alt.hn

5/14/2026 at 12:32:43 PM

Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure

 https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/points-are-a-weird-and-inconsistent-unit-of/

by danborn26

5/16/2026 at 4:50:47 PM

Not to support or attack the rationale behind the css or html standards but these have exact real world SI unit meanings:

   CSS  |                    | Exact Size | Exact Size    
   Unit | Name               | (Inches)   | (Millimeters) 
  --------------------------------------------------------
   cm   | Centimeter         | 50/127     | 10            
   mm   | Millimeter         | 5/127      | 1             
   Q    | Quarter-millimeter | 5/508      | 1/4           
   in   | Inch               | 1          | 127/5         
   pc   | Pica               | 1/6        | 127/30        
   pt   | Point              | 1/72       | 127/360       
   px   | Pixel              | 1/96       | 127/480
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimetre

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#absolute-lengths

by djoldman

5/16/2026 at 10:09:55 PM

Never heard of the Quarter-millimeter before. Strange mix of divisions by tens suddenly switching to divisions of twos

by dylan604

5/16/2026 at 10:40:11 PM

I'd never heard of it either. A comment further down suggests it is Japanese.

Digging deeper, the kyu -- or Q for quarter millimeter -- is apparently a foundational distance measurement in Japanese typesetting, which is metric and operates on a millimeter grid.

by stevesimmons

5/17/2026 at 10:04:19 AM

The article mentions:

> the German and Japanese point is 0.250 mm

It's probably the sanest adaptation of the point to the metric system. A traditional point is close to a third of a millimetre, but that's too weird.

Since the Q is close to 3/4 of a traditional point, it's also quite easy to convert from traditional multiple-of-three point sizes: 9 pt -> 12 Q, 12 pt -> 16 Q, etc.

Although it's even easier just to call those 3 mm and 4 mm!

by twic

5/17/2026 at 5:00:11 AM

When the mcdonalds quarter pounder with cheese came out, the europeans came out with this government sponsored measurement for fast food chains to standardize and compete without adopting american standards. (like usb-c over lightning)

;)

by m463

5/16/2026 at 10:37:43 PM

It's known as the _kyu_ in Japan and used for specifying type (font) sizes.

by WillAdams

5/16/2026 at 4:27:01 PM

Well that there is your problem, LaTeX is using imperial points, and Inkscape is using metric points.

You need to start using SI points that are defined using wavelengths of ground state emissions of a decaying Americium atom.

by efitz

5/16/2026 at 2:56:47 PM

EMUs always seemed weirder to me. Like an unnecessary compromise instead of just using metric outright.

https://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/points-i...

by cheschire

5/17/2026 at 12:12:35 PM

Oh they're a super weird unit for sure. But I do kinda like that it allows expressing both 100ths of an inch and 10ths of a millimetre as an integer. I wonder if they're a carryover from early versions of MS Word when CPU power was more limited?

by snoopen

5/16/2026 at 4:15:54 PM

FWIW, early 1980s Epson dot-matrix printers vertically spaced the dots in the print head exactly 1/72" apart, though I don't remember them calling the distance a point.

by masfuerte

5/16/2026 at 2:59:42 PM

As someone from european continent. Those US measurements units look and feel so hard to work with.

Instead metric system is predictable and easy to work with.

Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

by tariky

5/16/2026 at 3:44:25 PM

In industry, we have. At home, most households have little or no use for US dimension tools such as wrenches. You can service a bike with all metric tools.

"Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes. The latter would cause a brief but massive inventory management problem, that nobody's ever willing to put up with, even if there's a long term benefit.

I believe we made a mistake in how we tried to teach the metric system. I learned in first grade: Metric is easy because it's just math. Most people heard "math" and freaked out. Metric was taught as a bunch of conversions and units. Inches were taught as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

I remember talking to a machinist, and he said: "I hate the metric system because there's so much math." That was 30+ years ago. Today, machinists just read mm or inches from the same digital readout or CAD program.

My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

by analog31

5/16/2026 at 5:58:19 PM

I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.

You hit the nail on the head here though:

> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.

Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.

