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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I get this problem all the time and I live in "the right" London so it is not just a "nearest London" thing.

It is not just digital assistants, but so many other things like Google maps, e-commerce sites, address auto-completes etc seem to assume that I want the North American one with a population of 300k that no one knows about, not the one that everyone has heard of with a population of 9 million.

I've always just pegged it down to the usual cultural-blindness that we come to expect from SV companies that there isn't anything beyond north America (e.g. "global launches" only being for USA, Canada, and Costa Rica etc) and that if your language is "en" then you must be American or Canadian with everyone else being funny foreigners that "we don't support, sorry"

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Just to report that it isn't necessarily/solely cultural myopia at work here: I live in Ontario and have family in London, Ontario, and while visiting them with location services on have both asked for and googled "what is the temperature in London, Ontario" (notice that I said the region!), and gotten results for London England. I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

>I left angry feedback with Google over it once, but it's happened many times.

That's not going to get you anywhere - they're not listening.

On the bright side, screaming at the void can be therapeutic for some people...

The modern day equivalent of writing a stern letter and just leaving it in a drawer.

You could send it to The Times and see if it goes to the London version? ;)

There is an entire new class of species breeding over there: "Artificial Humans" [1]: A quantum state thing that may or may not be a real human. You can never tell. This is beyond Turing test. A real human behaving as bot or vice versa.

[1]. https://trialx.com/blog/google-play-bans-our-covid-app-built...

It's not true. But reports are very valuable when filed with helpful information.

Simply use the airport code YXU ;)

Sometimes these systems just make baffling decisions. One time years ago, while waiting for my plane to begin deboarding at JFK Airport in NYC, I tried setting my MacBook's timezone to Eastern manually. I started typing "New Y" into the Closest City field. OS X helpfully auto-completed it as "New Yekeba, Liberia": https://evan.tumblr.com/image/65341168142

As best I can tell, New Yekeba is a tiny resettled former mining town with minimal population. There are very few English-language web pages about it. Somehow this ranked higher for Apple's auto-suggest than the most populous city in the US.

"e" is alphabetically before "o" ?

Looks like the autocomplete is going off alphabetical order rather than some other characteristic of the city?

I considered that, but in that case it would have suggested New Yarmouth (among other places) first.

I guess that's the next innovation. In the old days, you enter the entire search string. Then you got Google Suggest where each keystroke was trapped and responded to. Now not only you need to trap each keystroke, you need a weighted list of results so you show them in the order of popularity.

Not an Edit: I am pretty sure Google is already doing it so it is not an innovation, its been there for a while. I am calling it so for the folks who are not doing it. Also, it may be there in general search but it may have seemed like excessive data for searching time zones on your phone. But with billions of phone users, such usage would be common and the feature will happen, eventually.

Weighting results in Search Autocomplete is something Google has done since launching it.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, though not on this)

Hey, it's correct when sorted alphabetically! Good enough, commit and ship it!

To be fair, where I'm from, "London" would probably refer to London, ON, but that's just because I live in Southern Ontario. So it's not like no one has heard of it.

On the other hand: no one in Southern Ontario will be asking what time it is in London, ON because it's all in the same time zone, so this seems like a problem.

Well, and it's further complicated by the context of what's being asked. Coming from Waterloo Region, if I ask what time it is in London, I almost certainly mean in England. But if I ask for directions to get to London, I probably mean the one that's a few hours away by car.

So it's not as simple as just fitting these queries into generic templates and sending all instances of $LOCATION to a common geocoder.

Now if we could just wipe Waterloo IA off the map...

Yes, but we expect those assistants to be a little smarter than college programming assignment...

It really highlights how all language is incredibly ambiguous, and depends on all sorts of cultural and semantic contexts to disambiguate, despite the inherent ambiguity not being at all a problem for its users.

There's so much more to language than just a string of sounds or characters.

This is rather inconvenient when shopping for niche products. American website assumes that everyone on the internet is American, and you have to go through the shopping cart experience to learn that they don't ship to Canada or Europe.

To be fair, there is a tendency among Americans full stop (with the honourable exception of the good denizens of this and other likeminded sites) to assume that everyone on the internet is American.

HN is not an exception. It's the most stark in threads about salaries.

