skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't remember if it was primary school or high school, but I learned it. It was not beside the imperial units. Those were learned first (and very early) while metric was taught as a part of science classes.
If you're just looking to accept donations on Wordpress using Stripe, there's a great plugin called WP Stripe[1].

I've made my own enhancements[2] that you should check out if you like the plugin. My extended version isn't listed in the Wordpress directory but you can find it on github[3]

[1]http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-stripe/
[2]http://michaelapproved.com/articles/a-wordpress-plugin-to-ac...
[3]https://github.com/MichaelApproved/wp-stripe
Show HN: Anonymous Blogging
http://valleyanon.com/ -- A simple anonymous blogging platform for free speech online. I built it so that people can let their stories be known without fear.
clickable: http://valleyanon.com/
Everyone managed after around 2 years, with the Euro. Even older people.
I'm in England, and I view 500ml as a "metric pint"
I briefly checked out the site before it went down. IIRC it's a SaaS CRM for donors. They charge $25/month and up to manage and accept payments.
a gallon of milk, eh? you must drink a lot of it
Joy by Zadie Smith
Metric is taught and used in school (middle, high, university) in the US for any sort of math or science, leastways anywhere I’ve ever been… If I were using any kind of tools to measure things and make calculations, I’d use metric, but in daily life, viz. in speech, it’s easier for me to just use the familiar imperial—especially if I want to make myself easily understood to normal people.
You could poison water. After 9/11 in Warsaw, Poland we had some jounralists sneak up to a municipal water storage facility and pour powdered sugar to water supplies on camera to show how easy would it be to do the same thing with another, more lethal, white powder.

Also I guess doing serious damage to power grid isn't beyond the realms of possibility? You could of course bomb a substation, but I guess there are more subtle (and difficult to repair) ways you could inflict the damage if you took control over a small part of the grid. I guess I should stop speculating and leave the specifics to those in the know ;).

Big (and long lasting) infrastructure failures will have more damaging impact on both the local economy[0] and people's "ease of mind" than a random mall bombing.

[0] - remember the recent jwz story about power cable? How as long as it wasn't repaired, it costed the city $13k/hour? http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
That would ruin the game for most players. It has to be a server mod.
Lybian?
It very likely is never going to happen. The main reason for resistance apparently is the various land boundaries that would have to be re-scaled to metric, which would be a source of endless legal wrangling. Already houses in the US have the longest history attached to them, sometimes all the way from the homesteading days if the plot is old.

I've used both metric and imperial, for construction imperial is lots easier, for physics and other things that involve frequent conversions metric is far easier.

The Canadians officially have metric, try buying a 250x125 sheet of plywood. Everybody will look at you as if water is burning.
Show HN: 9 Months of Chaos
Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating
But that's just one unit. Try doing it with 4, and it gives people an idea of the difficulty involved. I'm not saying it's impossible, just hard.
Yes, let's add another set of measurements, that sounds like a great idea.
MailTabs for OS X Mail app ownership is for sale, 3 hours left.
TopTV and Reliance Netconnect websites hacked by Brazilian hackers
> If entertainment and fiction always had to follow the rules of physics and our world, we wouldn't have anything like magic.

OTOH I'm surprised how much in terms of magic could be expalined given the technologies we have or can imagine right now. For instance, if we ever get our hands on working nanotech, all the elixirs and magic potions that change you in different ways could be reality (you'd just be ingesting a bunch of pre-programmed nanorobots / viruses along with a tasty juice) :).
It's supposed to be against the law in the US, especially to cell phones, but it's still horribly common,
yes! As a US expat in europe, this never ceases to cause me trouble. Plus the A size ratios are just lovely.
People complain about the usual issues: multiple definitions of a mile, the odd ratios between inches, feet, yards, etc. It gets even more fun in agriculture, where the bushel is a frequently used unit. Now, the bushel is a unit of volume, whereas much of the world prefer to measure their crops by weight. To convert between the two, you essentially need to use conversion ratio (or table) for the crop type, along with an estimate of the moisture content of your product. To be fair, this is more to do with a difference in measuring methodology, rather than a failure of the imperial system, but it still highlights the kind of issues that come up between the systems.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel
I'm a little surprised it's happened so early but I'd attribute it to the fact that it's actually cheaper than an iPad. I've got the Acer c710 and actually like working with it even though it seems like the processor is a little slower than my old cr-48.
They (I'm swiss, so I wasn't affected that much by the transition) had a double display (prices in french francs/ deutschmark / lira) for quite some time before and after the introduction of the actual currency (coins and banknotes). It's not a perfect solution, of course, but the point is that the transition wasn't abrupt.
At the risk of being lumped in with the negative/unhelpful/HN-is-on-the-decline comment crowd, and I hate naysaying here but...