It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.

by dguest

5/17/2026 at 3:17:47 AM

We have a saying in the US, "a pint's a pound, the world around." As the other post mentions, not everything has the same density, but a lot of stuff is pretty close to water.

The ironic thing is that an Imperial pint of water weighs more than a pound.

by analog31

5/17/2026 at 12:00:53 AM

> A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg

Okay but what about the off chance you’re measuring something other than water?

by arealaccount

5/17/2026 at 5:35:48 AM

Estimate as water and fudge it a bit. Conveniently the fudge factor is just the specific gravity and is already tabulated as such in a lot of fields.

But it turns out that water is a pretty good bet most of the time:

- Settled snow is around 0.25

- Dried wood is around 0.5

- Soil is around 1.2

- Rock is around 2.5

Which is pretty good if you want to answer "how much does that truck / ship / mountain / lake weigh?".

Of course there are some anomalies: Tungsten is around 20, but it's not like imperial units help here, and the name literally translates to "heavy rock".

by dguest

5/16/2026 at 4:08:14 PM

> "Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes.

You adopt ISO sizes FFS. They are international standards. You really want to invent a whole new set of incompatible 'standards'?

You think the US is the first to go through this? Australia, Canada, and the UK went metric in the 1970s (we also decimalised our currencies). Yes it was challenging for some adults but mostly pretty easy for kids. People adapted. Industries adapted. Now we hardly think about it except when dealing with Americans or in some historical contexts.

by perilunar

5/16/2026 at 4:20:57 PM

For the piping example, you have all the installed infrastructure that's in the old "IPS" (straight) and "NPT" (tapered) sizes. So now a plumber needs to carry additional fittings or carry conversion fittings. Easier to just stay with what we have.

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 4:29:50 PM

Of course it's easier to stick with what you have in the short term. Change is difficult. You do it for the long term gain. If you had done it 50 years ago like the rest of the English-speaking world you wouldn't be in this mess.

by perilunar

5/17/2026 at 7:55:49 AM

Half of our houses were built 50 years ago. Even if we had a 'tough but fair' autocrat simply declaring we're moving all newly-installed everything to metric standards, we're going to have to have both kinds of pipes on the truck for 50 more years. That's 2x the inventory to manage for every trade that works on any kind of construction or servicing of equipment.

We can still do a better job teaching metric to kids, without needing to tear down every building to replace all the 2-by-4s with "50x100s." But yeah, that means dealing with the fact we don't have everything following the standards and our pipe threads, screws, etc. will always be different to yours.

by xp84

5/17/2026 at 8:03:59 AM

> Half of our houses were built 50 years ago

That’s true of everywhere in the world at the time they made the switch (give or take a decade). Why is that a problem unique to America?

by digitalPhonix

5/17/2026 at 8:09:34 AM

Didn't France go metric a few centuries ago? Anyway, I suspect there are at least 10 times as many buildings, and 10000 times as many machines deployed, in 2026 America than the number you'd get by adding every European country's stats at the year they really seriously standardized metric.

You can make a better case that we were fools to not stay the course in the 1970s than a case that we should try it today. Even the 70s seem more like the very tail end of a window. 1776 would have been a great time to do it!

by xp84

5/17/2026 at 12:58:08 PM

A lot of the commonwealth countries switch ~1970 (UK, Australia, Canada at least).

Why does the absolute number matter? Every trades truck/stockpile will need to stock double for some time, not some absolute value increase.

by digitalPhonix

5/16/2026 at 4:41:29 PM

What's the long term gain? It's just a unit of measure, ultimately arbitrary. Standards bring efficiency, and we already have a standard.

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 9:54:35 PM

Exactly: the entire world has a standard, and the US is doing its own weird thing.

The long-term gain is being able to sell your stuff to the rest of the world, and being able to import stuff from the rest of the world without paying a Weird Format Tax.

Would you rather manufacture stuff for 8 billion people, or for 340 million?

by crote

5/17/2026 at 4:31:31 PM

You could also argue that North America should convert to 50hz 220VAC for electric services, so that one line of products could be sold to the entire world. But the switching costs would be huge and manufacturers generally have no problem making the few changes that are needed to make products for export, or when possible designing their products to accept either standard.

