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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

Please don't write in Imperial numbers in an international comunication platform. Most of us don't know what a mile is compared to a kilometer. (Yes you can google it, but you have no 'feeling' for it still, and why put the workload on many that could be done by a single person?)

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The title is taken from the headline of the article, which was written by an American news company, about an American corporation, about a product destined to debut on American roads. It makes sense to use American measurements considering the context.

I'll concede that it is a bit silly for America to still be on the Imperial system.

Reuters is British and was bought by Thomson, legally a Canadian company, in 2008. Its headquarters remain in London.

Or it makes sense to change the American measurements.

Btw I'm not native English and I use English to write this comment despite being born in this non-English country, being grown with my native language, and still being in this country while writing this comment. Why do I do this?

Because we are an international platform.

The submission title is the article title, and submission guidelines specify to use the original title (with some caveats). Hacker News also has a large US contingent. While that doesn't mean everything should be converted to imperial units, it also shouldn't be surprising when they show up. I wouldn't expect people to modify their units in this way in either direction, frankly. As you mention, it's not that hard to find a place that does the conversion, and it's also not that much harder to become accustomed to having a ballpark feeling of another unit system.

Sounds like a prime opportunity to write a Hacker News unit-conversion bot. Unless bots are banned....

In that case, I bet there's a browser plugin which will convert units for you automatically.

Sounds like something that could be accomplished with a browser extension. No need to rewrite/repost anything on the site itself.

A mile is about 1.7 km, you can double it to get a rough sense

Actually, it's just a shade over 1.6 km.

FYI it's much closer to 1.6 km, it's 1609 meters. So for most maths, just times by 1.6 is close enough.

I'd say this discussion is a clear "q.e.d."

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