skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doctors and the gym use kilos for body weight, I agree but I don't really hear people ever say "I just dropped a couple of kilograms in the last month" it's always "I've lost half a stone"

I never hear Fahrenheit, which I'm glad about.

Cooking is definitely not 100% metric. The cooking shows on TV still mention cup sizes, pints etc. There's so many recipe books still in imperial and colloquially we never say a 30cm baguette or a 113g burger. It's a foot-long and a quarter pounder.
Now if you can get [to $1 to $2 million inn run rate] in 12-18 months, that’s great. 24 months is probably OK, but at the edge for most people. Or if it’s a semi-mythical lifestyle business, maybe it’s OK.

You know what you call semi-mythical things with existence proofs? Empirically observable facts. As contrary to, say, unnamed $1 MM run rate SaaS businesses killed by competition. I'm having great difficulty thinking of one. Granted, I don't know the histories of all the hundreds of companies that fit the terrible nightmare of selling millions of dollars of software at 90% gross margins, so it's possible you could come up with an anecdote or three...

Also, if you sell a million a year in software, and you need help, you buy help. People who are additive to revenue aren't cheap but they are, well, additive to revenue. Support folks? Very inexpensive - a plumbing firm with 30% gross margins at the same scale can trivially hire them.
They still haven't converted. Miles & Miles per hour are still used for driving.
"to meditate for any reason other than because it's the truth will eventually be self-defeating"

Not sure I agree. You quote a zen master. The book I am currently reading "The Three pillars of zen" gives much less judgmental advice.

I'm not gonna type the whole thing up, but it basically states that there is no problem with people just going after the goal of increased concentration, a state they describe as:

"this is more than the ability to concentrate in the usual sense of the word. It is a dynamic power which, once mobilized, enables us even in the most sudden and unexpected situations to act instantly. Those who have developed 'it' are no longer slaves to their passions."

It does say that this "quality" recedes without practice, it's something you have to maintain by meditating every day, as opposed to the actual deep changes that come from seeking enlightenment.

But it is perfectly fine for people to pursue meditation for benefits completely unrelated to spirituality or enlightenment.

The quote and paraphrasing are all from the book and come from zen master Yasutani-roshu.
I think most engineers would naturally support this idea. The reality is that doing something like this is pretty tough because the current system has so much weight. It's akin to asking a company to abandon a perfectly functioning legacy software system just so that someone can rewrite it.

My dad was an engineer with Caltrans and he told me about how California was ready to make the switch. It was going to be a gradual transition where signage would start listing both metric and imperial speed limits. They had actually gotten pretty far along into designing signs, etc.

He told me that the state eventually killed it because no politicians supported it and there was no strong desire from the public. While I think this is a great idea, I don't have my hopes up.

Apparently the state did a lot of work actually switching over to the metric system (all manuals, standards, etc. were updated to metric) but the plan was eventually aborted in favor of English units and much effort was then spent on switching back. :-/

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/oppd/metric1/DD-12-R1_Final.pdf

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/oppd/metric1/metricpg.htm
FWIW, I am perfectly willing to believe that the various complaints that came up among my friend group were all weirdly-correlated one-offs (like, maybe we are all likely to have done certain stupid things with our tablets in the same way), and that tiziano88 is wrong about the cable.

That said, I've found some other people talking about similar issues.

http://forums.androidcentral.com/google-nexus-7-tablet-acces...

Apparently, in their version of the manual (maybe it was changed after Google I/O) there is even a statement about the cable: "use the charging unit and micro USB cable that come with your Nexus 7; other charging units and USB cables may charge more slowly or not at all".

http://i595.photobucket.com/albums/tt35/StereoMike7/86ee9ea1...

I then maintain that if this is true, they should have provided a bright blue cable that said "Nexus" on it, so I'd always be able to know "ok, that's the cable that came with my Nexus 7 that I should be using when I charge it", as otherwise you end up with this horrible set of folklore surrounding how the charging sucks (as, seriously: how many people read or pay heed to the fine print warnings in the manual? ;P).
> If you want to use approximate measurement, just round it to tens of centimeters

I totally agree. Rounding to powers of ten works comes for free in metric measurements using base ten numbers. This is by design.
Shadow banning is a terrible way to moderate a forum. If the HN guys are reading this - make your process fair and transparent!
It gets even more awkward when it’s not just output: we’ve got a refine-by-height range slider in our system that I’m having to localise.
There's a fairly simple way to protect them, but no utility does it.

You mean a faraday cage? Will wrapping it with foil work?
I didn't think there were people that really tried to defend the imperial system on anything but familiarity. not very happy of having been proved wrong.
How about 10 meters?
This doesn't make any sense. 1ft is ~30cm. Just measure in units of 30cm. Doing the math in your head is trivial.
No. It has as much to do with programming as currency conversion does. It's a problem involving numbers that people occasionally solve with the use of code. By your logic beanie babies have a lot to do with programming because someone built a site to list and sell them online (ebay).