Cutting metric or imperial threads in a pipe fitting is a programming code change in a CNC machine, and maybe using a different cutting tool. Easily done for an order that's going to be exported.

So I don't think manufacturing is a big concern, and not the reason we've stayed with old standards in many cases.

by SoftTalker

5/17/2026 at 6:34:15 AM

Maybe avoid to crash half a billion $ probe on Mars surface?

by mahkeiro

5/17/2026 at 8:04:36 AM

k what's your quote on replacing every screw and bolt in America (and of course tapping new metric threads for those screws and bolts to go into). Also replace every pipe in every house.

There would need to be like a minimum 50-year transition where everything will be worse (keep both of everything in stock because both old and new need maintenance) and we'll probably have more confusion and mistakes over what units were being used during that half-century.

I love metric. I think it's awesome. But I'm not sure what anyone expects anymore. We attempted the same half-assed conversion Canada did in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President and people were pretty sane. We did only a little bit worse than they did[1] though. It boggles the mind to imagine a US populace as determinedly political and polarized as they are now adopting even a slightly inconvenient lifestyle change just because the government said so. Therefore, "you guys should just adopt metric" seems less than productive.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Metric/comments/hmyt6a/how_to_measu...

by xp84

5/17/2026 at 1:22:01 AM

The UK continues to live on in a weird metric-imperial mash up. Beer is still measured in pints, lots of food (but not all!) is measured in pounds, distance and speed limits are sign-posted in miles, but the sizes of most things in life are in cm, mm and meters.

by PaulDavisThe1st

5/17/2026 at 1:56:19 AM

Not to mention measuring people's weight in stone

by SturgeonsLaw

5/16/2026 at 4:12:58 PM

Imperial measurements do have the benefit of more even divisors than metric.

Pretty common to talk about measurements of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an inch and find those graduated on a ruler. Or 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/8 of a cup for liquid measures, etc.

But then machinists generally work in thousandth or ten-thousandths of an inch.

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 10:04:21 PM

The problem is that fractions suck to do math with. Rather than doing basic addition you have to do a divisor conversion and then do an addition. Heck, the third-pounder burger failed because a significant fraction of the American consumers believed it was smaller than a quarter-pounder!

And most of the kitchen stuff is a chicken-and-egg problem: the US used 1/2 cup because that's what it is used to, the rest of the world has recipes calling for 50g of flour. If the US was used to weight-based measurements everyone would have a kitchen scale with 0.1g precision lying around, instead of a bunch of measuring cups.

by crote

5/17/2026 at 12:00:26 AM

The only evidence we have for the “Americans were too stupid to understand that 1/3 was bigger than 1/4” story is from the memoirs of the A&W CEO at the time referencing some unnamed market research performed by some unnamed firm. A person who has a vested interest in explaining why their failure to turn around a sinking company was due to external factors beyond their control. It also implies that in a culture where every kitchen has at least one set of stackable measuring cups in 1/4, 1/3 and 1/2 sizes, and a culture where you would order meat from the deli counter at your grocery store in 1/4 or 1/2 lb increments was suddenly and completely incapable of remembering their basic fraction sizes when comparing the cost of a hamburger. Personally while it makes for a cute story, I really just don’t believe it.

by tpmoney

5/17/2026 at 3:45:46 PM

Fractions are often easier. What's half of 3/8 inch? Easy, 3/16. And you'll find both those graduations on most rulers or tape measures.

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 10:20:24 PM

You sound like an 8th grader asking the teacher when will we ever use this in real life type question. Fractions aren't that bad when like anything in life you are practiced in using them. Let's see what's faster in a kitchen, scooping something by measuring cup or trying to get a specific weight by 0.1g precision? I'm home after working all day trying to feed myself and mine. I'm not trying to win a start for my restaurant by the Michelin man.