I'm interested to see this thread but posted 6 hours later. This happens on forums that are very EU/NA heavy--or games.

The thread seems overly negative towards Americans and criticizes them heavily because half of America is still asleep and the other half just started working. If OP posted it later Americans would likely be filling the discussion with the reasons why your complaints are happening.

My personal opinion is that US-centrism is obviously a thing, but EU people are so used to seeing it that they then mistake other things for it.

This same thing happens with Spain and Mexico as well!

Hacker News is an American site, specifically a Silicon Valley site. If you went to a British site, they would be talking about things from a British context. All are welcome, but it’s a bit ridiculous to complain that every conversation on the internet doesn’t support multiple currencies.

Correction: Hacker News is an American-founded site with international community of users. That's not a site for Americans where the rest of the world just comes to watch. Or maybe I missed a point in the guidelines...

I'm not talking about currencies. I'm talking about sentences like "if you move to the east, you'll earn...", "in the south, it's..." in conversations with no prior indication that it's just about US and "the east" means "the east of US" and "the south" means "the south of US". Because US is the whole world and there is no need to clarify...

I don't think this is an American thing as much as it is a 'country with large population' thing. Internet users all around the world do tend to frequent sites based on regional preferences, and the human brain is exceptionally prone to identifying patterns. I'm sure if I were to hang out on Weibo or VK I'd find a bunch of people assuming everyone was Chinese or Russian.

In my view it's the language. English is so common everywhere that young people around the world are pretty good at it (including me), so they get onto the internet from a young age and start consuming English (mostly US) websites, social media, and movies etc, which further strengthens the grip the US has.

Meanwhile, you'd struggle to find an American, or any one from the Anglosphere really (maybe with the exception of Canada) who speaks Greek, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, etc.

Almost any results from DuckDuckGo have this affliction.

Go to https://duckduckgo.com/settings and change the Region to wherever you are for better regional results.

See also: "Please select a state" dropdown with no "Not US" option.

TBF internationalisation is complicated and hard to do well. So is international shipping.

But compare with a European site like thomann.de, which not only handles currencies and taxes but also (mostly) translates the product descriptions into most European languages.

That's dedicated, having worked for a company that took care of online shops for clients, most of them would balk at the cost of doing that.

Indeed! Is it so hard to just state where you're willing to ship upfront? The worse is when they later send you emails because you "left something behind".

And too many app developers assume that all their users have massive/unlimited data plans. This is usually correct for... most developed and developing countries, but:

They forget that in the telecom-backwater of Canada, a 4 or 5gb/month plan is near the high end.

I’m looking at you NPR One app for thinking buffering 300-400mb of content is a good idea.

It's not just app developers. The Android devs only appear to spend their time on flagship phones and assume they can burn system resources that bring cheaper phones to a crawl.

Even fast devices have slow internet in the underground. So many websites load 3mb of data for a few kb of relevant info.

Was thinking this exact thing! All these companies are hugely US-centric.

It's like this on maps too (apple maps is the worst) you can search for something fairly straight forward that should be local and it'll find you something in California.

But I agree with the general theme of Siri being the dunce of the personal assistants. Mostly can't even hear its own wake word. You have to whisper Alexa's name when talking about her to prevent activation and in the same environment shouting at Siri produces nothing but silence.

It’s not US centric. It’s just that Siri, and the others (to a lesser extent?) are dumb.

Try asking Siri for directions to your next appointment. She will tell you all about it, including where it is supposed to be, but she won’t give you directions. Mind boggling.

And it’s not uncommon for me to search for some place in the Midwest USA, and get a result in Europe.

In the recent (~5y) past, I've asked Google Maps, from within London, a route to Charing Cross Station and been given the one in Glasgow.

In the past few months I decided to give Apple Maps another try to see if it's any good. I tried to get directions from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Victoria. It tried to send me to Victoria BC, Canada.

Ouch!

That’s even worse than a pre-smartphone fail I encountered ~15 years ago.

I was on a train from London to Liverpool Lime Street Street, and somewhere around Nottingham one of the fellow passengers asked me when it would arrive in Liverpool Street Station.

From Cambridge (UK), you can take trains either to Liverpool or to Liverpool Street Station (in London). Refugees would often be released from a nearby detention center with a ticket and instructions to take the train to Liverpool. More than one ended up lost and befuddled in Liverpool Street.

