8 ms·
One thing I've come to learn is that American formats are human-friendly rather than machine-friendly. Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works
by warent 4y ago
One thing I've come to learn is that American formats are human-friendly rather than machine-friendly.
Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human.
in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc.
Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers. We're not feeding a number into a machine, we're speaking to humans.
Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25"
Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important.
- seydor 4y agowater freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale. and more importantly, sanely decimal. and you say 3rd street, not Street 3. and 4th of july i do prefer the american decimal point 1,000.00 , it makes more sense. But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards.
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago> But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which require universal standards. I think we should arrange our society to favor humans and program computers in such a way to accommodate humans rather than the other way around.
- noizejoy 4y agoArguably human imperfections are already deeply reflected in computer design and programming.
- tshaddox 4y ago> water freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. This is a stretch. How is being 70% water relevant? It’s not like I’m routinely measuring the water in my body to make sure I don’t let it boil or freeze.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThat’s why I say 11rd Street and set my hot pot to 1100100 degrees. The added benefit is I can now do math on my fingers with a 100x greater range! Bring in toes and it gets insane.
- seydor 4y agoI feel like people like you should be required to use | and O instead of 0 and 1. You don't get to spoil our perfect arabic numerals for your numerical travesty. begone, you wasters of bytes
- fnordpiglet 4y agoIn reality I encode everything in raw bits but for these Europeans I convert to their hippy Unicode whatever. Why use 7 bits for a character when you can use UTF-8/16/32 - the “metric system” of encodings.
- groestl 4y agoYou will love this: https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/how-10-fingers-became-12-hours https://www.earthdate.org/episodes/how-10-fingers-became-12-...
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI guess it’s good they didn’t use base 2 finger counting or we would have 1024 hours
- zokier 4y ago> The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale Of course kilogram is a mess in itself, being base unit with a prefix. While SI is mostly okay system, lets not forget that it has its own warts.
- Krasnol 4y agoIt only is human-firendly if you grew up with it, so it's rather "American-friendly". > You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", We say 25th March in German. Saying the whole date follows the importance: day, month, year: fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig.
- nerdponx 4y agoI think their point is that the American date format is natural in the context of English grammar. Which it is, but written dates serve more purposes than acting as a record of things people said.
- Krasnol 4y agoThis is my point too: all of this is not "human-friendly" but "American-friendly" or in the case of dates "english-friendly".
- graypegg 4y agoAlso the standard in French. Day (optional ordinal) Month.
- laurentlb 4y agoWhy would you start with '5' and not '20'? :) Many traditions have their quirks. But at least very few German-speakers will try to defend this format.
- harel 4y agoI think you are just used to the format. I don't see how it's any more human friendly than metric/celsius/normal time. All perspective
- graypegg 4y agoI’ve heard that a few times, but personally as someone that is a human as far as I know, I've never been able to grok Fahrenheit like I can Celsius! Celsius slots into nice groups of 10 where 0ish is very cold, 10ish is cold, 20ish room temp, 30ish is summer heat. It’s less of an inherent part of the system, and more of a fact I just grew up with it and it’s what I’m used to.
- nerdponx 4y agoBut usually I know what the month is. Pre-qualifying a unit number with the "type" makes sense because I don't necessarily know what the number refers to advance. And sure, just for grammatical consistency and flow it's fine to say the month before the day. But it's another story in writing, especially on forms, or even worse, in data sets.
- ocimbote 4y agoTjis comment illustrates the Stockholm syndrome in a nutshell. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
- neevans 4y ago50 being the middle is region specific it doesn't work the same way in all countries. Also isn't it better to just say 25th March rather than March 25? Because most people will be aware of the month we're talking abt and date is the most important thing there which should come first.
- rocketbop 4y agoWell March 25 is not ambiguous. 25/03 is also not really ambiguous. 04/03 is ambiguous. I don’t think there’s a strong preference for 25 March over March 25 in Europe or elsewhere. I think I might write either one of those.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoYeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your units make no sense, you're drawing the bullseye afterwards if remember my idioms correctly.
- cratermoon 4y ago> you're drawing the bullseye afterwards if remember my idioms correctly. That's informally known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy
- dtech 4y agoSo is the few examples from the OP...
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoI believe that cratermoon is helpfully reminding 5e92cb50239222b of the name of the formal fallacy 5e92cb50239222b is talking about.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoIf your body temp is over 100 F, you have a fever. If the outside is 100 F, it's too damn hot. The bottom end is much harder to justify but I believe the idea was that you wouldn't have to regularly deal with negative numbers. But both F and C are completely arbitrary. That's the least messed up part of the non-SI unit system.
- groestl 4y agoFreezing and boiling water really does not seem that arbitrary to me.
- cratermoon 4y ago> in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc. Depending on where you live, 50F could be considered cold. It's certainly not warm enough to be comfortable when lightly dressed. There's nothing special about Fahrenheit in this respect. 20C is really what I'd call "not cold, not hot". 0 is freezing, 5 is cold, 10 is chilly, 15 is cool, 20 is comfortable, 25 is warm, 30 is high warm, 35 is hot, 37 is body temperature, and 40 is really hot.
- Dah00n 4y ago>in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc. You could say the exact same with Celsius. Also, how is 50 the middle in Africa and also Northern Europe? Average temperature is very different. >Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important. So 25 is clearly the most important by your own logic hence day/month/year is the logic choice. If someone asked the date do you say “the 25th” more or less often than “March 25th”? Most people know the year so that can be skipped. Many know the month so that can frequently also be skipped. Hardley anyone that ask for the date know the day of the month though so why is that not the first part of information you reply with? Seems you are just stating what you are used to.