These incessant arguments of "why is someone doing something different than what I'm used to so stupid" are funny if not tiring. Why not ask why are there so many different spoken languages in the world instead of just speaking like me? We could go into if Rust is better than Go, or why Romulans are better than Klingons. The problem is that nobody wants to understand the differences and just want to rag on the person opposing their views. Yawn

by dylan604

5/17/2026 at 8:07:52 AM

> scooping something by measuring cup or trying to get a specific weight by 0.1g precision

Why are you conflating speed and precision? A cup-ish measure would be 200g and no one is measuring that to .05% accuracy.

On the flip side, good luck getting .1g precision out of a measuring cup if you need it.

by digitalPhonix

5/17/2026 at 8:24:50 PM

I'm pretty sure my reasoning was in my comment. Nobody making dinner wants to weigh things out. That's why there are measurements like 'add a pinch', 'just a skosh', or similar. Pretty much the only people I know that measure would be bakers.

The point you're not willing to accept is that there's no dying need to be that precise and using "cup-ish" measures is good enough and works just fine.

by dylan604

5/17/2026 at 9:13:34 PM

“About 5 grams”, “approximately 250ml”.

Precision is orthogonal to the unit.

by digitalPhonix

5/16/2026 at 5:19:43 PM

I'm a fairly experienced machinist, though it's not my occupation. At the present time, machinists have the least problem with metric. The unit conversions are built into all of the machines and measuring tools. You press the inch / mm button. The ruler has inches on one side and mm on the other.

Everything is standardized on IEEE floating point. ;-)

It's a headache to maintain collections of parts and tools such as taps and dies for both standards.

The biggest shift is simply the obsolescence of old stuff, and emergence of new stuff. And industries have adopted the practice of reducing the overall variety of parts needed. I work in the development of industrial measurement equipment, and where a design might once have had 30 different sizes of fasteners, now it's 5, all metric. Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more. Washers are integrated into the screws. No more "philips" or flat head screws. And so forth.

by analog31

5/16/2026 at 5:42:34 PM

> Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more.

What is the modern approach where nuts/bolts and spacers would have been used?

> No more "philips" or flat head screws.

Torx? Rivets? Something else?

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 7:51:47 PM

Threaded holes and rivnuts. Now a rivnut is a part, but the fabricator keeps it in stock instead of us. More shaped stampings and castings so that spacers aren't needed. Reducing parts also reduces handling of parts. Probably CAD makes it easier to design these things in.

At where I work, we use hex head (trying not to say Allen). I see lots more Torx in products as well.

by analog31

5/17/2026 at 3:25:19 AM

Because I don't want to deal with a hundred of anything, and I don't want to deal with decimal points. I want everything I measure to be near single digit numbers. Hence, inches for common dimensions like a "2x4". I can handle something being 5 1/4 inches. How the hell large is 133 mm? Humans are not good at intuiting numbers far from unity.

Miles are great. The typical highway speed limit is about a mile a minute. You can easily lower bound how long it will take to get somewhere if you know how far it is in miles.

In cooking, I often need to halve quantities in recipes, hence pounds and ounces. Watching cooking channels give metric quantities is absolutely baffling to me. You see things like 175 mL. That is 2 sigfigs too many.

by CyLith

5/17/2026 at 6:41:08 AM

You don't want to manage a decimal point but you are fine adding two set of units? Like in 6'3?

by mahkeiro

5/17/2026 at 3:30:19 PM

Yes. I see the 6 and I think: pretty tall, just a bit taller than me as a baseline. Then the 3 indicates another bit more. At no point am I adding the quantities to achieve a total. It’s two pieces of information in something akin to a binary search.

I do woodworking and framing and approach is similar. Measure out to 6 feet first, then move out 3 inches more. It’s iterative refinement. To measure lengths I always do a few bisections like 3 feet, 2 inches, and 3/4 plus a sixteenth. I can remember a sequence of 3 or 4 integers for about a minute, long enough to transfer the measurement. Give me something like 135mm, and I’ll forget in a few seconds.

by CyLith

5/17/2026 at 3:22:25 PM

When Europe switches to metric time I'll switch to reporting centimeters for my height.

