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That date format is actually the worst I have ever encountered. m-d-y, with year in 2 digits, numbers not zero-padded, US "order" yet using dashes. It's like a
by diarrhea 5y ago
That date format is actually the worst I have ever encountered. m-d-y, with year in 2 digits, numbers not zero-padded, US "order" yet using dashes. It's like a moderator of /r/ISO8601 came up with the worst possible format on purpose. Am I missing something?
- bugeats 5y agoThe incident was caused by a database query that was "2-22-22" when it was supposed to be "2-22-22".
- Invictus0 5y agoIt's a quirky nod to the fact that all the digits were 2 on that day in this format.
- adamomada 5y agoThis is what you sometimes see for best-before dates in Canada. Even better, because our dates are “supposed to” be like 22/2 but I don’t think anyone here does that, except Quebec perhaps. Sometimes you just have no clue
- missedthecue 5y agoI mean, there is literally no way to confuse it with another date, unless you go back 100 years, when Slack didn't exist. There is no 22nd month, so we know the 22s are the day and the year, leaving only the 2 to be the month. Is it really that difficult to parse?
- johannes1234321 5y ago> leaving only the 2 to be the day I think you meant "to be the month" there. qed■
- diarrhea 5y agoBeautiful.
- tjoff 5y agoI'm so tired of having to do that game every time I see a date. It is not hard, but it is quite annoying. Especially since it isn't solvable in a lot of cases, so you try to reason your way to the most realistic interpretation. It shouldn't be this hard.
- true_religion 5y agoIt’s not really that hard. Like the imperial system, Americans just memorize how it works as children and don’t think about it anymore. Think about it like speaking a different language, except with numbers and not words.
- dllthomas 5y agoThe complaint isn't about the particular other order, but the fact that the order is ambiguous. In this case that doesn't matter, but often it does. Americans memorize inches and yards, and often also memorize centimeters and meters, and working with either is fine, but we're not so often faced with numbers where it might be inches or centimeters and we have to figure out which (and when we are, it's sometimes a pain - certainly a bigger pain that working with known units). Or, working with your language analogy, please go fetch me some "pasta" without knowing whether I'm speaking Italian or Polish.
- huhtenberg 5y agoI just thought it was a typo.
- noselasd 5y agoThat particular date is possible to understand, but the date format is not. (Is is really that fun to try to figure out what 12-11-21 means ?)
- CPLX 5y agoNovember 21, 1812 What do I win?
- lkbm 5y agoIs there a different post where they used this date format? None of their other incident reports even have a date in the title. Yet this one does, and in a weird format. Maybe there's something novel about the date, and it's written this was to emphasize the novelty, not to provide some vital information that happens to be excluded on every other incident report title they've posted.
- bamboozled 5y agoSo we could either: a) Use a far superior date format which nearly the entire world uses by default and is better and simpler in many ways. b) Do logic when we see dates to try workout what format the date is in. Going with a seems like a no brainer...
- verve_rat 5y agoEspecially in this scenario where you are communicating to an international audience.
- burnte 5y agoYeah, but what about that party that I threw on 10/11/12. Did I set it for November 12, 2010, or October 11 in 2012? Or somewhen else?
- brigandish 5y agoIt's a waste of effort and makes me wonder about the competence of the person who wrote it (when looking at a mangled date generally). Display dates are for humans so write the month name, then it doesn't matter what the order is. 22 Feb 22 Feb 22 22 (weird but still better) 22 22 Feb (very weird but still better) This also goes to show that 2022 is a better choice. My own personal preference - the 22nd of February 2022.
- jonpurdy 5y agoCame here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gleenn 5y agoIt's because people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two" which they then write out in that order. As a programmer, peoples' frustrations are understandable, but you're a bit naïve if you think even a percentage point of the speaking population of the world knows or is concerned with big endian-ness or sortability. However they speak English, at least in America, in that order, and that's the way they write it. Europeans only got it a little better.
- ascar 5y ago> Europeans only got it a little better. There is a reasonable argument for little endian dates (as in the least significant information is usually the most relevant as it changes most often), but apart from the "it has been like this forever" I don't see any reasonable argument for middle endian date formats. Then again, the US is notoriously resistant to the metric system too.
- mumblemumble 5y agoYour error is expecting reasonableness. All linguistic conventions are either arbitrary or lost to time, and mostly only exist for tradition's sake.
- lilyball 5y agoIt's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001". All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-dd-yy is an atrocious format. If you're going to use dashes, stick with yyyy-mm-dd. Replacing the dashes with slashes, as in 2/22/22, would have been fine.
- charcircuit 5y agoIt's a shortened version of "February 22, 2022" It doesn't seem that bad to turn it into 2-22-22.
- smcl 5y agoThe issue is a great deal of the rest of the world don't do this, so you need to decide whether to apply best-guess heuristics to parse it or decide that it's a typo ("ah there's not 22 months, so maybe it's the 22nd of February or someone fat-fingered the 2nd of February...?"). In this case you can lookup Slack outages to disambiguate it, but the frustration here - and I share it - is directed at the stubborn refusal to use a standard format that the reest of the world has agreed upon.
- lucideer 5y agoIt's also a shortened version of "22nd of February, 2022".
- HiJon89 5y agoI expected the top comment on hackernews to be something this pedantic and irrelevant to the content, and I was not disappointed
- elpakal 5y agoI had to read the parent comment twice to understand that it was talking about the date in the title of the post and not anything relevant whatsoever.
- vxNsr 5y ago> Am I missing something? Yes, the numbers are all the same, and the author is based in the US, and thus is using the default format in the US. So odd that this is the top comment.
- samstave 5y agoOMG - I thought I clicked on the tablet thread regarding Sumerian OOOs -- and I thought you were sarcastically making fun of the way the Sumerians captured dates on limestone tablets ~4,000 years ago... (i had scrolled immediately down, so the thread titel wasnt visible when I was reading your comment) haha
- rcthompson 5y agoThe point is to describe the date using only the number 2.
- jabbany 5y agoThis. The use of dashes here is a bit annoying IMO ... Not sure if this is standard but I usually see the delimiter being used to define the date format: big-endian y-m-d uses dashes, middle-endian m/d/y uses slashes, and d.m.y little-endian uses dots.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Not sure if this is standard but I usually see the delimiter being used to define the date format: No. Pretty much every separator / order combination is in regular use. See the table under “Listing” at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kybernetikos 5y agoI know it's somewhat trivial but it does bother me a bit too, because I am used to the dashes being an indicator that ISO 8601 is being used. If you're going to use a nonstandard format, I'd much prefer it not look like a standard one.