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From structured YY/MM/DD logic to ‘just use epoch seconds’ timestamp pyramid meme
DataFormats Post #4430 · source on Telegram

From structured YY/MM/DD logic to ‘just use epoch seconds’ timestamp pyramid meme

Description

The meme shows four pastel-colored pyramids comparing date-time ordering schemes. 1) At left, a perfect pyramid labeled “Japanese logic YY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS” stacks layers from bottom to top: Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute, Sec. 2) The next pyramid, captioned “American "logic" MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS,” has the Year layer awkwardly pulled out of the middle, breaking the hierarchy. 3) The third, “European "logic" DD/MM/YY HH:MM:SS,” similarly yanks Day and Month out of sequence. 4) The final pyramid simply reads “F**k it. UNIX timestamp.” and is filled with the single text block “Seconds since midnight 1970-01-01 UTC (excluding leap seconds).” The visual joke highlights how regional date formats disrupt natural magnitude ordering, while developers often retreat to the monotonically increasing Unix epoch for sanity and sortability

Categories

DataFormats CS Fundamentals

Common Tags

DataFormats TimeZonesAreHard RelatableHumor DeveloperPainPoints MomentJSDateHandling

Comments

32
Anonymous ★ Top Pick After the fifth bikeshed on whether 03/04/05 is March or April, we just cast every timestamp to BIGINT and agreed to revisit the spec at 03:14:07 UTC on 19-Jan-2038
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    After the fifth bikeshed on whether 03/04/05 is March or April, we just cast every timestamp to BIGINT and agreed to revisit the spec at 03:14:07 UTC on 19-Jan-2038

  2. Anonymous

    After 20 years of dealing with timezone bugs, date parsing edge cases, and explaining why '01/02/03' means three different dates to different teams, you realize UNIX timestamps aren't just elegant - they're self-care. Sure, you'll still get bitten by leap seconds, but at least you won't have to debug why your European CI pipeline thinks your American deployment happened last month

  3. Anonymous

    After decades of international date format bikeshedding and countless production bugs from MM/DD vs DD/MM ambiguity, the industry collectively realized that arguing over human-readable formats is a waste of time - just store everything as Unix timestamps and let the presentation layer deal with the localization nightmare. Because nothing says 'I've seen things' quite like choosing epoch seconds over yet another regex to parse '02/03/04'

  4. Anonymous

    I've never seen an outage caused by epoch seconds, but I've triaged three incidents caused by '07/08/09' - pick ISO 8601 or epoch and stop playing date roulette

  5. Anonymous

    Date formats prove CAP theorem irrefutably: never consistent across American and European services - unless Unix timestamps rule

  6. Anonymous

    We argued Y/M/D vs M/D/Y vs D/M/Y for a sprint and shipped UNIX timestamps - leap seconds excluded, humans confused, and time still the worst distributed system; see you in 2038

  7. @sylfn 4y

    "Reiwa 4" moment

  8. @RiedleroD 4y

    I use japanese dates appearantly

    1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 4y

      You don’t use the austrian style?

      1. @RiedleroD 4y

        no, it's less logical

      2. Deleted Account 4y

        the whaaat

        1. @RiedleroD 4y

          I'm austrian, we usually use what they call European style

          1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 4y

            Now I feel like I want a map with color codes where what is used

            1. @sylfn 4y

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

              1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 4y

                How tf did you send it within 2 secondds

                1. @sylfn 4y

                  google "date format map" first link

              2. @RiedleroD 4y

                damn hungary

                1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 4y

                  Yeah😂😂😂💀

  9. @sylfn 4y

    iso 8601> am i joke to you

  10. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 4y

    Thank god in Hungary we use the “Japanese” style

  11. Deleted Account 4y

    who in europe write their dates as DDMMYYYY HHMMSS, i thought it was HHMMSS DDMMYYYY

    1. @RiedleroD 4y

      depends on what you're writing the date for ig

    2. @maggelia 4y

      Everyone who wants to find the files in a directory ordered by date YY-MM-DD

      1. @sylfn 4y

        1999 moment

        1. @chupasaurus 4y

          2 is still more than 1, even when comparing strings

          1. @sylfn 4y

            YY vs YYYY

            1. @chupasaurus 4y

              Ah, you're right.

          2. @sylfn 4y

            99 vs 1999

            1. @chupasaurus 4y

              I've done some black magic with bash and date utility, no need to convert

  12. @ivan_orange 4y

    SQL style ftw

  13. @azizhakberdiev 4y

    Ancinent (1970) prophecy tells that in 2038 will happen timelapse

  14. @thisisluxion 4y

    I always use YYYY-MM-DD, much more convenient

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