by Jach

5/17/2026 at 3:40:19 AM

>> That is 2 sigfigs too many

Don’t take up baking then, where the difference between 175 mLs of water and 200 mLs of water can be the difference between unworkable dough and the perfect pie crust.

by nonfamous

5/16/2026 at 3:20:00 PM

The U.S. uses metric pretty much everywhere that is important, in most science, engineering, and medicine. Specific trades and common household things remain imperial due to inertia and no one really caring. It is much more accurate to say the U.S. has a dual system. We learn metric in school like everyone else.

by cityofdelusion

5/16/2026 at 4:19:41 PM

Can't wait for us to adopt the metric Avogadro constant. I wonder what units they use for the Hubble constant in Europe (love me some megaparsecs).

by Jblx2

5/16/2026 at 9:12:48 PM

Because you have to ask what benefit will it serve in exchange for the effort? In places werwere it really matter we already do, and conversions are pretty simple otherwise. Sometimes fractional units are just slightly easier for a specific task, and having used them our whole lives they are second nature.

To me asking why we don't have a single measuring standard is similiar to asking why we don't all agree on a single language. Sometimes it would be easier, sometimes it wouldn't, but in the end it doesn't matter all that much.

by AngryData

5/16/2026 at 3:42:59 PM

Points are not American, they are used for typography in Europe and everywhere else equally as much as in the US.

The metric system is poorly suited for font sizes. Most designs require a series of sizes within a small range: a typical book or poster might use 9pt for footnotes, 12pt for main text, 16pt for subtitles, and 24pt for titles.

Aesthetically speaking the most attractive ratios of sizes are small ratios like 3:2 and 4:3. Using points it is very easy to construct an attractive range of font sizes like my example above. It is difficult to imagine how this would look in a metric system that's not a mess.

by iacelmiv

5/16/2026 at 4:23:44 PM

Font sizes would be perfectly fine in millimetres. 9 pt ≅ 3 mm, 12 pt ≅ 4 mm, 18 pt ≅ 6 mm, 24 pt ≅ 8 mm. The difference is about 6%.

by perilunar

5/16/2026 at 10:39:17 PM

A 6% difference in type size would markedly change number of characters per line, number of lines per page, and pagination.

by WillAdams

5/17/2026 at 3:18:05 AM

[dead]

by perilunar

5/16/2026 at 3:45:41 PM

My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time, they prefer to not learn and be confused all the time instead of adopting the better way. Unless it's mandatory, such as in military or aviation, then they are happy with it and feel like part of a special in-group.

by projektfu

5/16/2026 at 3:56:39 PM

>something rational like 24-hour time

Shouldn't the real smarties be using 10-hour days using metric time? 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.

https://timeity.com/metric-time/

by Jblx2

5/16/2026 at 4:09:52 PM

Clearly we should just use seconds, hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, and stop worrying about whether our time lines up with the celestial movements.

by projektfu

5/16/2026 at 9:06:38 PM

The books Fire Upon the Deep use seconds like that, no hours or days or weeks, just larger 10x multiples of seconds.

by AngryData

5/16/2026 at 4:13:44 PM

And here I thought maybe time zero would be the big bang, but alas, that is too celestial, so I guess January 1st, 1970 it is. Or whatever that is in the metric calendar (10 months per year, 10 days/week, 100 days/month)

by Jblx2

5/16/2026 at 4:55:40 PM

It's a bit difficult to use the Big Bang as time zero when the current uncertainty of when it actually happened ±0.02 billion years, which is what, a thousand times longer than all of recorded human history.

We could use the birth date of that jewish prophet, except we'd still be off by a few years. Oh well, in a few centuries no one will care, and we'll just use Unix Epoch.

by perilunar

5/16/2026 at 4:01:10 PM

My grandfather gave me a mechanical pocketwatch stopwatch that counts tenths of a minute. Every gradation on the dial is 6 seconds. It's bizarre.

by stackghost

5/16/2026 at 10:30:53 PM

French people did metric, meanwhile they prefer "four-twenty and fourteen" to "ninety-four."

by pessimizer

5/17/2026 at 2:22:22 AM

> My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time

24-hour time is terrible. An analog clock doesn't have that written on it...

by dataflow

5/16/2026 at 3:58:07 PM

Reddit level post.

