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Ask HN: How do you treat your users that are born on Feb 29th?

3 points by vilius ↗ HN
In the case of common year, when it is appropriate to send a greetings message? I guess the most common approach is to do it on 28th, but in some cultures it is considered a bad sign to celebrate the birthday a before the actual day. Viewing from the programmer perspective it is now obvious that an implementation which compares the current day with user birthday date and performs some sort of action is not a very wise one.

2 comments

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rplnt
If you want to have special case for users born on 29th then make it even more special and send custom greetings with acknowledging the fact that it is not really their birthday and so on...
pasbesoin
I look at it from a formal/legal perspective. By many definitions, the person will not be considered to be a year older on February 28th. (E.g. in the U.S., they can't have a drivers' license yet if they are 15 years old and their birthday is February 29th., nor can they drink if they are 20 years old.) They will be considered to be a year older on March 1st.

Going on that, I view the birthday to, descriptively, have shifted a day later. And calendar-wise, that actual day that would in a leap year be counted as February 29th is instead counted as March 1st.