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Comment by SZJX | Hacker News Reader

From the D/M/Y date format at the end of the article, they may not be native English speakers (at least they aren’t American).

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The USofA is the bizarre exception here:

  The United States has a rather unique way of writing the date that is imitated in very few other countries (although Canada and Belize do also use the form). In America, the date is formally written in month/day/year form.

They don't use metric, still use First Past the Post voting, elect a mini monarch with effectively unchecked powers, ... it's an odd place.

Also, the US military used/uses DDMMMYYYY format, i.e., 15JAN2025, where MMM is the month abbreviation, which is similar to one of the formats used in Romania. This has the benefits of unambiguous parsing and no need for component separators but lacks lexicographical sort-ability like ISO 8601. A format like YYYYMMMDD might some of the advantages of ISO 8601 by keeping items of the same year and month together at a minimum. (ISO 8601 is the most proper date format though. ;)

The thing is, lexigraphical sorting is something that can be easily parsed, parse the date and sort it how you want.

The standard was for written and radio communication to be unambiguous.

If you're writing software, believe me you want a format like 13FEB2025 over anything except maybe unix timestamp in UTC.

Don't oversell the place. It also has it's down-sides.

Mass shootings, out-of-control police, bankruptcies from for-profit healthcare and expensive medications, Bibles and Creationism in public schools, widespread ignorance about the world and just about everything, and millions (vastly undercounted) of homeless people.

But seriously, America is awesome for rich people if you don't mind living in a poor, third-world country that still believes it's a first-world, exceptional country.

Think you might have missed the parent poster's sarcasm.

Good, stay out then. It'll do just fine without you

"America is awesome for ambitious people" FTFY

Africa of North

We write the date that way because that's how we say the dates and conversation: today is February 13th, 2025.

02/13/2025. I personally use ISO dates because i like getting sorting for free.

Ah yes, the famous American holiday of July 4th ;)

England is just one example of a country of native English speakers who use dd/mm/yyyy.

yyyy-mm-dd is the iso standard, w/ the benefits of logical consistency (larger to smaller units left to right) and -- best of all -- sortability.

In any case there are two sane ways to write dates, and the middle-endian format is not one of them.

The other is the US military one 14FEB2025,yes? That and ISO are all we need.

That military style uses little endian so it belongs in the sane formats category.

However, with ISO you're likely referring to RFC3339. The full ISO8601 standard allows insane date representations you're not going to see anywhere but the documentation that explains them.

The only problem is that it puts the most important information last and the least important first (going by "what do I most likely need to see and cannot infer from context", ie I likely already know the year and possibly the month).

Who cares? How much time are you going to lose from that? Like, 0.15s every time you read a date. Big woop.

It has been a problem for me when the last part gets truncated (e.g. with an ellipses).

Big-endian

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

Australia, too.

And?

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