- dtech 4y agoFirstly this logic doesn't hold water. Month is not the most important, day of month is. "What date did you mean?" can easily be answered with "the 25th" if it's a nearby date, month only becomes relevant if disambiguation is needed. Secondly this is 1000% purely what you're used too. After a month in California Fahrenheit felt very natural to me despite being used to Celcius.
- sigwinch28 4y agoIf someone at work asks me the date or if I’m signing in somewhere as a visitor and I ask the date, the response is the same: “the 25th”. The month is expected to be somewhat obvious. The year even more so. If I’m giving or getting a response with the month I expect “25th of March”. If I ask for the time and it’s the evening I expect someone to say “3:30” without the PM. It’s expected that I know it’s PM. In continental Europe I would expect “15 hours 30”. Going to your address analogy, don’t you typically give the building number first? “1220 Something Street”. Again, with numbered streets in North America they tend to write and say “122nd Street” or “5th Avenue”. It’s the number that comes first. Not “Street 122” or “Avenue 5” or “Something Street 1220”. I don’t think your analogy holds well.
- tshaddox 4y ago> Consider any other Label. You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", "Unit 25", "P.O. Box 25" That’s very obviously cherry-picked though. The opposite is true for the names of numbered streets (“9th Street”) and house numbers (“1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”). You picked the only component of an address where the number comes after the label.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago> Here we are on March 25. The year comes last because it's least important. Sorry to break it to you, but in the UK, Australia or India you wouldn't say March 25, you would say 25 March or 25th March. Just as you would in Spanish, French or German. The fact that you say March 25 reflects the atypical American date standard. They do say March 25 in Chinese, but that's because they use YMD order (and when saying a full date, they will say "2023 year, 3 month, 25 day") which also makes sense. There's nothing more "human-friendly" about saying March 25. It's a purely American thing. There's also nothing more "human-friendly" about Fahrenheit. If you grow with Celsius, 20-25 is optimal, 10-20 cool, below 10 cold, below 0 freezing, over 30 very hot, nothing difficult about it. Sorry if this sounds harsh but your comment is pure distilled bias.
- Freedom2 4y agoAs a weird contradiction, don't Americans also generally say '4th of July' when referring to the holiday?
- UncleOxidant 4y ago> it works well when thinking like a human. I think this is the cognitive bias from having grown up with the system.
- lutoma 4y agoI keep seeing Americans claim that, but I really think your perception of this as more "more human-friendly" is really just a result of growing up with it.
- kebman 4y agoExcuse me, but can you please expand upon how Fahrenheit is easier "when thinking like a human"? Why 50? Why not 100? Why not simply use something that is easily compared, such as the freezing and boiling point of water? You know... Celsius?
- allenu 4y agoI'm biased since I grew up with mm/dd/yy format, but I do find month first more useful simply because the 30-day period something takes place in gives me more context immediately about an event, at least when talking about scheduling things. The year is typically implied, so it's not needed. The actual day of month gives you more specificity, but the month is an easier "chunk" to keep in my head when thinking about a date. If I think about my next dentist appointment, just knowing that it's in September is more useful to me than just knowing the actual day of the month.
- mynegation 4y agoAll of this is a matter of habit. I assure you as someone who grew up with Celsius system, we have no problem translating temperature ranges to the levels of comfort and clothes layering. European mailing addresses start with the biggest addressable unit (country) and then drill down to region, city, street, house number, unit number which is actually closer in spirit to your “lead with important information” example.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago> it works well when thinking like a human. The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human". > Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers. If I say March 30, the year number is implied (probably this year) and I probably have omitted it because it is not as important enough to say again. If I say 2023-03-30, the year number is probably important. Might not that important, but at the least I'm looking for future readers who might not realize that I've made this comment in 2023. The year number is thus as important as month and day of month here, so consistency matters more. And the American mixed endian date format is as inconsistent as mixed byte endianness (which is thankfully gone by now).
- doublepg23 4y ago> The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human". Well this takes the cake for the most bad faith reading I’ve ever seen on HN.
- mavili 4y agoDate format should flow from smalles to largest units. That is human friendly. When the rest of the world says 25th March, it's more human friendly for two reasons: 1. The most important part is the day, and that comes first. 2. The month only changes every 30/31 days, so for that duration it is enough to just say "Today is the 25th" therefore cutting the need for the bit that we already know (that is March). Similarly for the year, you don't mention that it's 2023 for a whole year pretty much.
- fanagra32 4y ago> Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human. Maybe if you are an American. But non-Americans are puzzled when they see 10/03/08 and are told that that's October 3rd, 2008.
- zephrx1111 4y agoI don’t think Fahrenheit is more “human” then Celsius. We think 25 is normal, above 40 is hot and below 0 is freezing.
- pythko 4y agoYou seem to be the lucky lightning rod comment on this! I guess it's fitting that the tech world gets particularly up in arms about this; we're certainly a group who enjoys demanding standardization while refusing to change our own practices. (But also, if you're not using ISO 8601 in a code context, what are you doing?)
- capitanazo77 4y agoIn Celsius 20 is fine. And your clothes change 10 degrees up or down. That’s it. Now you know Celsius.
- poiuyt098 4y agoso to tell someone a meeting's at 8:45, do you write 1/4:9 because that's how humans say it, or still the non-stupid way?