If Europeans are so smart, why didn't they commit to metric time which is soon much easier to understand?

by drstewart

5/16/2026 at 4:12:34 PM

At least 24 hour time is monotonic through the day. Baby steps.

by projektfu

5/16/2026 at 10:07:46 PM

Don't forget about DST and leap seconds!

by crote

5/16/2026 at 10:58:39 PM

I only use UT1, of course.

by projektfu

5/16/2026 at 4:30:41 PM

Unless you're talking to someone in a different time zone.

Europe should just have one time zone on a one day clocks divided into decidays and centidays.

by parineum

5/16/2026 at 4:42:14 PM

> Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

The maga people are ready to die on this hill.

by LtWorf

5/16/2026 at 2:10:44 PM

From the title I thought this was going to be about basis points, as used in finance. (A basis point is one hundredth of 1 percentage point).

by PopAlongKid

5/16/2026 at 2:29:47 PM

I thought it was going to be about story points.

by RexM

5/16/2026 at 2:38:21 PM

I thought it was going to be about story points and I was going to wholeheartedly agree with the premise

by sevenseacat

5/16/2026 at 3:00:41 PM

what do story points measure?

by NooneAtAll3

5/16/2026 at 3:13:53 PM

It’s an imperial measure of the number of sentences in a story. The metric version is the “Gilgamesh”, a reference to a prototype story maintained by ISO in Paris.

by clickety_clack

5/16/2026 at 4:28:40 PM

* gigamesh

by virgil_disgr4ce

5/16/2026 at 10:28:25 PM

Except if you're posting stories online, in which case it's most likely a gibimesh, though people use the terms interchangeably

by Shish2k

5/16/2026 at 8:28:30 PM

It's a relative abstract measure of case size that's the same across experience levels. A junior and a senior should both be able to agree that a given case is small/medium/large relative to the kind of cases their team usually handles, even if the case would take two hours for the senior and two weeks for the junior. Story points codify small/medium/large into numbers (Fibbonacci is a common choice, like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, where 13 is often "too big for one sprint").

Mapping story points to time doesn't really work for individual cases because of those different experience levels, it's going to heavily depend on who does the case. Instead, you track story points competed in total for the team for the entire sprint - the different experience levels average out into something consistent, like 30-35 story points per sprint.

"Velocity" is related scrum terminology, and is the mapping of that whole-team measure back to time. A previous team that understood how this worked and stuck to it had those story points per two-week sprints, so we could estimate things months out with reasonable accuracy despite the different skill levels.

I also thought this post was going to be about story points because it's a common complaint from people who don't understand the "different experience levels" part. If everyone on the team reliably took the same amount of time for a given case, then yeah, you could cut it out and just estimate in time. But it's not for that.

by Izkata

5/16/2026 at 3:14:30 PM

Nothing, except a story's size relative to other stories estimated by the same team.

by syncsynchalt

5/16/2026 at 4:02:56 PM

I had a manager institute PERT estimations for every task/sticky, which was interesting but not necessarily worth it.

In the end, the work takes the time it takes, and nobody knows how long that will be ahead of time. Fiddling around with estimates helps with ranking but not prediction.

by shermantanktop

5/16/2026 at 4:25:20 PM

If the work takes the time it takes and nobody knows how long with that, why not track and iterate on the predictions versus outcomes creating experience and data that would enable prediction and prediction refinement?

Over time the estimates should be trending closer to outcome, as the process improves in breaking down and specifying the details that impact prediction & work, and the statistical gap from previous estimates gets baked into future estimates. The process, capabilities, ability to identify diverging factors, and correction of initial estimates should all be maturing concurrently.

The entire point of using fuzzy numbers is to enable fuzzy yet usable predictions. Similar work in a similar situation, armed with specific statistics and outcome, should be highly predictable at the team and individual level over time.

by bonesss

5/17/2026 at 1:24:57 PM

Sure, that’s the theory behind middle management. Unfortunately the bosses who run the places keep saying yes to things that have never been done before and for which few priors exist.

by shermantanktop

5/16/2026 at 9:55:44 PM

Alternately, it captures a bit of so many things (tech-debt in codebase, mental health of team, task risks) that it's best to avoid trying to link it to any one thing.

