Date Format Debate

The cluster centers on debates over date formats, with strong advocacy for the unambiguous ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) standard over regional variants like MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY that cause international confusion.

📉 Falling 0.4x Other
4,018
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#6528
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
5
2008
9
2009
35
2010
55
2011
73
2012
153
2013
160
2014
110
2015
169
2016
129
2017
201
2018
180
2019
117
2020
377
2021
535
2022
580
2023
446
2024
276
2025
399
2026
9

Keywords

e.g FF US ATO MM mozilla.org MMDDYYYY twitter.com YY goo.gl dd mm format date iso month dates oct 28 year

Sample Comments

steve1977 Apr 17, 2023 View on HN

There is only one date format, ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). Everything else is just a mistake that hasn’t been corrected yet ;)

interfixus Aug 10, 2018 View on HN

Or YYYY-MM-DD as a few of us obsessive smallendians keep insisting.

vzaliva Mar 14, 2021 View on HN

The date in stipid US standard (mm/dd/yyyy) will confuse the hell of the rest of the world. Please use not US-centric ISO date format: yyyy-mm-dd.

Benanov Feb 21, 2025 View on HN

YYYY-MM-DD should aggravate everyone equally, switch to that

beeboobaa3 May 21, 2024 View on HN

What's weird about the most common date format in the world, dd-mm-yyyy?

detaro Nov 24, 2021 View on HN

You see YYYY-MM-DD sometimes, but that's clearly not confusable.

xigoi Aug 12, 2022 View on HN

I know that Americans use MM/DD/YYYY. But YYYY-DD-MM???

MattBearman Dec 13, 2014 View on HN

Unless you're from one of the many countries that uses the more logical format of DD-MM-YY :P

bryanlarsen Jan 31, 2024 View on HN

Some languages pronounce the date as year, day, month so some people write YYYY/DD/MM. Since both YYYY/DD/MM and YYYY/MM/DD make sense to different people, neither should be used.

philliphaydon Mar 12, 2018 View on HN

It’s yyyy-mm-dd not yyyy-dd-mm....