Also, I hate DOB selectors which don't allow me to manually enter the date, and default to today, and don't have a year << arrow. Only month.
Now I need to click at least (age - 1) * 12 on the < arrow.
In general, I wish more websites would use native date / number / dropdown pickers.
Workday is the worst offender here.
I think that’s true on all OSes
(With apologies to patio11.)
This parallels, and the remark about patio11 refers, to this article[2], which has since become famous on HN. It ends with a similar remark from the author's prior experience as an American expatriate in a less populous and less cosmopolitan part of Japan, when a clerk remarked that Patrick McKenzie was a troublesome name to have in Japan, and why didn't he change it to something convenient and ordinary like Tanaka Taro[3].
This has since become HN folklore.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_era_name [2] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145768
In 2012, a clerk actually asked my wife and I, when we got married, whether it wouldn't make more sense for me to change my name. Then he wouldn't have to spell Patrick McKenzie on the wedding paperwork, and, approximate quote, "I already have to get one name change form out for her so filling out a second one is no trouble at all."
* Hardcoded into the system libraries/.net framework
* The Windows Registry
And this allows things to continue working even if the software is older than the newest era.
I asked a friend in Shanghai whether she thought Uyghur names should be allowed. She responded: "Huh? You don't get to choose what other people's names are. They tell you their names, and then you have to call them that.
And if you really want to think about weird names, there's a country called 'St. Vincent and the Grenadines'!"
(In other minority-names-in-China news, I have a Mongol friend whose name is Saruul. Her parents sinicized this as the three Mandarin syllables sha-ru-la, which look like a normal Chinese name. I don't actually know what she prefers to be called, but I suspect most people she knows call her Rula.)
Delegating parsing user input is a good idea, but sometimes the input methods you can rely on just don't cut it.
By the way: The international way to express a decimal separator is a (thin non-breaking) space. There's no misunderstanding possible.
According to whom? The CGPM recommends thin spaces as thousands separators, and either points or commas as decimal separators. NIST, ISO, etc. generally copy this, sometimes stipulating the decimal separator as one or the other.
i really hope you mean thousands separator ...
It can and should be, though. I feel like we should have a separate word for parsing when the rules are not well-defined - something like "fuzzy parsing" (in a similar vein to fuzzy string comparison)
Personal, the MM/DD/YYYY format, that is stander in the USA, needs to die and be replaced with YYYY-MM-DD.
Same with 12 hour time and replacing it with 24 hour. As the saying goes l, Americans use am and pm because they can't count past 12. AM and PM are a waste of code and display area. What fits in 2 characters takes up 5 characters.
But it can be worse. Los Angeles, Sunday, November 2, 2025, 2:00:00 am is ambiguous. Is it PST or PDT?
In today's Windows 11 I can't find that setting. You can't set the thousands separator separately, not anywhere that I can find. It's a tragedy. I see Excel misreading CSV files all the time. I don't use Excel that much myself and I understand what's going on, so it doesn't affect me all that much directly, but for my Excel warrior colleagues, it's another matter.
Which is to say, you assume it's as written, unless context suggests otherwise.