[2nd-hand story from, likewise, 15 years ago. Accuracy not guaranteed]

See also: New York Penn Station and Newark Penn Station are consecutive stops on the North-East Corridor line, and sound identical in conductor-ese. Causes regular panic attacks from first-time riders.

had similar encounters with people asking how much longer it will take to get to Ashford as their Eurostar train leaves soon while on a train that stops at Ashford (Middlesex) instead of Ashford International, in Kent

cf my disaster in Italy when I got off the train at Venezia Miestra (basically an industrial estate at the wrong end of a road bridge) instead of Venezia St Lucia (the bit with the canals and architecture).

"Charing Cross (Glasgow)" Station in Glasgow is the true Charing Cross. I can only applaud Google Maps there.

You were looking for the vastly inferior "London Charing Cross"

Yet, if someone says Charing Cross in London, they do probably mean London Charing Cross nevertheless.

What makes your comment fun is that I can almost hear it in the angry Scottish accent of a Mike Meyers character. “If it isn’t Scottish, it’s shite!”

Don't forget the "world series" for major league baseball played in the US and Canada. ;-)

A tired quip that doesn't get more clever with time.

Guess what?

The "World Cup" didn't invite any soccer teams from Africa or Asia to their 1930 tournament but they still called it a World Cup. The UK wasn't even part of FIFA at the time but they still pretended it was a "world cup".

Aye and nobody invited Antarctica to the most recent one, so it's still not a World Cup!

The baseball World Series has been contested since 1903. When are they going to invite the rest of the world?

Whenever they join MLB, just like you have to join FIFA to be in the World Cup.

Do they even accept applications? The FIFA application process is apparently not very easy, but 211 national associations have still managed to join.

Even in 1930 it involved several nations, and that was /ninety years ago/

It was the World Series long before Canada was involved. :-)

Along the same lines, I always laugh at announcers proclaiming the Super Bowl winners as the worlds best (or something along those lines).

I mean, it is true. But it still irks me for some reason.

For time you probably don't want the nearest. If you are 200km from London, Ontario you are most likely in the same timezone so you want London, UK. However for driving you do want the nearest.

Another irritating bit about this is that when I search for news about my country in my language, spanish (I live in London, the UK one Siri, not the american one) I still get a number of english language results first.

Did you search in spanish or english? Also local environment options - was in in english or spanish.

But the whole language and geographic association is one area in which many software experiences seem to get mixed results.

My pet gripe is when I install software and it offer English (American) and no English(UK) option. Though less impacting that some language handerlings, like yourself.

Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?

Seriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.

Would I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?

17:00 is unambiguous. 9:00 could be AM or PM. 09:00 nearly always means 24H format; but what about 11:00?

Siri should just start using "Zulu" time. /s

I think almost everybody in European countries knows about AM/PM, but I certainly get confused by 11:59 AM vs 12:00 AM

On the topic: Siri will ask you to clarify if you set a reminder too close to midnight. "Did you mean 11am tomorrow?" It also works on the other side: set a reminder for "2" at 1am and it'll ask you to specify.

I've never been able to keep 12 AM vs 12 PM straight in my head. If I have to put something on my calendar or set an alarm for that time, I always use 11:59 AM or PM.

Is there a mnemonic or trick for remembering?

Yes, you can’t have 12:01AM being in the afternoon, so 12:00AM must be one minute before 12:01AM, so it is also dark.

It might go back to Anglo-Norman (Frenchish) language:

Apres midi Post midi

It's usually held to be Latin: ante and post meridiem[1].

But surely the whole point is that midday itself is neither before nor after midday, while midnight is precisely equally both before and after?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock

But "apres" also means after.

12 AM and 12 PM are only meaningful by some arbitrary convention, and I'm not sure if that's even very consistent.

I try always to use 12 noon and 12 midnight instead.

That’s why insurance policies in the US usually comes into effect at 12:01 AM.

Same in the UK, and similarly they often cease at 11:59PM, which has always struck me as pretty unsatisfactory.

What if a plane crashes on my house, between policies, during those two uninsured minutes?

Sure, it's unlikely, but so are all the other things that might cause me to claim on my buildings insurance policy.