Seriously?

1) If you haven't seen enough of these White House Polls go by yet (and there is a never ending list of inanity, for example: http://www.modernman.com/12-dumbest-whitehouse-petitions/) let me clue you in. They do nothing. Nothing. No one reads them. Just go back to wishing on a star.

2) The belief that something like this would ever be on the White House's radar/todo list is honestly just retarded.

3) Why is this even here? This isn't Reddit. The focus of HN is pretty nebulous these days but this is well outside the realm of entrepreneurship and programming which I believe has always sort of been at the heart of HN.

4) Rabble rabble HN is in decline.
And Matt Inman. http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science

More seriously, I can understand the power of habit, but the imperial system looks, well, pretty insane from a non-accustomed point of view.
> `(1 ,a) ; this construction satisfies the definition of list comprehension

How dense you have to be to conveniently ignore everything, imagine arguments, imagine counter arguments, post it, and keep repeating it?

How on earth (define a 1) and `(1, a) related? Do you understand scheme and what list comprehensions are? Or do you just dump "lisp, lisp, lisp, na da ...not listening...lisp, lisp" in response to everything?
D.C. has a bike sharing program but I think they require the bike rental company to make sure there are always bikes available at all bike stations. I saw a guy restocking the bike racks and he explained it was part of the deal with the city in order to be allowed to operate.
To be honest, although I know the obvious benefits of metric, I still prefer imperial simply because of its messiness. I realize the system is archaic, etc., but I still like that connection, as attenuated as it may be, to our ancient past. Use metric for all scientific purposes, etc., but keep that connection to the natural world.

I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial languages like Esperanto, etc. - or our base-60 time units as opposed to some other decimal-based system. :)
I was educated during the conversion in the UK and commonly switch between the two. Speed and distances for travel in miles, shorter distances in meters. Height in feet for people, meters for building etc. Weight of people in stone, otherwise normally grams, liquids in pints for some things, liters for others.

It's confusing, but makes sense in the long run.
> the imprecise Imperial Unit

englilsh units aren't any less precise than SI/metric ones. They're just more awkward and less used worldwide. The cases which I find particularly irritating in US units are lb mass vs. lb force, and HP/BTU/foot-pounds/calories/Calories (and kWh) when all you need is a J.
This doesn't explain anything. Why is the USA the exception?
Connections is awesome. There as a column in SA as well.
As a 25-year-old living in the UK, body weight is mostly kilos (that's what my doctor uses, and what I look at at the gym) except when talking to my parents. Cooking is 100% metric; I genuinely do not know what people are talking about when they quote Fahrenheit temperatures. Lengths and weights are metric, though not clothing sizes I guess. Driving distance is the only thing day-to-day where I think in old units.
Oh, the problem with the Euro was that they raised prices everywhere where they introduced the new currency. What was previously 0.8€ becase 1€, 28€ to 30€ and so on. Economic power also moved from individual countries to the ECB in Brussels. If the US started using SI (Systeme International), it's not like you would be subject to a metric-controlling organisation in Paris. :)
Do people outside the start up / technology world really use Quora? I've never seen anything there that's of value to "real people", and worse, Quora pages seldom (if ever) are returned when I search for something on Google (while other Q&A sites like StackExchange and others come up all the time). I personally find Quora confusing and the content in there more on the navelgazing side. Not sure I get it.
It's our age, I'm afraid. I'm a foot'n'inch-using brit too, but my early teenage kids only deal in metric units (except for miles)
It's usually the percentage chance of dying over the next year.
Not wanting to defend DUNS but what's the process for getting Indian government contracts? In Australia there were voodoo lists of approved contractors, and I have no idea how one got onto them, how long it took, or how much it cost.
Why not use metric volumes instead of bushel? You'd have the same conversion issues converting bushel to imperial weights.
Your usage of 'they' makes me uncomfortable viscerally, but given that you may not know his gender, it actually makes sense. I think it's because 'they' produces an Other-ing effect as well. Just something to think about, and something I wanted to draw attention to off the bat. While I don't think what you said is _wrong_, something like "Someone who has schizophrenia can't..." instead. Or maybe not. Just figured I'd share.

Anyway, schizophrenia is a very complex illness, with five major subtypes and many related disorders. I am not a doctor, and I'm not privy to his medical history, but what I can tell you is that it affects individuals in different ways. It's entirely possible that Terry is only lucid when he's talking about CS stuff; I don't know if that's true or not.

For more, I'd start here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001925/
Experiments in technology & design
I don't get any of this and I haven't had a bad charging experience with my Nexus 7.

