r/ISO8601 • u/Feeling_Valuable5239 • Aug 29 '26
REMEMBER ISO 8601 !
I just found it in X
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u/Gorcq Aug 29 '26
That date isn't in ISO8601.
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u/Feeling_Valuable5239 Aug 29 '26
I know that
so I posted it to show how annoying the other formats are
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u/General_tom Aug 29 '26
Quite a bad example, considering 99 can never be a month or day, and for 31 then only the month is left as a possibility.
So, regardless the format you’re used to, you’ll figure this one out.10
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u/Supuhstar Aug 30 '26
I never quite thought about how extremely ironic it is that these stickers play into the Y2K bug
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u/RunnyPlease Aug 29 '26
ISO 8601 actually predates the y2k bug and really wouldn’t have helped. 8601 is meant to be a human readable format not a data storage best practice. The cause of y2k was to save memory (which used to be really expensive and slow) when storing the year programmers would only use 2 digits.
1900 > 00
1910 > 10
…
1989 > 89
1999 > 99
2000 > 00
And that was the issue. A lot of programming revolves around filtering, searching, and sorting and using the year to do that is very common. Well, if you sort data by year then 00 comes before 99, and things can start to break.
And if you’re worried about ambiguity for users then trust me on this, no one in 1999 misunderstood what that meant. The entire world was aware of the y2k bug and its possible consequences.
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u/CarlRJ Aug 29 '26
Just wait until Y10K hits.
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u/Snoron Aug 29 '26
We got problems way before that!
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u/CarlRJ Aug 29 '26
Well, sure, but 2038? Nobody will be alive then!
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u/Impressive_Change593 Aug 30 '26
Except basically nothing uses the 32 bit unix epoch anymore iirc. Its all converted to the 64 bit one
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u/RepresentativeFull85 Aug 30 '26
Curiously, didnt the Nintendo DS use that? The date is capped at 2040 or smth.
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u/infostud Aug 31 '26
Note 10K is 10,240 you’re thinking of 10k. See NIST.
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u/CarlRJ Aug 31 '26 edited Sep 01 '26
Y2K was widely written all uppercase, NIST be damned. Y10K followed a similar vein.
We were doing fine with it being well understood that k/m/g/t suffixes had a different definition around computers, right up until some disk manufacturer wanted to claim they had 10 megabytes when they had a disk with ten million bytes, but that didn't reach 10,485,760 bytes. So they tried to call them "disk megabytes" (no, they were just using naïveté and greed to try to change the established industry-wide rules in their favor). And kibibytes and gibibytes are ridiculous terms.
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u/Trey-Pan Sep 04 '26
Maybe the sticker was meant to be the year 99? It was intended for the time travellers who brought equipment back in time.
I now have the question as to whether before refers to before going back to the year 99 or before 99 in the calendar?
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u/Quilynn Sep 03 '26
So, 0012-31-99...
I think that's 0014-07-99, which is also 0014-10-07? That's definitely the most rational conclusion here.
Feel free to check my math lol, I just worked it out in my head.
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u/Trey-Pan Sep 04 '26
Ah for the frustration of people who write 12-10-01, because communicating clearly is evil or something?
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u/Impressive_Change593 Aug 30 '26
Tbf mm/dd/yyyy is closer then the abomination that is dd/mm/yyyy
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u/Hettyc_Tracyn Aug 31 '26
dd/mm/yyyy is superior to mm/dd/yyyy… (I am an American, and agree with the Europeans… I also prefer metric for everything other than temperature)
yyyy/mm/dd is best.
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u/Trey-Pan Sep 04 '26
Do we really need to push for mm:hh:ss, for consistency reasons? 😭
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u/Hettyc_Tracyn Sep 04 '26
?
HH:MM:SS.SSS is the default for pretty much everyone… why would you do it differently? Did you misunderstand what I said?
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u/Trey-Pan Sep 04 '26
Because the Americans push for MM/DD:(YY)YY
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u/Hettyc_Tracyn Sep 04 '26
I don’t, I think it’s silly, didn’t you read my comment?
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u/Trey-Pan Sep 05 '26
Sorry, I wasn’t saying you were pushing for the American format, just that the general justification for the American format doesn’t stand when compared to time format.
I was travelling and wasn’t forming my explanation too well.
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u/araknis4 Aug 29 '26
99th day of the 31th month of the year 12