So make insurance policies overlap by 23 hours and 58 minutes? And leave it to the insurance companies to figure out which one gets to pay out if bad things happen during the overlap.

Most policies I've seen have a clause that says that if you are double insured for the same event then they won't pay out - which in effect could leave you with neither company paying anything. I have no idea how a court would look at such a clause, but it definitely exists.

even 12 midnight is ambiguous- for example is 12 midnight on January 1st the start of the new year? Or is it at the end of new year's day?

Yeah, I always think of 12 as really just 0. So 12:00AM = 0:00AM is midnight (precedes 1:00AM by an hour) and 12:00PM is 0:00PM (which precedes 1:00PM).

Sort of. Instead of mnemonics, I find it easier to remember when I know how a concept is derived from basic principles. So, first we observe that 1am and 1:00 in 24h format are the same time. Then, we consider the hour before that. That hour is 0 in 24h format. It also belongs to the same day. Since the day is split in two equal halves by AM/PM, then hour 0 in 24h format is hour X am, where X is the hour before 1 am. That is hour 12. Therefore, 12am is 0 o'clock.

The other fact that helps me remember is that 12 hour clocks were invented before the number 0, and afterwards 24h clocks are 0-based, so 12 on an old clock is the start of the am or pm cycle respectively because there is no 0. Really 12 should be 0 and then it all makes sense.

My mnemonic is literally "it's the wrong one".

12PM is morning, 12AM is afternoon.

This one works for me. Thanks!

No, it's not. 12PM is midday (12:00), and 12AM is midnight (00:00).

Right. Mnemonic or not, I still get it wrong.

I learned it by traveling the US on a one month Greyhound bus pass. I had to deal with the time tables, after all. It’s a rather inefficient way to learn it, but it was interesting in other ways.

Think of 12.30. 12.30 PM is after-noon.

You can use first principles. "12:00pm" likely refers to the minute that contains the seconds "12:00:00pm, 12:00:01pm, 12:00:02pm... 12:00:59pm". Each of the seconds that follows the first one is non-ambiguous (they're in the afternoon). It would make little sense to have the first time be 12 hours apart from the other ones. Thus the boundary point 12:00pm refers to noon and the boundary point 12:00am refers to midnight.

>>I think almost everybody in European countries knows about AM/PM

Again, as a Polish person I don't think that's true at all, certainly in Poland it isn't.

I am from Poland, and while we understand 12-hour clock and use it interchangeably with 24-hour one (well, mostly old people, young people just use 24-hour clock) - nobody uses AM/PM.

In Polish it's 8 rano (in the morning) vs 8 wieczorem (in the evening).

I can't remember which is which in AM/PM, and have to check each time :)

And the issues with midnight/noon are frustrating and 12-hour-clock should just die.

I am from the USA and whenever I travel to Europe (Poland, Germany, England, Scotland, etc.) I never quite grasp whether 24h is used for all purposes, or just "official" purposes (like train schedules) while casual conversation remains 12h. I wonder if the young/old divide you described is prevalent in most places.

I assume some people (perhaps older people) wear analog 12h wrist watches, and wouldn't translate to 24h after looking at it to answer a random question "what time is it?"

When I was young (in 90s) everybody used 18 and 6 wieczorem (in the evening) interchangeably, like 50% - 50% split.

Now I almost never hear "6 wieczorem" it's always 18. I think I haven't heard it used this year in Polish.

Lots of people use analog clocks but they just say 18 when looking at 6.

Interesting! It sounds like maybe there are more people doing +12 mental math (reading analog clocks in 24h places) than people doing -12 mental math (Americans trying to read 24h times) even though the USA is always the "weird" one.

That probably indeed varies a lot by location and demographic.

In my experience in Finland, casual spoken discussion is usually 12h but written is 24h. The xx:xx format always means 24h, whether written or spoken.

When referring to a precise minute 24h is common even when spoken - "train leaves at sixteen thirty-four" - the 12h alternative is "train leaves at four past half five" or "twenty-six to five". Notably, one would never say "four thirty-four" as that refers to 04:34 (24h).

Also, 12h is used when casually written with letters - e.g. it would be "meet you at three" / "nähdään kolmelta", not "meet you at fifteen" / "nähdään viideltätoista".