I've successfully charged it with at least the included charger and its cable, with an 1A USB charger and its included cable that originally came with an older HTC Android phone, and with yet another cable that was connected straight to an USB port in a computer.

tl;dr: to my experience, Nexus 7 charges just fine anywhere like any other micro USB device does.
>Already houses in the US have the longest history attached to them, sometimes all the way from the homesteading days if the plot is old.

That's young by European standards. Somehow we managed the conversion.
The UK managed the switch from imperial to metric okay. It's really not that hard.
This is because in both the US and the UK, imperial measures are legally defined in metric units. A pint is 568ml, by definition (well, in the UK, the US believes a pint is 454ml, but that's another argument).
Content Strategy Hub: Top Posts of 2012
it's ridiculous
Nice project, I may end up using this for stealthy HN browsing at work ;-)

I wrote a Hacker News plugin for Sublime Text a little while ago that lets you browse HN from inside the editor. If anyone is interested, the repo is here: https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin
\in means "in the set of"

Given the definition "The definition of a rational number is a number that can be expressed as the quotient of two integers where the denominator is not 0."

Let N be the set of all integers and Q be the set of all rational numbers.

Trivially 0 is in the set N, 5 is in the set N

by the definition 0/5 is in Q. Therefore 0 is in Q. QED.
Actually, the "Europe is better and the US is inferior" mantra, which is very widely held in the American left-of-center, is a significant factor in all of those.
Sure, but that's 3 digits versus 1; if the requirement is to express common, human sized-objects with rough accuracy in as few words as possible, it works just fine. Really, it's all semantics (as you say), but there are specific cases where one might be a better fit than the other. It's the inconsistencies in imperial that are truly horrible, not the arbitrary standard unit...
Just a simple measure like forcing all government signs to use metric would go a long way.
How does that even work - do you actually draw a mental image of yourself walking up that person's length foot by foot?

And what if your feet are not 30cm, but longer or shorter?

If you say "about x" you might as well estimate to 10cm precision and say "about 180cm" or "about 190cm".
I think some crime is to be expected, people break the law when society is working, and I guess if you are already breaking the law to survive, if something happens you aren't suddenly going to change your ways.

If the power is out over a longer period of time it's the lack of food and clean water that will cause a problem, mostly, but because of the concentration of people in cities the modern society relies too much on food being brought to us.

I guess you have already thought about this to some extent, I just know that most people in the city have never been hunting, and depending on where you live I guess they never have gone fishing either.

I think I would like to be able to survive on my own out in the forrest/woods by hunting/fishing, even if there hopefully will never be a need.

Edit: English is complicated.
Sentiment is not a good justification in the science/engineering world.
i will try but are you sure it work?
These "apologies" are not gibberish. Measurements units are like words in that they are conventions that enough people agree with to make them useful as a way of communicating. Measurement units exist to help us quantify our world and if two systems do this equally well then there is no recompelling reason to switch.

Besides which, what problem would be solved in the process? People will use whatever units they prefer anyways at the end of the day. As a negative, forcing top-down change would irritate people.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995344
That's great that you feel that way but a unit systems is suposed to efficiently communicate information. Using an archaic unit system because it makes you feel hipster isn't a good idea.
Ugh US vs UK!

US gallon = 3.79 Litres where as UK gallon = 4.5 Litres

US pint = 473 mL where as UK pint = 568 mL
It does have a lot to do with programming actually. I'm building an international application and I have to convert all my dimensions and weights to make it work in the US.
In Canada beer is sold in 532ml cans and bottles (18fl oz?). It's funny to put imported and local beer cans next to each other, although they look the same, the local is slightly higher.
> Measurement units exist to help us quantify our world and if two systems do this equally well then there is no recompelling reason to switch.

The world is already nine-tens of the way through the switch. This is a compelling reason to finish the job.
"Familiar" is a bit off target because it implies that use is a matter of individual choice.

The system is embedded in standards, such as SAE. It is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.

Yes, the system is familiar, but wiping the slate clean and starting anew is not a feature of stable democracies.
That's true! You could explain 'magic' as simply being something your current technology could not explain.

If you were able to show a person from the past a mobile phone, some video or even the time machine you would need to do so.. they would probably believe you were some kind of god or that the things you showed were magic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication#United_Kingdom

Would indicate that the process has being going on for some 40 years and is still not at all complete. That to me indicates that it's not "easy" either.
DNS is centralized? Not as I understand it.
Well, at some point, that part of the world decided that they'd use weight to measure produce, as opposed to volume. So now, if you read a scientific paper from Europe, you will get numbers in KG, likely with no indication of moisture content (since they don't particularly care). So, you're left with an inaccurate conversion to bushels, or more likely, you simply don't use the paper. The same goes for the other way around; there's probably a whole lot of rework that happens due to this incompatibility.
I was raised metric, but still find utility in the imperial system under some circumstances. I use my anatomy to measure things all the time while out on the farm, for instance. You could say step off 914cms, but I think 30 feet makes more sense in the context since you are literally counting your steps.

