Update metadata and transcripts through end of July 2026

Refreshed episodes/hosts/comments/series from hpr.sql, and added
official HPR transcripts for the 180 episodes aired since the last
sync (hpr4516-hpr4695).

hpr_transcripts/hpr4609.txt

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+Episode: 4609
+Title: Proper Date Format
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4609/hpr4609.mp3
+Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:15:05 (official HPR transcript)
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4609, for 2026-04-02
+Today's show is entitled, "Proper Date Format"
+The host is Ahuka and the duration is 00:07:19
+The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
+The summary is "There is only one logical date format"
+You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. This show was submitted in February 2025 to cover
+occasions like this, where there are gaps in the schedule. Hello, this is Ahuka welcoming you to
+Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode. And this is from the Reserve Q. So this particular
+show is what I'm calling proper date format. Now, one of the things you quickly run into if you
+correspond with people who are both in the United States and Europe, which I have done both in my
+career as well as in my personal life, is that we don't write dates the same way. I know when I was
+working as a project manager for Ford, you know, we had operations in Europe. And so many of my
+projects, I had to work with people there. And, you know, thing about project management is, you know,
+dates and times are extremely important when you're managing a project. And the thing that we ran into,
+and, and now, of course, you know, my personal life, I run into it as well, because like, you know,
+I'm involved with doing shows for Hacker Public Radio, and that's got people all over the world
+listening. So I think we all know how this works. Now, we'll start with March 14th. Now, in the United
+States, we like to say March 14th is Pi Day. And why is it Pi Day? Because in the United States, it is written
+as 3 slash 14, 314. And we know Pi starts 3.14. So in the United States, that seems like a clever
+little thing. Now, people in Europe would look at that and say, why do you think there is a 14th
+month to the year? Now, suppose you want to make a joke about May the 4th. Okay, and that's Star Wars
+Day, as in May the 4th be with you. In the US, we would write that as 5 slash 4. But in most of
+Europe, it would be 4 slash 5. And it can be even more complicated once you drag in the rest of the
+world. There is simply no uniformity. You can see it with, there's a page on Wikipedia, I've put a link to
+that in the show notes, that basically shows you the date formats for every country in the world.
+And it's just, there's no consistency, no uniformity at all. And we're not even consistent in how we talk
+about dates. Now, in the United States, we might well say May 4th, as that does indeed match how we
+write dates. But then we will insist that our Independence Day is the 4th of July. Almost like
+we're not a British colony any longer, but let's use their date format for one of our most important
+dates. Now, in my experience, each side thinks the other is a bit odd, but regards it as a harmless
+eccentricity. But which side is correct in this? The answer, of course, is neither. The one absolutely
+correct date format has been defined, and you can find it in the ISO 8601 standard, and I've put a
+link in the show notes if you want to look that one up. The correct date format is four-digit year,
+followed by two-digit month, followed by two-digit day, because that puts the elements of the date in
+a logical order. Now, why is this the logical order? Well, suppose you were filing documents by date.
+Would you start by putting all the documents from the fourth day, without regard to month or year,
+into a group? Or would you first collect all documents for a given year?
+Now, you might argue that filing documents is something people don't do as much of these days.
+We have computers and digital documents. We don't need any stinking filing cabinets.
+But that only strengthens my argument, as you can easily verify. For example, I'm writing this on
+February 13th, 2025. If I use a date code for my digital file, and I make it 02132025,
+what happens if I later create a file on, say, January 6th, 2026? That would then be 01062026.
+Try this, and you will see that in your file manager, 01062026 will appear before 02132025,
+because all computers treat the significance of digits from left to right. The most significant
+always on the left, the least significant always on the right. Also, when you take a look at this,
+you see why it is necessary to have two digits for month and day. You say, well, you know,
+if I can write May the 4th is 5-4, why do I need 0-5-0-4? Well, try it, and you will discover
+that you need that 0 for things to come in the right order. If you don't do that, then you're
+going to get things that are going to go 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3. It's just, that's what happens.
+So, you know, there's a reason for all of these. Now, with the ISO 8601 standard, the most significant
+part of the date is on the left, and all of your files will be in order. And once you get used to it,
+your life is easier. An example of this is photos. Now, my wife and I like to travel. We're retired,
+and we can do that. And we take a lot of photos using our smartphones. And every photo we take
+uses date, time stamps as part of the file name. And the dates all follow the ISO 8601 standard.
+So, I can easily sort my photos in the order in which they were taken. And since I have over 13,000
+photos in my Flickr Pro account, a little help with sorting them is really nice. I now use this
+format not just for digital file names, but for most of my dating purposes. It really just makes sense.
+And I hope you will also see the sense in this and adopt the ISO 8601 standard. So, this is a hookah
+for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, and as always, encouraging you to support free software.
+And since this is coming from the reserve queue, I'm also going to encourage you to record a show.
+This is a community project, and it will only exist as long as people record shows for it.
+So, bye-bye.
+You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
+Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
+If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
+Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
+Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.