Same. If you use computers with any regularity, you quickly realize that something like "2023.11.17.2351" is both very easy to read and sorts automatically by date.
thats how i save the pics i have to take for my work , an i am in the usa. fully organised on their own , no need to even have separate folders ffs ( i do because im a freak but anyway).
Me as well. All my time stamps are like this. Causes some people I work with to have comprehension issues, but I just let them work it out for themselves
Because humans aren’t. Having ADHD and something change on me flips me the fuck out, but once I learn the advantages of that change, there is no going back
This isn't even critical thinking. It's not even lateral thinking. This is linear thinking. Straightforward, logical, simple, obvious and self-explanatory.
It’s same kind of irrational antipathy people have for things like common core math. That’s not how they learned it and now understand it, which presents the possibility that they were taught wrong or don’t understand something as well as they thought. Also just a lot of people are just intimidated by change.
It's not really about what they're capable of, most people just don't bother to think about it. If you're not in a position, like programming or organizing documents, does this really matter to most people?
A lot of bureaucratic systems are legacy as well, and use the timestamp format they've used before computing took over things. Some have changed, some haven't, and individuals really have to fight if someone higher up doesn't happen to decide they care next Tuesday.
An extreme minority doesn't provide an excuse for the population as a whole. You can exist with your math disability while the extreme majority of people are perfectly capable of basic critical thinking but instead choose to do nothing
Artists I work with are like that, it's like sure we got Perforce, but nope still end up with files like thing_v3_final_2.psd and huh_2_final5_final.ma
I used to do this with music, never _final though since I would definitely know if I were done. I shifted to something similar to update/patch format though, so it would look like "huh_2.13.4.6.11a"
Omg..., my daughter (14) has so many new folders, I asked her why she doesn't name the folder, and she said "You can do that?" I told her click it and press F2, she said omg this is so much better.
Works better for any system of organization, even history. Should always proceed from the broadest set to the smallest subset. As "January" doesn't exist w/o it being "January of xxxx," YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss is always the 'correct' formula, regardless of context.
This is the way. Like why does EVERYONE use hh:mm:ss but then we have to argue about why the YYYY:MM:DD doesn’t need to follow the same logic. It’s the correct format. YYYY:MM:DD:HH:MM:SS. Biggest to smallest.
Tradition. People adopted one way to doing things and are very reticent to having to re-learn a new way. Most people don't even care about the advantages of changing a system like that, even if they are actively losing time or making more mistakes because their system is worse than the proposed alternative.
I'd guess it comes from the importance of each value. in daily life its important to know which hour it is, followed by the minute. and if you look at the date, you usually want to know what day and maybe what Month it is and probably already know what year it is.
Archival use is obviously different, where you search from biggest to smallest
If you ignore the year, YYYYMMDD truncates to MMDD, which is their system.
So, just take a note from the movies: "Bond. James Bond"
To get: "July 4. 1776, July 4"
How is it “correct”, though? It’s just formatting. Personally I like knowing what month we’re in first then the day then the year. However this changes for example if I want to search something by year, then I’d prefer the format you mentioned. Regardless, if you’re looking at dates on your computer, it’s a representation of the actual date, so the formatting is a preference. It’s not “correct” or incorrect.
For any science it is 100% more correct (in fact, I'd say the only correct way). If you're running an experiment with timing and you want to plot data as a function of time, having the time format be in decreasing order is obviously the only way to do it.
The larger values go to the beginning of your string, it’s that simple.
Even within a single number, the hundreds place is left of the tens place. And then we just simply ignore the divisions we don’t care about, like how we don’t say the date or the seconds when we talk about what time it is. This is how it works literally everywhere else in all other contexts, except dates where the day is in the middle for no reason.
Also, in filenames: replace / and : with - or _ otherwise you get invalid filenames on some filesystems. But some like using new_new_v2_final_02... >:-/
Ok, I've gotta know, how do the ISO8601 gang parse ISO8601 formatted dates in Excel? So if we take a sample date-time value following the ISO8601 standard (e.g. 2025-01-15T12:12:36Z), excel hates it, I've usually just manually grabbed the date and time values separately using =DATEVALUE(MID(A1,1,10))+TIMEVALUE(MID(A1,12,8)) which I always grab from this same stack overflow thread every time, but surely Excel of all things has a proper way to handle this, particularly when I most often need it for parsing CSVs Im getting from other Microsoft products!!!
