Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Sorting dates: This is why there is an international standard of having YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in the order we have it. We got to learn this in school in the 80-ies because sorting paper documents would be more logical and easier to find stuff. So way before most people got computerized.

It just happens to be the most logical way to sort for computers too, as long as humans are involved in the usage of the data.



> Sorting dates: This is why there is an international standard of having YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in the order we have it.

That would be great, but this ISO is just one of the standards, and there are still regional standards as well.

And that's still ignoring the end-user. In Europe for example, humans might create filenames with date in format dd.mm, e.g. "Report 25.01.xls"

A system attempting to sort this intelligently would likely assume this is a decimal number, as it has zero context for it.

It's just slightly worse than the lack of consistent UTC-usage of systems, with the mixed attempts to correct data to local timezone (or not) depending on application...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: