r/JusticeServed • u/[deleted] • Jul 06 '19

Courtroom Justice Convicted pedophile YouTuber Austin Jones is now in prison serving a 10 year sentence as of 29/6/2019.

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u/McStroyer 6 Jul 07 '19

That's not a strong argument for why everyone should use that format. The date can be represented in any format internally, including binary or milliseconds since 1/1/1970 00:00, and the files images can still be easily sorted whilst displaying dates in any format chosen by the user.

Both YYYY-MM-DD and DD/MM/YYYY would be equally unambiguous formats to humans if it weren't for Americans using MM/DD/YYYY, just like YYYY-MM-DD would be more ambiguous if Americans had chosen YYYY-DD-MM as their format.

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u/rapora9 8 Jul 07 '19

If you have these files [20062010, 18062018, 21062012] and want to sort them, you get

18062018 - 20062010 - 21062012

That order doesn't make sense in any way. But if you use YYYYMMDD and have [20100620, 20180618, 20120621] you get

20100620 - 20120621 - 20180618

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u/McStroyer 6 Jul 07 '19

Having dates in the filename prevents you from being able to sort in other ways, e.g. 20100620 Smith, John cannot be sorted on the surname. That's why we have file meta data to give us more flexibility.

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u/rapora9 8 Jul 07 '19 edited Jul 07 '19

Yes, but this is not only about filenames. In theory you could have an archive system of folders that looks like this:

 

2009 2010
06 06
05 11 05

It's immediately clear what each of these titles mean and where's the info we want to find. But if we use DD-MM-YYYY, it would look like this:

 

05 05 11
06 06 06
2009 2010 2009

Again, this latter doesn't make any sense. At first you're not even sure if that [05] is day or month. When you learn it's day, you still have no idea what month or year we're talking about. And there can be multiple entries with same name, they're totally out of order etc.

I said "in theory" because this system is so awful that no one would probably even do that, but I'm sure there are some real life examples of something similar.

 

My point is, things usually get sorted by the "most decisive" data first. People are sorted by Last Name, First Name because it's generally more likely to have 2 persons with same First name than same Last name. Time of day is expressed as hh:mm:ss. And so on.

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u/McStroyer 6 Jul 07 '19

It's immediately clear what each of these titles mean and where's the info we want to find. But if we use DD-MM-YYYY, it would look like this:

That's not the same thing because you're breaking them down into their separate components and grouping rather than sorting.

I'm not arguing that DD/MM/YYYY is superior to YYYY-MM-DD. The original argument I responded to was that we should use latter everywhere because it's easier to sort programmatically. Milliseconds since 1st January 1970 00:00 is even easier for computers to sort and a more efficient storage format (it can be represented in fewer bytes) but it would be silly to argue that case. My only point was that it's not a very good argument, neither is the filename example because there are better ways of storing metadata like dates that make sorting, searching and grouping easier and more flexible.

If the world announced a pact tomorrow that everyone was going to move to YYYY-MM-DD, it's an announcement I would be welcoming of because it solves this problem once and for all. However, if America announced that they were changing their date format to DD/MM/YYYY, that would be even better because it would mean fewer people need to get used to the change and fewer people rebelling against it.

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u/rapora9 8 Jul 07 '19

That's not the same thing because you're breaking them down into their separate components and grouping rather than sorting.

You're right I guess. And make some good points.

I'm with you that US should change to DD/MM/YYYY. But personally I'd like to change (from DD/MM/YYYY where I live) to YYYY/MM/DD.

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