MM-DD, then you can be international standards compliant as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

I think everyone should use ISO 8601.

And if you are using something else, especially if it’s something like XX-XX-XX, specify what you mean by that!

I prefer RFC3339, specifically:

> NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T". Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

Plus, it sorts naturally.

Starting with the day or the month is Ludacris.

Day I can accept, even if I dislike it. Starting with the month will always make me angry. It just has no logic to it.

Sure it does. It's the shortest way to specify a date within a period of a year surrounding the current day... Which means it's a date format that should only ever be spoken, not committed to written record.

Month first is not even syntactically correct, even in spoken form, in some languages.

I have a hard time getting that past non-technical users (in the US). People that don't think like an engineer. Even though we're right! Of course!

YYYY-MM-DD is the only correct format and I will die on this hill

The most nonsensical approach is what the Americans use but let's not go there : - )

The fact that this sorts correctly seals the deal. There is no better option.

There’s some unexpected behaviour with MMM as a formatter, which is that it’s not always 3 characters long and differ subtle by locale.

Notably on the JVM if your locale is en-GB every month is 3 chars: Jan, Feb, Mar, etc. until you get to September which is Sept.

In en-US it’s just Sep.

Of course, if you don’t specify the locale in code, it will choose the system default leading to lovely region specific exceptions for your servers in Ireland and England.

Using different locales based on region for your servers is in itself an insane decision.

It’s the default on many non-AWS providers.

I use YYYY-MM-DD for my blog since it's the one true date format.

Unix Epoch with the string "Stardate: " prepended does the trick :D

Julian date with the same.

Mmm doesn't localise well either.

E.g. French has Juin and Juillet, both "jui" start.

Better to just use yyyy-mm-dd everywhere. I see so many bugs from people still using US date format in 2023.

I store notes in to git repository. I used to store timestamps inside the file too, but I found out I don't have the patience to add those if I change tooling like to a different markdown editor that doesn't do it automatically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com