But hey, the metric system seems more sensible to me too.

Edit I don't mean to come off as a jerk. I haven't slept yet and just got a BS call from m boss so I'll probably read this later and wish I were more diplomatic.
It is certainly strange. I guess it adds some human element to the story. Personally, the end part is a bit of a filler for the article. I would have much prefer to read more about how the Sheri was able to explain the ins and outs of an internet business in Africa etc. To each their own, I guess.
> it backs the ideology

I don't think what you're saying is even well-defined. In other words, what does it mean for something to "back" an ideology?

I think "anarcho-capitalism" is abhorrent, but I think bitcoin is ideal for the political system I advocate, which is capitalism.
Are the US afraid of a little challenge?
The Tux3 filesystem returns to Linux
> We use cup measures for flour, sugar etc in cooking.

We do? My cookbooks are in metric units. In fact I own no books that use "cups."
Definitely got a chuckle out of this one.

However, I think the message should be not be (as many engineers may think) that non-engineers are unable to grasp basic technical facts, but rather that engineers are lousy communicators.

Success in business depends on effective communication, especially between people working in disparate specialist fields. Being able to adjust how you explain a subject to the knowledge level of your audience is, unfortunately, a skill that is not commonplace amongst (software) engineers.
Metric system is way more understandable and easy to mentally manipulate. The only good argument against standardizing it, is people are used to it for many years. But so were my grandparents with our country's currency before we switched to Euro. There's an awkward "bootcamp" period where you just convert every unit to the old one just to get the feeling of the "quantity" but after a couple of months the new units feel normal.
It's also worth to notice the way Swiss survived WWII. They sat on critical supply routes, and organized guerilla before anyone could invade, giving them an incredibly strong bargaining position.

Keeping bunkers actually works well with that. And they're not really wasted space — people use them as wine cellars, washing rooms or whatever else.
For the login you ask for an email address. There are plenty of services providing disposable email addresses but I wonder if you need to ask for an email at all. Perhaps an 'Alias' field would be more in keeping with the ethos of the site.
From what I've experienced, we use the imperial units for the same reason we use degrees over radians: the units allow for common use of integer multiples of simple fractions. For some people, a simple fraction of a relatable unit really is easier to deal with than a base ten decimal, and a lot of labor out there simply doesn't need higher precision.

Of course, once you enter any sort of engineering work, well, simple fractions often won't cut it and it's far, far easier to simply use a decimal number. And then there's no reason not to use metric measurements.
Great niche idea however why isn't the site targeting specific keywords to drive traffic?
On the weight thing, as a former wrestler I can always guess my weight within a pound. I'm feeling 191 ... strips naked ... 191.

Did have to strip naked to get the number I wanted though.
The price probably played a role, but I also think they address pretty different markets. Not everyone wants to hold a tablet in their hands all day, while others would rather use a tablet than a normal laptop.
Well old people manage to move from Europe to the US (and visa versa) do they?

Just with the Euro the change should be at once. Then everybody will be fine in 2 years or so.
Every objection that is being raised on this thread was raised when other countries enacted metrication. You are free to read the history of these processes. Nations did not collapse and people learned how to use new units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication

I would more support a petition that was well and cogently written, however.
Space may accelerate Alzheimer's in astronauts
I get the problem, my point was just that it is unrelated to the issue of imperial vs metric system.
My thoughts exactly. Not sure what the point of Quora is and don't see it being around in a year or two personally.
New developers would do themselves a big favor by staying out from PHP. (Saying this as a former PHP coder.)
I didn't mention buying anything in the shops. I mentioned cooking, as in recipe instructions. Though I bet you don't go to Asda and ask where you can find 2.272 litres of milk.

Do you ever do mile-per-gallon approximations for your fuel economy? Cars are still advertised with mpg values.

Do you ever buy a steak at a nice restaurant?

Have you ever played golf or football?
I made a parentheses-less Lisp-inspired language a while back by using prefix (polish) notation with fixed-arity functions. You can find it here: https://github.com/darkf/possumv2
That's another problem: you can re-label all you want, but the glasses, packings and tins are still the same size. Now if you are confronted with remembering 1 pint or fivehundredsixty... that compilcated other number, you will always opt for the easier one. Weather it's about remembering or mentioning. For the same reason we have more easily rememberable increments of 250ml, 330ml and 500ml.
Build Your Own Google Glass
Only vaguely relevant, but I grew up in a rural area in Canada which caused me to learn a strange set of units. For me, highway distances are measured in kilometres, but country roads are measured in miles. Groceries are priced per kilogram, but my weight is in pounds. I readily swap inches and centimetres for measuring small sizes and distances (sometimes on the same project). I am more comfortable with Celsius, but the thermostat in my parents' house was in Fahrenheit.