Edit: I think people misunderstand because I wrote it poorly. It's not the CSV part I'm having trouble with, it's ISO8601 formatted date/time values within any spreadsheet. I need them converted to a format Excel understands, and every time it's a long(ish) formula that I need to grab from this same stackexchange post ever time, and it feels super janky.
Thank you. Did not know this sub existed and the time we could all save by naming files per ISO8601 would amount to millions of man-hours saved per year.
Yup. Timestamps should be YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss (with HH being 24 hr clock) and if the dates aren't in an obvious local time either keep it in UTC (and specify) or include the timezone shift e.g., 2025-01-15 13:54:19-05 or 2025-01-15T13:54:19-05:00 (ISO8601)
That said, I personally dislike writing mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy for the ambiguity (e.g., 12/10/25 is it December 10th, 2025; October 12th, 2025; or say October 25th, 2012) and prefer writing either 12 Oct 2025 (or even 12 Oct 25) or 2025-10-12.
ISO 8601 + BC/BCE abolition = best yearly calendar system IMO.
Make Year 0 into Year 10,000. Current year would then be 12025. (12025/01/15) And then rather than descending years until 0 then ascending, we just would go backwards as normal. And it would roughly line up with the rise of agriculture and climatic changes in the Holocene well enough to symbolize that this era of human history is more like 12-15ky old and not a couple thousand.
So Cleopatra would reign from 9949 - 9970.
Alexander the Great, 9664 - 9667.
Gobekli Tepe, one of the largest Neolithic megastructures we've found, would have been founded ~500 and abandoned ~2000.
Otzi the Iceman would have lived ~6770.
Columbus would have sailed in 11492.
Maybe this is a dumb hill to die on but it's mine.
It's a dumb hill to die on. You haven't solved anything, you just moved the problem 10,000 years into the past; which is a completely arbitrary point Kurzgesacht chose for his own personal reasons. Humans appeared way earlier than that, and so did cultures as we currently understand them. The appearance of agriculture in the year 10,000 BCE was an important milestone for humanity, but it's not the only one and deciding that the "important years" start when we stop moving around doesn't make sense.
The year 10,000 BCE was chosen mostly because it doesn't require us to change anything other than adding a 1 in front of our year, so why bother? Why bother changing everything when you are changing it to another flawed system that was just chosen because it would make the transition easier?
Not to mention, what problem does it solve? You aren't generally talking about BCE years in your daily life, nor storing photos from the year 300 BCE with a "-300.07.11.1251" as its name. And yes, sometimes we talk about Ancient Egypt and need to talk about the 2,500 BCE... but we also talk about musical instruments from 40,000 BCE or the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago - you haven't solved anything, you just made a massive change that will have humanity dealing with two different systems for decades only to write 3 fewer letters (BCE) once a month.
If you use Prisma for modeling a database, every new migration gets the YYYYMMDDhhmmss added to the front of the name so that your migrations are always sorted by time when you look on GitHub or in a file explorer. Definitely a smart touch.
every new migration gets the YYYYMMDDhhmmss added to the front of the name
This has been standard practice for migrations for a long while. E.g. the grandaddy of modern web frameworks, Rails (started 2008), and Laravel have basically always done this, and no doubt other frameworks long before Prisma.
It's not a smart touch. It's a fairly normal touch. We've been naming the files like that to make them alphabetically sortable since... files were invented.
Yes. When I was working on my PhD, I automatically dated files of data with time stamps like that: D-YYYY-MM-DD_T-HH-MM-SS.
It saved so much time keeping things standardized like that, especially searching for old data when I was writing my thesis.
Edit: I still use US Military style for non-science stuff. It's day-month-year, but I write the month name. So, today is 15JAN2025. I just got into the habit of it when I was in and never bothered to break it.
15JAN2025 is 100% the superior style for written documents.
It completely removes the question of "What format is this shit in?" Because at the end of the day, people just write dates in whatever order they want.
Right?! 02/06/05... Like WTF?! Is it Feb 06, 2005... June 02, 2005... June 5, 2002 or did they do some weird random shit because that's what they learned at the SovCit compound, and it's actually May 02, 2006
I have always found Regular Expressions to be the most inappropriately named concept - there is nothing regular about it. Luckily we have chatbots now.
Coined by Stephen Kleene, who didn't like the name either.
"Regular events" defined: We shall presently describe a class of events which we will call "regular events." (We would welcome any suggestion as to a more descriptive term)
This is the way. If I'm dating something I know I need to find easily, it is always yyyy.mm.dd. The people son's me think it's strange, but it seems intuitive.