The past X weeks of point-estimates is what you use to forecast which things fit in the next Y weeks, and you can't have both stability and forecast accuracy. Any attempt to permanently "peg" a point to a certain number of man-hours is going to interfere with that accuracy.

by Terr_

5/16/2026 at 2:20:57 PM

That's why my favorite unit is the px, a.k.a., 1 centiinch.

by zetanor

5/16/2026 at 2:53:08 PM

I thought px was an abbreviation of pixel which doesn't have a dimension?

by fluidcruft

5/16/2026 at 3:21:55 PM

Pixels have pitch, which is the distance between pixels. That is what is usually meant when talking about px as a measurement. It is analogous to dpi or ppi or the metric version.

by Tagbert

5/16/2026 at 4:01:32 PM

Does the pitch describe the distance between the edges of the pixels or between the centers?

by ethmarks

5/17/2026 at 5:03:48 PM

center to center.

by Tagbert

5/17/2026 at 7:00:23 AM

This is why Microsoft access had twips

by ivolimmen

5/16/2026 at 2:37:48 PM

I don't know what happened in my brain but i expected a piece about points as in keeping scores. Maybe about how we evolved from binary results (alive/dead in early human competitions) to more complex systems. I'd say humans played games long before being able to count. Of course competition is inherent to human nature. But i'd say, without getting into any philosophical debate, a certain amount of compassion and empathy is as well. Which must have resulted in early ideas of fairness. Especially when respect and status seem to be crucial to society.

So, how and when did points come into play? ...

Well, ok. I stop procrastinating for now (i hope). I hate my brain.

by endofreach

5/16/2026 at 3:00:18 PM

Not sure, but typefacing/fonts is absolutely cursed with this stuff. I'd be shocked if there isn't a true type font that runs DOOM. There's a reason Microsoft pushed font rendering out of the kernel in Vista. (Technically, they started the work on it)

by butvacuum

5/16/2026 at 7:39:17 PM

Here was me thinking it was about getting points on HN

by My_Name

5/16/2026 at 3:20:03 PM

taht`s perfect 4 europeans

by agus4nas

5/16/2026 at 1:50:53 PM

TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The mention of

https://frinklang.org/

is kind of interesting --- hadn't heard of it before --- may need to revisit the "ProportionBar" tool which I made ages ago....

by WillAdams

5/16/2026 at 2:59:57 PM

> TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The distinction ends up being important if you need compatibility with some document format, or with common typesetting expectations. But if there weren't a concern of surprising people with certain expectations of font-picking widgets, I'd argue that the better choice would be millimeters.

4mm is a great default font size, and going up by one integer mm at a time is a reasonable step size (it's just under 3pt).

by JoshTriplett

5/16/2026 at 6:37:58 PM

In Japan, a common measurement of font size is _kyu_ (q) one-fourth of a millimeter (0.25mm).

by WillAdams

5/16/2026 at 4:26:57 PM

[dead]

by yhdf

5/15/2026 at 3:33:02 AM

Just posted the following poorly-fleshed-out comment there:

So disappointed that this document, as much as it obsesses over obscure physical quantities no one cares about, makes no mention of THE FUCK.

1 fuck is equal to the amount of concern you have about something below which you cannot achieve without having no concern at all, as which giving "zero fucks" is defined. "Absolute zero fucks" would be the formal terminology.

For preliminary purposes, we can assume 1 fuck = 1 shit = 1 damn, but must account for the possible existence of a big-point-vs-printers-point style situation. Also they could be drastically different, like if 1 shit given about global warming would be equivalent to 299_792_458 fucks or something like that.

I have very little knowledge about the *real* machinations behind the standardization of measures (a tinfoil conspiracy kook would call it an Agenda 21, or 21 Agendas One, but I'm not going there), I want this to be discussed.

by dsevil

5/16/2026 at 2:26:50 PM

[dead]

by abanana