Just to throw an additional wrench into things, prior to official metrification (which technically predates my birth), Canada used "imperial" (i.e. British) units, not "standard" (i.e. U.S.) units. Because of this and the close proximity to the U.S., one had to be careful about just which gallon or pint you were talking about.

People younger and/or more urban than me seem to be 100% metric. I am starting to learn my weight in kilograms, but I still have no idea what my height is in cm without converting.
There's a couple of things you'd want to consider converting to metric: long distances, short distances/dimensions, volumes, weights, and temperature come to mind.

Long distances: swap out a bunch of highway signs, consider that 60mph (a mile a minute) ~= 100km/h, not too hard on people but a lot of signage needs to change. Feasible.

Volumes: people are used enough to 2-liter bottles of soda, expect the 3.78 liter milk to stay around for a while because of supply chains. Gas prices will be modestly interesting for people, but really easy on the industry.

Short distances/dimensions: now things get tricky and potentially expensive. There are a lot of fractional-dimensioned parts out there in industry in different supply chains.

Weights:
2.2lb = 1kg and you're pretty good. Nobody really uses ounces anyway!

Temperature:
Here's the thing about temperature: converting would be relatively useless because Real People don't do math with the temperature outside. Even scientists don't do math with the temperature outside all that much. For most people, a scale that starts at 0="civilization shuts down because you can't ice the roads" and goes up to 100="heatstroke territory" is a fine representation of humanity's day to day temperature. Why would we bother changing it?
Pretty sure Skype scales PG horizontally pretty darn well. PgPool is probably the least used, least recommended replication method out there. Streaming replication in 9, WAL shipping, and things like Londiste (Skype) are what real large production users use.
Don't know about the power grid, but I think at least in Europe it seems to be networked among several countries. If one country does not produce enough power, it can import power from other countries. Unless there is a single main line between the countries, it seems difficult to destroy.
Hmm, DUNS was discussed in great length recently (4 days ago) on HN[0][1]... Not sure why we need another thread on the topic.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4977889

[1] http://sam-dunne.com/post/39040255207
Interesting thought about the small factory. I guess they would initially be a bit difficult to identify. Or rather, I wonder how difficult that would be. And is the department of defense doing it - do they know what choke points they should protect?
As an example go have a look at http://gordonramsaysrecipes.com/ which hosts a collection of Ramsay's receipes. All in tablespoons, teaspoons and cups.
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.

I knew a civil engineer who first worked in the private industry and later got a job at the DOT.

At the construction company, they did everything in metric internally. Once a design was finalized, they would convert everything to imperial and submit to the DOT. DOT is behind the times, she thought.

When she got to the DOT, she learned their procedure. Before engineers got started reading the plans, a secretary would translate units from imperial to metric for internal use.

The fact that an old contract specifies units of rods and farthings is not an argument for anything other than defining official conversion factors between the old way and the new way.
It's funny how over the years my programming style changed. First it was 'C100', then it was more and more complex with ever increasing mastery of the language and ditto for other languages that I'm familiar with. Now I find I've come full circle. I keep things as simple as possible even if I know the 'perfect' (but more complex) way to solve something I'll stick to simple patterns and bullet proof rather than 'clever'. It took me a long time to come to the realization that clever code really isn't.
Regionalized units have the same damaging effect to manufacturing as closed software ecosystems has to software development. The only reason most US citizens do not feel the pain of this fragmentation is that they do not have to buy anything that is not adapted to the US market. Again, this is because the US is the biggest market on the planet and thus it is profitable for big companies to adapt their products to US standards.

However, supporting several unit systems is a huge tax on startup companies that work in manufacturing and therefore they reduce innovation and competition, causing harm to everybody along the way.
Agreed. Their almost exclusive emphasis on churches seemed odd, because the service looks like it could be useful for virtually any dot-org.

In fact, I wondered for a few seconds whether the site was accessing my browsing history in some way, because I recently had a church for a client and filled up my history with church-related things as a result. Nope, no tracking besides Google Analytics.
height, is another obvious example

Strangely enough, whilst I'm fine with lengths and distances in metres, the minute someone tries to tell me how tall they are in metres and centimetres, I'm completely thrown. It's the one conversion I pathetically still really struggle with (UK -> Poland in this case).
As a Canadian, I'd be inclined to call it the "every other industrialized liberal democracy on earth is better" mantra. Countries tend to converge on an optimal balance of individual liberties and social protections because it measurably works.