> In my experience in Finland, casual spoken discussion is usually 12h but written is 24h. The xx:xx format always means 24h, whether written or spoken.

My exact experience in France as well. “Six heure du matin” for example.

Never think of AM/PM except when dealing with badly designed software.

Where are you from?

Norway.

I don't intuitively know 17:00 is afternoon. I have to think about it. You get used to what you grow up with.

It also may or may not be evening [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening

If you are an American joining the military is a quick lesson. Dates are d/m/y and time is 0000hrs. Distance for anything that is not your PT run is in KM. I had lived overseas so not a big deal for me, but others in my unit struggled for a bit. I have forced doing both f/c, mi/km and 12/24 on my family from the start. Both my wife and kid where pretty happy I did when we started traveling outside the US quit a bit. No issues on if they needed a jacket, how far away it was and what the transport schedule said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b... with a nice svg on the side.

I wouldn't say "entire countries", but definitely a lot of people. I grew up (in canada) with 12 hour clocks.

In the US, I have definitely met people who will profess not being able to understand military time (this is a common way to refer to 24-hour time). They would recognize it as a time, but not get any other context from it.

In the real London it is not entirely uncommon to find yourself in a conversation with American tourists where they're asking/complaining about "military time" on train timetables. The odd thing about it being most platforms have a countdown-style timer much like you'd find in a US metro system.

I understand that sometimes they're just trying to interact with locals while on vacation, but it always seems like an odd starter. Depending on my mood you'll get a friendly chat about time displays¹, or a curt "it says 2 minutes 'til next train".

1. 24hr analog clocks worth visiting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd_Gate_Clock , or metric time, or Swatch time, or ... I'm just as boring with strangers as with friends ;)

There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. And even for the Americans that do know, virtually all of them (unless they are in the military or another profession that commonly uses 24h time), will have to "translate" by subtracting 12 in their head for PM times.

24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.

The demographic you're referring to - North Americans within the USA who don't know how 24-hour time works - are < 2% of the world's population.

So? What's your point? If you're selling something in the US, and it gave time in 24hr time as the only option, most Americans would hate it.

Most?

True but the GP asked about "literally everyone in the world" and the parent is a correct and useful answer to that question.

You're right. I tend to assume people that use the word 'literally' are using it incorrectly - as parent did.

It's sad, but an ineluctable truth, that this word is almost always misunderstood and misused.

In the (again, regrettable) common usage use of the word -- ie. 'almost all' -- the claim is likely valid.

> 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.

Sure.

> There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM.

1. Same is true for most people in the world

2. Wait, you mean they don't know if 17:00 is early morning or late afternoon??

Seriously, I have a hard time to believe that. I'll believe that most Americans need to convert to am/pm, but not that "huge swaths" literally cannot understand this.

My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that.

> My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that.

Have you looked at the news lately? Seen any of Jimmy Kimmel's "man on the street" interviews?

Most people will know this is sometime in the afternoon, but honestly a large portion of the population would probably think this is 7PM.

If you did a “man on the street” interview in Tokyo, how many people there would know that Texans don’t ride to their oil rig job on horses? I lived in East Asia for many years and many people there assumed that I had a ranch and rode horses because I was from Texas.

“Men” on the street everywhere have their ignorances. Americans aren’t any smarter or dumber than people anywhere else. If we were talking about “Chinese people __” or “Nigerian people __” we’d complain about it being racist or stereotypical, yet we seem to have no problem casting stereotypes when the subject is American. Europeans especially seem to delight in it. There is this smug superiority that comes in these conversations. But start lifting rocks in European towns and you’ll find that people are equally smart and ignorant across the world. It’s a matter of perspective.

With the utmost respect, I disagree. In my experience, the average American seems much less knowledgable about the rest of the world when compared with Western Europeans/Canadians/Australians/Kiwis.

To be fair, it's not that they are less intelligent, it seems to be because they are less exposed to, and perhaps less interested in, other cultures/countries.

A huge part of that is geographic isolation and American cultural/media "dominance".

Most people in the world? Are you sure about that? I don't believe it for a minute. In India, most people don't know 24 hour timing.

Most Americans have never heard of a 24 hour clock and would have no idea what 1700 means at all.

