Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by hu3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hu3·

It's more about the order DD MM YYYY than the separators.

View on HN

Hard disagree. The separator choice implies different ordering to me and to many others.

Ok what's 2/8/24 in words?

2nd of August, 2024 or Feb 8th, 2024.

Exactly. Choice of the separator '/' doesn't disambiguate.

It does in my jurisdiction. 2/8/24 is usually m/d/y, 2-8-24 is usually d-m-y, 2024-2-8 is always y-m-d.

> It does in my jurisdiction. 2/8/24 is usually m/d/y, 2-8-24 is usually d-m-y

Where is that?

I would guess this is more like 'most people use /' and 'most people where I am use month first'; therefore those using - separation are weirdo Europeans/rest of world putting the day first.

February 8th, 2024 a.k.a. 2024-02-08 a.k.a. 08.02.2024.

In your country maybe, and it narrows it down to approximately one.

two slash eight slash twenty four

I never knew that, actually. I developed a habit of writing my dates with dashes instead of slashes because I thought the latter looked too much like the number 1. Makes me wonder how many people I've confused after they read paperwork I dated. I currently do ISO order with forward-slash as a separator, which might be similarly confusing.

There are systems out there that do YYYY/DD/MM. AFAICT YYYY-DD-MM is only used by evil pranksters, so a date that starts with a 4 digit number and uses dashes is relatively safely assumed as YYYY-MM-DD.

The order is common throughout much of the world.

The separators (especially with that order) are not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com