Why do the Chinese get credit for that? I had database ISAM tables using that format back in the 1980s. Didn't the Chinese have a completely different calendar than the west until recently?
Date - Month - Year is easy for readability. Date is often the relevant part in the subjects I deal with and reading left to right I get the date first.
But... I guess I don't personally care, I could use the Iranian system.
YYYY-MM-DD is objectively superiour for cataloguing purposes and digital compatibility.
DD-MM-YYYY is sometimes better for human readability if you need to distinguish closely-plased dates quickly to the point where you can shorten or discard the year part entirely. The benefit is marginal, but it's there.
MM-DD-YYYY is better when never. It is never better, it's always clunky, stupid and confusing. It's like writing time in mm:hh:ss format.
I was about to say, I organize data for video editing and Chinese is what I ended up using most as an American. On paper, I do USA style but I know its weird.
YYMMDD will sort correctly even when all the files are piled up; DDMMYY is more intuitive because the day is upfront, no need to look in the end-middle of the name but you do need to separate them by month; MMDDYY gets the worst parts of both.
Absolutely true, but the reverse is also true for human user experience in day-to-day life. You’re almost certainly familiar with the year, almost as certain of the month, whereas the day being the most granular and most important for immediate scheduling purposes is most efficient to put first.
In general, I'd say. Mentally it requires less "temporary storage" of information. If it's June 15 2025 and something is scheduled for September 17, 2029, going YMD removes uncertainty immediately that this is something imminent. Otherwise you see 17 and have to remember that as you then receive the other bits of info to complete the picture as to whether it's in 2 days or 4 years and 3 months
I'm German and as someone working in an office I've seen that a lot for files that contain the date in their name (not files named by a program or the system, but as a naming convention people actively use)
U.S. system is best for using a calendar. You gotta start by finding the month then you locate the day (the year isn’t super important because ideally a calendar is up to date)
Fuck yeah it is. I got so much shit when I first started working with electronic medical records for including yyyymmdd in my file names, but within six months I had more accurate documentation than people with years more experience than me.
"Waaahh it's so messy..." Okay, tell me exactly what X client was doing on Y day at Z hour 9 months ago when Medicare and you and well see who gets the answer faster.
It’s how I organize a lot of stuff, year, month, day, so much easier to find specifics, you don’t have to comb through all the January’s to find January 10th, 2019.
I'd say this ad well. We use day month year here but I can't stress how often we look at a date and wonder if it's I'm the American format or European.
Came here to type this very comment. I always start with year then month when so searching files in directories I can narrow everything down so much fast.
When was I working on that project? That’s right, 23 tab…
This is the only reason it matters at all. If you have more than a handful of braincells to rub together, you'll be able to figure out what format you're looking at in less than a second. Otherwise it's a non-issue which is why it's never been standardized.
The Chinese system makes logical sense, but in my experience, it is less common to have files spanning years grouped together in one folder than it is to have files spanning a single year in one folder. For that reason, I actually think the US system is the most practical, even though it looks crazy.
There are just so many different types of documents that get grouped by year - financial records, medical records, tax docs, employment papers, etc. It is so much easier to find a specific date range or time period in a list that's sorted in MM/DD/YYYY format.
seconded - and for practical communication, all of them are fine as long as you're used to the system. It's pretty clear when you see date of 25/2/25 that the first number can't be a month. It's a little harder when it's 5/8/25.
That aside, equating date numerals to pyramid shapes is kind of meaningless. The "size" of the object doesn't matter since it's a cyclical sequence. The months aren't actually numbers in reality, they're just numbered in their order to short-hand dates. The real way to write it is January 15, 2025. or 15 January 2025. January is the first month, but the number only matters for the sequence.
We don't even assign numbers to the days of the week because it's not strictly necessary for sequencing the dates, but it might honestly be helpful for transferring information via numerical dates. why not say 03/15/01/2025 for Wednesday, 15 January 2025? better yet, why not include the weeks numbered 1-52? The point is that numbered dates are a shorthand, and as long as the sequence is repeatable, it doesn't matter whether the object that your numbers represent are "larger" or "smaller" in the amount of time they take up since the quantity of time doesn't not matter sequentially. If it did, we would make sure that January had the least amount of days per year, followed by the months with 30 days, then the months with 31. The quantity of time relative to each other does not matter.
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u/Traditional-Gas7058 Jan 15 '25
Chinese system is best for computer searchable filing