>subtracting 12 in their head for PM times.

Is that how you're supposed to do it? All my life I've been subtracting 2 and ignoring the fist digit for PM times (with the exception of post 20:00 times). I just noticed that when I was a kid and been using that all this time

e.g. 17:00 - 2:00 = 15:00 => 5:00

It works for everything up to 22, so you'd only encounter issues in the last 2 hours of the day really

22:00 - 2:00 = 20:00 => 0:00

> All my life I've been subtracting 2 and ignoring the fist digit for PM times (with the exception of post 20:00 times)

Which is the same as subtracting 12 (subtracting 2 and then subtracting 10, which is what ignoring the first digit does for times before 20:00).

Hell, I live in the UK and I can't stand 24-hour time ("military time"). I have to convert in my head every single time by subtracting 12 to figure out what the time actually is.

I hate 24 hour time so much. I won't use software that can't be configured to AM/PM.

Yep, if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable. First one because in a lot of countries people genuinely won't know what AM means, the other because there's only one clear way of reading it, but it's not consistent between countries.

The AM isn’t the main problem. It can be looked up. The issue is whose 11AM? What time zone?

>if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable...

I used to have all my domain names registered with Namecheap. I'd get emails from them saying things like '<whatever>.com is due to expire on 3/7/2018' --so, naturally, [being based in UK] I'd note on my calendar to renew the domain at the beginning of July, only to have it almost expire on me at the beginning of March.

I emailed Namecheap several times about this, asking them to use less ambiguous dates in their reminder emails and, each time, got snotty replies saying "We are a US company and we use US date order" [which wouldn't have prevented them using something like "March 7 2018"] to which I pointed out that they had a global customer base, so should avoid expressing important data in formats which their oversees customers would mis-read.

They refused to budge on this so, as each domain expired, I renewed it with another registrar instead and Namecheap lost all my business, my repeat business and my future business for ever.

All because they were too damned stubborn to move away from using an ambiguous date format.

Weird!

If someone doesn't know what AM means, they don't know English anyway.

It's Latin

It's used in English, therefore it's English.

So maisonette is clearly English as well, yes? Or baguette? Or kindergarten? That's some great logic there.

Yes, they're loanwords.

The best are that have a settings page where they try to give an example. But use a day-of-month =< 12. Like your example. It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear.

> It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear.

Assuming you're addressing OP with this part, I think that was their point.

When an application presents you with "04/05/2020", you have no way of knowing whether it means crazy American dates or normal-people dates.

This is reason enough for me to use 2020-04-05 exclusively. Lexical order is a bonus.

Just wait, someone will implement that as May 4, 2020.

It's possible, but very unlikely. The year-day-month convention has never been used anywhere that I'm aware of. YYYY-MM-DD is such a good idea it was turned into an ISO standard.

> "04/05/2020", you have no way of knowing whether it means crazy American dates

In just about every professional setting I've been in (in the US), Americans are just as confused as everyone else. We deal with people and documents/data from the entire world too. We look for clues elsewhere, such as other dates from the same source that have any number greater than 12, etc. There are very few documents these days where you be 100% confident without some other confirmation.

I so much just prefer Apr-05 2020. Clear to all.

Are we talking BCE or CE? :)

Were there Aprils in BCE?

Yes, the Roman calendar called the month "Aprilis". 10/12 of the modern Gregorian names were present in the calendar used by the Roman Republic (~500 BCE). Mark Antony renamed the month of "Quintilis" to "Julius" after Julius Caeser's assassination. The senate renamed "Sextilis" to "Augustus" in 8 BCE to honor Julius's grand-nephew who ruled for 45 years as the first emperor of Rome.

Of course, the Romans didn't use 'BCE' at that time. They referred to years by the consuls who held office that year.

Until you sort lexically, then madness.

I once had to write software that would create labels with a date, and said software would be used in both the U.S. and Ireland. I tried to push for the ISO standard of 2020-04-05 but couldn't get buy-in. Was finally forced to compromise on 2020-Apr-05.

While clear to all [english speakers] it still has US bias. Outside of the US it's more common to write 05 Apr 2020

it’s

  %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z

as God intended!

(and i’m an american!)

Is it a joke?

Year should be in the first column.