The US is a notable outlier, and the various comparative social and economic indicators are pretty damning evidence that the continued American insistence on an 18th century approach to governance actually is inferior to a number of other approaches that have been more inclined to take evidence-based best practices into account.
But why needlessly introduce the math, no matter how trivial it may actually be?
But, but - thumbs! Elbows! Feet!
It is very interesting but can you point to the research which validates your points? Also is eat-less diet supported by some research?
That's so clever it's a miracle nobody thought about it before. Oh, wait:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
The question gets asked all the time quora is discussed, my 2c:

I guess it's hard to tell, but I don't know anybody who isn't a techie who is on quora.

On the other hand, I don't know anyone non-techie using *.stackexchange either.

And TBH, I don't even know anyone using yahoo answers, but judging by the number of results from YA I still get in random google searches, I'd assume way more people find it useful than we may expect.
The milk is clearly sold in pints though, if they were selling it in litres they would've sold 2 litres, not 2.272 litres.
Reasonably scaled measurements are very useful, though. Everything in astronomy is measured in scaled units. Mass is in solar masses, interstellar distances are in parsecs (well kiloparsecs) or light years, planetary orbits are in astronomical units. Similar, a lot of atomic physics uses angstroms.

Of course, that doesn't apply much when the difference is only a factor of 2, like the pound/kilogram difference, but even there people cheat a bit by just saying "kilo."
It's obviously a great idea, and obviously (to Americans) unlikely to happen in the lifetime of anybody reading this forum.

Does anybody else from America remember being taught the metric system in public elementary school, and being told that we'd be switching to it over the next few years? I was taught this around second grade (1981), I think based on the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act), which was not just signed by some random interweb tubers -- it was signed into law by the president. But IIRC, it was a toothless and impotent piece of legislation that was effectively stymied by the US auto industry.

P.S.
Amusing visual evidence that the US system sucks:

http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/metric-...
How many European countries are there? How many of them have had the same government for 230 years?

The US surveyed and then subdivided much of a continent into townships. Land was sold and granted by the section, halfs and quarters thereof. Flying over the Midwest, the manifold rectangles on the ground show how problematic even the slightest of conversion errors would be.

Maybe it's technical debt. But it exists because the legal system is stable.
We got to do a little do-over due to an ambitious little French upstart called Napoleon. That reboot fixed a lot of our problems. The US never got to even think about a do-over until they were so invested in Imperial that changing was very hard.
> For most people, a scale that starts at 0="civilization shuts down because you can't ice the roads" and goes up to 100="heatstroke territory" is a fine representation of humanity's day to day temperature. Why would we bother changing it?

I thought you were talking about Celsius at first...
If it is against the law but nobody enforces the law then it is a meaningless law.

In the UK they rarely enforce it but often enough so companies think twice. They also tell the telephone networks hosting the spam callers to kick them off.
Progressive metal!
people order beer in pints in Italy, everyone just thinks a pint is a fancy name for half a liter.
I'm an American that grew up during the time they "tried" to go metric and none of this surprises me. Volumes are tricky for me, but I have no problem going from imperial to metric. Most other countries see the US and are like, "why aren't you using metric?" and we're like, "what's in it for us?" We learned metric in school and it's great, for exact measurements. Sometimes you just want to use what you have and not think about it. I don't know what 310mL is, I know how to measure 2 cups of water with...2 cups of water.

Speaking of globalization, TVs are still sold and classified in inches :-)
Http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130102-tomorrows-world
I wonder why won't Apple implement some stolen iPhone tracking. Imagine stolen iPhones displaying a "this iPhone was stolen" message during initial activation. This will make small stores owners (which I assume are a big part in sale of said stolen devices) actually care and check the source of their merchandise.
Well the other thing the Swiss have cultivated is their neutrality. From the neutrality and the natural fortress flows their long history banking. Historically the Powers would not think of invading Switzerland, because ... where else in Europe can you safely house your fortune? If you even hinted at it, you wouldn't be welcome.

Similarly, in wartime, everyone needs strictly neutral parties to get a lot of the humdrum business of war done.

Through Swiss front companies the Nazis could obtain critical war supplies (vanadium, I think it was); similarly the allies could obtain critical intelligence through the availability of Switzerland as a staging post into Austria and Germany.
Getting started with Flexbox - 12 Devs of Xmas
To be fair, non-metric units are also use worldwide in some specific fields. In aeronautics, height is in feet. In a boat, distance are nautic miles (not even the same miles as Americans on the road).

Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone?

So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how many inches you want. When you swim, you know what a 50 meters pool means. But do you care how many laptop diagonals you're swimming? Probably not.

Now back to US switching to metrics: I think the real argument in favor of sticking to imperial is the cost and risk of the switch. Risk because confusion between metrics could lead to a catastrophe (example: filling the tank of a plane with liters when it should be the same number of gallons).