71–80 of 206 posts
A lot of US "standards" (only US uses them) should be banned.
Usually, these standards are either equivalent to international standards or are only relevant in the home country of the organization.
Next step: metric measurement units everywhere. I've been waiting for that for decades. If "dozens" would die as well, even better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
English is far from being streamlined. In fact it's the only language I know that requires you to learn how to pronounce EACH word. Most languages only require learning how each letter sounds, and maybe a few dozen di/trigraphs, the rest is regular. Not so in English.
You have to learn to pronounce each word with Chinese too.
马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation.
女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman.
Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother.
(I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
I think we should switch to metric, a4 paper and right hand driving.
I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a shitty format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems. There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually... A5 booklet pri…
Anecdote: the office management/finance/HR people in the european office where I work really, really hate US Letter formats, because they don't really fit in "normal" binders. They're the ones who really suffer from this, because they're the only people who deal with paper format documents these days, I guess.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm...
I've lived in the US and also in a country that used the A-series extensively. While I've always appreciated the beauty and math of the A-series, I find the aspect-ratio of the US Letter paper to be much more appealing. A4 tends to be too long and too narrow.
I've tried in the past to explain how awesome the sqrt(2) ratio used as the basis of DIN/ISO page sizes is, but there are some very dumb people on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821947
They are more or less agreeing with you that convenient scaling is a feature. They just use a bad analogy, and you talk past each other a lot. (I agree that they miss the point that you aren't promoting metric)
talideon, you do not come across well from that exchange. You may or may not have been talking to a brick wall, but you weren't listening to one. I more-or-less agree with raldi: instead of fixating loudly on what Turing_Machine did wrong in that thread, think about how you could do better next time.
Anecdote: the office management/finance/HR people in the european office where I work really, really hate US Letter formats, because they don't really fit in "normal" binders. They're the ones who really suffer from this, because they're the only people who deal with paper format documents these days, I guess.