Agreed - really wish more people would use ISO date format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

There’s a subreddit for that too. https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/

There’s also an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/1179/

(Because there’s an xkcd for pretty much everything)

I LOVE the hover text on that one.

I think formats with month and day before year are popular (and possibly emerged originally) for cases in which the year's only really included in case you're not sure whether you're reading something old and the date's already passed, that is, the date is referring to something 12 months or less away, which is probably a very high percentage of dates people encounter day-to-day. This puts the most useful information up front. The alternative being dates that omit the year entirely, which are also very common.

  22 May 2020 09:28:30 +5

is a perfectly unambiguous date stamp for human reading.

by all means use iso6081 for everything else, but i genuinely prefer the above in daily human facing use.

it’s in commmon use in the US military, and at least passingly common elsewhere. Not something normal people do here, but it’s be nice.

"May" is English, though.

Otherwise, good format.

%b

should respect locale.

I actually didn't realize am/pm wasn't something Europeans did...

We love what US calls “military time”

24h clock isn't exactly military time.

14:30 in military time would be fourteen hundred thirty hours, or one-four-three-zero hours, or in written format 1430Z, Z being Zulu (UTC), or an actual offset.

"military time" is a 24 hour clock.

14:30 is almost without exception read as "fourteen thirty" in military time.

I've never seen it either of the ways you describe above.

Uh, they invented it. I guess they forgot.

UK'ians do use it. French, Germans, Swiss, BeNeLux, Italians, Spanish, Polish not. Don't know about the rest, but would be surprised if anyone in Europe but the UK used it.

They still know what it means though. Clocks are still divided into 12 in Europe.

Not if you don't have to use it for whatever reason. Personally I never learned the difference between am and pm before I got a job where I had to interact with people who used it. Still not sure if noon/midnight is 12am or 12 pm though ...

For written times, no. If you're arranging to meet a friend you'd write "see you at 2030", but you'd say "eight thirty" out loud.

In Greece it's sometimes used.

10:00π.μ. = 10:00 προ μεσημβρίας = 10:00 before noon

10:00μ.μ. = 10:00 μετά μεσημβρίαν = 10:00 after noon

Transliterating this into the Latin alphabet is fun since it gives "p.m." for before noon.

Indeed! My mother once mistakenly put an alarm for 6π.μ. thinking it was 6p.m., and suddenly at 6am in the morning it was blasting off for no reason.

That's what living for so many years in another country does to your native tongue

Or calendars that start on Sunday (since I'm European and am used to calendars starting on Monday). Forget to notice the label once and one could end up booking a hotel room for Thursday to Saturday.

So most of Google? Google Calendar, Search, Maps and others all tend to be very stupid in that aspect.

It's ridiculous TBH, whether its travel apps, or setting timezones in things.

For a lot of products, US sales are just worth so much more than sales from anywhere else, that it is reasonably common to not care much about the rest of the world. I’ve worked for a few companies that started out with a heavy focus on localization, but eventually realized it was just a massive waste of money.

Chicken and egg problem, maybe the US sales being stronger are a reflection of the system's lack of ability to deal with international customers (even if only in English)

Though yes, cross-border commerce is annoying.

America is also incredibly wealthy in terms of mean disposable income - irrc about 45% higher than the UK for example, with a substantially larger population.

The issue isn't doing business in just America. The issue is the communication. Some services will have big banners like "Works everywhere flawlessly" and then (if you are lucky) in some dark corner of the FAQ there will be a tiny sentence, "Only available in US for now" (translation: it will never be available anywhere else).

Even global companies like Google, Amazon do this.

In situations like that non-US consumers aren’t their customers, and they’re simply not interested in communicating with them.

Then why are they on the internet? Aren't they aware that non-US people can also access it? And if they aren't interested then why do they add "for now" to their message?

And are you telling me global companies like Google and Amazon don't have any non-US customers? I don't know which world is that but I want to live in it.

Google and Amazon aren’t particularly good examples of this. They don’t have very many services that are only available to US customers.

But there are plenty of businesses that only trade with US customers, and make little effort to ensure that’s clear on their websites. To answer your question, the reason companies like that don’t put special effort into making this more clear is because while some people might think this is a problem, it’s certainly not their problem. If somebody browses their website for 20 minutes, decided to make a purchase, and realizes they can’t, the business hasn’t lost anything. That person was never going to be their customer to begin with, and it’s not exactly easy to put together a business case for improving UX for people who will never be customers.

