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Yes, I don't understand american/English dates and time. I don't know when "04/06/2019 09:00 PM" is. Is it April or June? 0900 or 2100? Let me send an ISO8601 t
by matsemann 6y ago
Yes, I don't understand american/English dates and time. I don't know when "04/06/2019 09:00 PM" is. Is it April or June? 0900 or 2100? Let me send an ISO8601 time as all other APIs accept.
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago"09:00 PM" almost universally (is there any case or format or app that does it differently?) means 21:00 in 24-hour clock format. Not 09:00 (in 24-hour clock).
- mikeyjk 6y agoAM / PM clears up the 0900 vs 2100 ambiguity, but agreed re; American date formats.
- zeeZ 6y agoFor me it clears it up only 92% of the day. I couldn't tell you when 12:xx AM/PM is right now.
- Fnoord 6y agoPM means post meridiem. That's Latin, but you don't have to remember it. If you simply remember the P means 'post', and the 'M' means the exact middle of the day (12 noon) then you know 12 PM is 12.00 (after noon hence afternoon) and 12 AM is after midnight or 0.00 (the hour after previous day's 23.00 / 11 PM). Then you just need to remember morning is AM, afternoon is PM, evening is PM, and night is AM. That's it. Yeah, I find 24H system easier, but its what my native locale uses, so I am biased... (as is everyone else)
- Swizec 6y agoThis is in fact so simple to remember that street signs in San Francisco, where AM/PM is native, use 11:59am/pm or 12:01 and never 12:00 to avoid ambiguity. Street cleaning from 12:01am to 3:00am, for example.
- Fnoord 6y agoOnly thing to remember there is: .00 means new hour. Which the number before .00 denotes. Caters to lowest common denominator. I had all this explained on elementary school (which was boring and slow as fuck) during English class, and we don't even use 12H system in The Netherlands. It is quite frankly as simple to remember as a logic (tho not necessarily common) grammar rule.
- jcelerier 6y agoit's really weird tho 12AM 1AM 2AM 3AM 4AM ... 11AM 12PM 1PM 2PM ... 11PM 12AM 1AM even the way you explain it: "then you know 12 PM is 12.00 (after noon hence afternoon) " when I read "12 after noon", I understand "noon + 12 hours" which should give midnight..
- ryanianian 6y agoMnemonic: “AM” is “Always Midnight”
- HenrikB 6y agoFWIW, there's also 00:00 and 24:00 to distinguish midnight at the beginning of the day versus the end of the day.
- nicwolff 6y agoThe easy way is to remember that the hour following 12 pm is clearly in the afternoon, so 12 pm must be noon.
- matsemann 6y agoYes, I'm not trying to claim that AM/PM is ambiguous, but that me as a person not used to the system (basically everyone except US and a few other countries) have no idea which is which. :)
- lazylizard 6y agoit is. some ppl say 2359 to avoid saying 12am/pm.
- hairofadog 6y agoA native Floridian once told me that the New Year's fireworks display would be starting at “12 PM”. Confused about why they’d be shooting off fireworks in the middle of the day I said, “12 PM!?” She rolled her eyes and made air quotes with her fingers and said, “Well, AM”, as if I was being extremely pedantic. To her, AM meant morning and PM meant night. Having worked on the UI of an event-related service, I can say the error rate is much lower if you go with the ‘11:59’ workaround. In addition to the confusion about whether 12 PM is 00:00 or 12:00, there’s confusion about which calendar day 12 AM falls on. When does a Friday midnight movie start? 99.9% of people will show up at the end of Friday, but in a literal user interface you’d have to choose 12 AM Saturday. I thought of fireworks girl very frequently when I worked on that UI.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoI just use noon and midnight to reduce ambiguity 11:59pm, midnight, 12:01am 11:59am, noon, 12:01pm
- ValentineC 6y ago"Midnight" doesn't solve the second part of GP's problem: > In addition to the confusion about whether 12 PM is 00:00 or 12:00, there’s confusion about which calendar day 12 AM falls on. When does a Friday midnight movie start? 99.9% of people will show up at the end of Friday, but in a literal user interface you’d have to choose 12 AM Saturday. I use 11:59pm or "end-of-day" for most cases.
- Fnoord 6y agoAmericans use DD/MM/YYYY (regardless of delimiter being e.g. / or - or .). We Dutch use MM/DD/YYYY. The latter results in sorting correct on month if its annual data. Over multiple years it breaks. ISO 8601 has my preference, though in MS Office I need to set to Japanese cause my version lacks the setting. 9.00 PM is very clear to mean 21.00 in 24H format. What isn't clear is if 9.00 is 12H or 24H format. 9.00 AM or 9.00 PM is. However if you may reasonably assume the user uses 24H format, it is clear. It always takes up less space to use 24H format, though 12H format is always clear. Except for TZ (timezone), both all time suffers from that. [EDIT]Oops I messed up, and that's why I dislike these and prefer ISO8601. Although one nice thing about DD/MM/YYYY is that its little endian (which is easy to remember for laymen as going from small to big). Keeping rest of comment as is.[/EDIT]
- bigzyg33k 6y agoThis is incorrect, Americans use MM/DD/YYYY, and from my understanding most of the rest of the world (I think the Netherlands too) use DD/MM/YYYY
- illuminati1911 6y agoLot of Asian countries use YYYY/MM/DD like China, Japan, South Korea etc.
- ci5er 6y agoWhile I believe that most (?) of Europe uses DD/MM/YYYY, I am pretty sure that most of South East Asia (dunno about India and Nepal) use YYYY/MM/DD.
- ValentineC 6y ago> I am pretty sure that most of South East Asia (dunno about India and Nepal) use YYYY/MM/DD. I think you might have meant East Asia. I know Japan primarily uses YYYY/MM/DD. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, etc (South East Asia) conventionally use DD/MM/YYYY. Interestingly, the Philippines seems to use MM/DD/YYYY. This looks useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
- dave_sid 6y agoIt’s June