If you have precise measuring tools at your disposal, then I'm inclined to agree though.
I once designed an ultrasound system that was used to decide the magnification of the plastic lens implanted in a cataract patient's eye. It scares me more now than it did then (the late '80s / early '90s).

It takes a while to learn your limits ... and to become a "sage". Once you become a "sage", you realize that you don't actually know much in the grand scheme of things. More people look up to me now that I know less ... That's pretty amusing in its own way.
can't you register ?
Considering how much of Minecraft can be about grinding for resources or MCMMO levels... imagine being able to script the player, or even being allowed "bot teammates" you can script! Since that part of it could run on just the client (minus small interface stuff on the server for clients to request basic info and send player input), you could go all out with as much advanced AI as you can muster, without draining the server of any resources... while having a bunch of minions that gather resources, fight, explore and/or build (if you have the spare processing power/memory and the scripts.. so I guess it would be dominated by people who have many crazy fast machines and mad coding skills.. but I'd still love derping around in it, too. There's always robbing those bots manually haha..).

Apart from these bots acting on their own, players could send commands to bots via private message or towny/faction chat. Oh, and speaking of towny and factions, or any sort of teams reallly: what if this sort of "Minecraft Robot Wars" competition was set up so there'd be a few human players, with each having their bots who know their owners, but otherwise nobody knowing who is a player or a bot, and who is on what side... ?!

So you could e.g. either all join up in one town/faction and give your alliance away for more efficiency/power, or split up and try to play all sorts of diplomatic games via chat and actions, and try to deceive bots/people long and short term. Minecraft online is so much about trust, I never played another game that came close; and while that can be very frustrating and petty with humans, it seems hilarious to try to code bots that act real or otherwise deceive ^^ Especially if everybody knows that it's the goal of the game.

Please, nobody make this happen, this would destroy my life. Even just thinking about the possibilities is addicting haha.
Show HN: Visualizing audio hacks
I moved from Belgium to the US last year, and one of the things that surprised me was that metric measures actually see a fair amount of use in the States. It makes a convoluted system even more weird, but it's also just plain fascinating.

2L bottles of coke and 9mm bullets, miles except when people suddenly switch to kilometers, 50 meter pools and 5K jogging runs but a 120 yard football field, 2 oz shaving cream but eye drops come in a 20ml bottle and so on.

Guess that's what globalization does for ya.
Same here. I'm one of the (numerous) "founder members" of Streetcar so I pay no annual fee to be a member, this was one of the major things that enticed me to Streetcar in the first place. Luckily that deal stayed in place when it was taken over by Zipcar and I'm really hoping Avis continue to honour this agreement.
Apple store in Paris hit by thieves in heist
When do you even deal with these things on a day-to-day basis? These days most people buy prepackaged stuff from the supermarket. I don't think many people go to market stalls and struggle telling the merchant how many potatoes they want. I mean, some do, but it's rare enough that they would probably figure it out quickly.
> (The Imperial system) is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.

So is the metric system now in most of the world.

And where the non-metric world has to interact with the rest of us, metric is embedded in their processes too. E.g. science done in the U.S. and engineering goods made for export in the US. This comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4996646 discusses some of the same issues.
It's nice to be reminded that there will always be fresh waves of not-yet-cynical people to take up issues like this. But boy, am I cynical about the chances on this one.

The wikipedia article on Metrication in the US [1] isn't the best article ever but is worth reading for mentions of previous efforts.

A few things:
- the US Congress has in various ways 'blessed' the metric system, more than any other. However...

> Proponents of the metric system in the U.S. often claim that "the United States, Liberia, and Burma (or Myanmar) are the only countries that have not adopted the metric system." This statement is not correct with respect to the U.S., and probably it isn't correct with respect to Liberia and Burma, either. The U.S. adopted the metric system in 1866. What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen [2]

Did you know that Jefferson proposed a decimal system for the US before the SI system had come about? (See e.g. [2].) There were also proposals to measure land in decimal units rather than in 640-acre sections.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_State...

[2] http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html
Leonardo da Vinci was a chronic procrastinator. Ironic?
My parents used pounds, stone, feet and inches; my school used kg, g, and cm (born in ’80). I’ve had to take a conscious decision to reset my thinking to metric only and to supply metric values when people ask for them.

This all apart from miles of course, but when all your road signs are in miles and the speed limits in mph there’s not much you can do about that. Who knows what plans there are for that switchover…
Mostly okay. Our roads are still in miles per hour, and we still sell a "pint."

But at least food labels are all metric.