Im not really making any value judgements about doing this, I’m just giving you the perfectly rational explanation for how this occurs.

An example from Google is YouTube TV.

I have seen countless people raising issues about why they can't use some services and after some time the people from the service will finally tell them it's because they aren't in the US. All of this can be simply solved with a simple "Only available in the US" in the front page. And if Google is to be believed human support is quite pricy.

And no, it isn't complicated. Not for designers or developers. (I am not a good designer but I have developed many websites.)

Failing to consider that your customer base could be international is the definition of blinkered irrationality. You're not just losing goodwill, you're losing potential profits.

There are obvious exceptions, like fresh food or anything else with a limited shelf life, and any product that has a distributor chain providing sales and support in a different territory.

Beyond that it makes no sense at all, especially for software and other non-physical services.

Other countries, including China and the EU, understand this. Companies in the US that fail to adapt will lose business and be left behind.

What EU companies are Google and Apple losing business to, exactly?

If you have one market where your acquisitions costs are lower per $ in sales than all other markets, you are literally losing money on every $ you invest in sales for any other market. Your intuition for how this works is simply incorrect.

This isn't true for either Apple or Google or Facebook, all of which are determinedly global in their sales and marketing.

They’re also very weak examples of companies that do this. For starters, Apples localization is quite on point most of the time. Facebook and Google really don’t have many features at all that are territorially exclusive.

Tell that to their atrocious app store situation. Need an banking app for Japan AND one for the USA each only available on that country's store. Apple says F.U!

Are you only allowed to affiliate your Apple ID with one country’s app store? If I moved to Japan and switched to the Japanese app store would I just lose all of the apps I purchased via the US store?

Yes, you can only have your account associated with 1 store.

You won't lose the apps you have installed but

1. They won't update until you switch back so you'll likely need to switch 2 to 4 times a year as your bank and/or other services deprecates their old apps.

2. Switching requires manually re-entering your name, address, phone number, and credit card info every time.

3. Any subscriptions you have via Apple Pay will be cancelled.

Thanks Apple!

And note: While the average person does not have bank accounts in 2 countries I've run into plenty of apps I needed as a tourist that are only available on that country's store. For example the Lime app is not available in the Japanese store because Lime isn't in Japan but if I'm visiting a country with Lime then I want to be able to use the Lime app so I need to switch stores.

Meanwhile my Switch lets me have multiple user accounts. Each user's account can be assigned to a different country so I can buy The Touryst from the USA store and Japan exclusives from the Japan store. (not saying 2 accounts are the best solution it's just surprising that a Nintendo device does this part better than Apple)

That's more of a developer problem than an Apple one. Most of the apps on my phone work in any country around the world. I've used Uber in many countries, Spotify, Netflix... If your bank wants to restrictively localize their app distribution, how is that Apple's fault?

It is reasonable for a company not do want to deal with people outside their country including payment systems they don't support and laws they don't understand, taxes they have no experience with etc...

It is not reasonable for Apple to make using the phone in more than one country so hard. That is something Apple has the easy power to fix.

Really? Facebook Portal would be the poster example of this for me.

I am in the market for a video chat device usable for people in the age of 70+. This device is perfect.

There is no real reason to limit it to a region but they do. Plug adapters are easy to come by and one place I saw a spec which said 100-240V 50/60Hz for the power adapter. But marketing/shipping/support/multiple SKUs might want them to limit distribution. But they are not up-front about it.

And you do not figure out until you are ready to order.

It should be obvious to put a prominent note on the landing page that the product only is available in select locations. Especially for a global brand.

>There is no real reason to limit it to a region but they do.

The US has approximately zero laws dealing with privacy. I'd bet a lot of money on that being the real reason.

It took them five iOS versions (8-13), so 5 years, to finally introduce predictive typing in Dutch. I can't wait for swiping finally being introduced with iOS 18. Especially for the amount of cash it has Apple is horrible for introducing features for every localization.

I mean the problem being described has nothing to do with US sales though. I'm sure if people ask for the time in London, 99% of they mean London UK irrespective of whether they are US based.

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