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

431–437 of 437 posts

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#431

Post by account42 »

eythian wrote: post #196
Mordisquitos wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another great thing about 2021-03-11 is that, even putting aside its technical advantages, it is (probably) intuitively understandable to any literate person even if they have never seen it before and, most importantly, it is almost immune from confusion because (hopefully) nobody is insane enough to expect YYYY-DD-MM. YYYY-MM-DD both satisfies the American intuitive expectation of month coming before day, and the Wo…

Non-scientifically, about 20% of people won't: https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/978747364105011202

I don't think it's fair to assume that the people choosing the WTF option would not have interpreted the format correctly if they had to pick an actual interpretation.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#433

Post by account42 »

dingaling wrote: post #265
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…

> only the other 96% of the planet Ahem, ISO8601 fails for Taiwan and Japan...

How does it "fail"? Taiwan has different year numbers but they are sufficiently offset to avoid disambiguity and IME people can read normal years just fine. Anyway, the year-month-day order seems to be the same.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#434

Post by account42 »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #83
jpetso wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to speak popular languages is in fact often advantageous for the multi-linguist.

Very good and very true point. Multi-linguism only has upsides.

The "downside" is the time you need to invest to become proficient, which you could have spent on something else.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#436

Post by yread »

ncmncm wrote: post #298
yread wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh interesting, from wiki

   56 - seksoghalvtreds(indstyve) - six and [two score plus] half [of the] third (score)

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#437

Post by mercurywells »

JdeBP wrote: post #311
CuriousNinja wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never actually read the ISO 8601 spec ... because it's not free I was very surprised to discover this. Why are they charging money for the specification of a date format? I would expect standards like these to be published in public domain.

Aside from the fact that you are conflating copyright with price, note that many standards organizations charge money for copies of their standards documents. ISO charges roughly 20 times the price of a paperback book for a 33 page document. You can buy BS/ISO 8601-1:2019 from the BSI for an even more exorbitant £246. Standards Australia will sell the older 2007 version to you for a mere AUD165. But this is not speci…

IEEE publishes several standards for free via their IEEE Get Program
Post reply on HN