Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 437 posts

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#291

Post by ben509 »

bambax wrote: post #76
systemvoltage wrote: post #28

No one here is talking about practicality for non-software engineers which is probably 99.9% of the population. It might be fine for sorting and no one gives a shit about endianess. Common person would argue - why do they need to know the year first? Most people encounter dates in the same year, they already know we're in 2021 and it is not as important. Having to laboriously parse YYYY before getting to the most imp…

> laboriously parse YYYY Really? It's hard to parse the year?? What about when you come across a piece of paper written some time ago, is it not useful to know the year? > most people convey to others that this box is 12x8x8 inches "Most people" == nobody outside of the US. > And no one uses decimeter (10 cm) for some reason which is actually nice since its the size of the index finger I just measured my index finger…

> Really? It's hard to parse the year??

Is it so hard to write "it is?" Nevertheless, you used a contraction.

You did so entirely unconsciously because that's how langauge works.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#292

Post by PeterisP »

happymellon wrote: post #185
jacobolus wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen non-Americans write YYYY/DD/MM before. Hyphens are key here.

That is horrifying. I am glad I have never met these people.

yyyy.dd.mm. (but not with hyphens!) are commonly used for all the languages where their grammar and word order means that the spoken way to say dates is like "twothousandtwentieth year's first march".

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#293

Post by JdeBP »

hannob wrote: post #9

There's another aspect you may not know about: It's close to how it's done in chinese, which is 2021年3月17日. They use different separators (the chinese words for year, month and day), but it's close enough. Given that china is the country with the largest population it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand.

Markus Kuhn has been making this point since 1995.

* https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#294

Post by maxwell »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #276
ginko wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>English has ~1100 million total speakers but only 318 millon native speakers, while Chinese has 918 million native speakers Why would that matter? Arguably the ideal lingua franca should have no native speakers at all as those have an unfair advantage.

> Why would that matter? Arguably the ideal lingua franca should have no native speakers at all as those have an unfair advantage. I share your vision of an explicitly taught universal language which gives no group or individual an unfair advantage. We obviously need more equality in the world. From the perspective of trying to maximize how many people with whom you are able to communicate, however, on a practical ba…

Your numbers above list 1.132B English speakers and 1.116B Mandarin speakers.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#295

Post by pwg »

jeff-davis wrote: post #286
m12k wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a side effect of being consistent with the way we write all other numbers, with the value represented by each digit declining as we go left to right.

Lexicographic sorting does not work for numbers of different lengths, e.g. "100" and "9".

It does if you zero fill the shorter number to an equal number of digits: "100", "009".

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#296

Post by scottmcdot »

I've been caught out by doing date comparisons in Spark SQL using string yyyy-mm-dd against string yyyy-mm-dd 00:00:00. It's easy to think that the trailing 00:00:00 will have no impact on date comparisons but it does! Lesson learnt: use substr(date, 1,10)

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#298

Post by ncmncm »

yread wrote: post #145
jiggawatts wrote: post #6

The real advantage is that Azure and AWS and every other US-centric cloud service insists on showing me that something happened on the 3/11/2021. It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November. Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever. For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date i…

M/D/Y is a bit like the German way of reading numbers. 328 become three hundred, eight and twenty. Terrible

Let's not even talk about Danish numbers.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#299

Post by atleta »

saithound wrote: post #118
systemvoltage wrote: post #28

No one here is talking about practicality for non-software engineers which is probably 99.9% of the population. It might be fine for sorting and no one gives a shit about endianess. Common person would argue - why do they need to know the year first? Most people encounter dates in the same year, they already know we're in 2021 and it is not as important. Having to laboriously parse YYYY before getting to the most imp…

These "arguments by practicality " are almost always just-so stories. The Hungarians (and presumably the Chinese) have their own just-so stories about why YMD is the most practical order: you use dates mostly when you sort heating bills, invoices, or even fruit preserves, and in all those cases you need to sort by year first. Australians will tell you a tale about how "day before month" is human-scale, while "month b…

Speaking for the Hungarians: you're right, if you get used to it, you actually don't even notice the leading year if you don't care. The whole thing just seems to be made up. In other words, rationalization of a habit.

Why big endianness is great though, in practice is that most of the time you actually do care about the year when you use the written form AND it's unambigous. The problem with the reverse notations is not that it seems illogical to some people. The problem is that both d/m/y and m/d/y is used and you can't have the faintest idea which one you are looking at.

Now in theory we could have y/d/m, but we fortunately don't, so seeing the first number being a 4 digit one, you know how to interpret the date.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#300

Post by JdeBP »

euroderf wrote: post #221
m_eiman wrote: post #29

While on the subject of time, could you Americans pretty please stop believing that the week starts on Sunday? It's just as wrong as your date format.

Starting weeks on Sundays has the ill effect of centering every calendar page on the work week, with the work-free days relegated - nay, shoved out - to the margins. The cynic in me says this is by design. Perhaps a capitalist plot to denigrate time away from work? It would be psychologically satisfying to have every calendar week begin on a Monday so that every work week ends with a prominent, uninterrupted two-day…

It is a capitalist plot with a time machine, given that the convention goes back for millennia.
Post reply on HN