Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes

bennettfeely.com

457 pointsbennettfeely180 comments

Feels strange to have single decimal places in your inch figures. I’d have expected something like eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds of inches, even though the decimal representation of them is unwieldy (1⁄32″ becomes 0.03125in). That also helps you avoid fractional pixels, which is worth doing if convenient: 1⁄32″ is 3px, because 1in is defined as 96px.

(As an Australian, the main place I’ve ever seen fractions of inches is old tools like spanners from before the adoption of the metric system, and that’s all fractions with powers-of-two denominators. But maybe Americans use decimal fractions of inches? I suppose I have seen laptop screens described in that way, e.g. 13.1″, 15.4″ and 15.6″, though people typically truncate to the inch.)

All small measurements in the US are done in power-of-two fractions of an inch. In fact, much of the initial opposition to the metric system here was led by the construction industry, who has found from experience that 1/2" 1/4" 1/8" 1/16" etc. measurements are too convenient to ever give up.

How this that convenient when you then have to use something like 13/16?

Just look at the standard wrench sizes (https://www.cnm.edu/programs-of-study/programs-a-z/automotiv...):

* Standard Combination Wrenches: 1/4, 5/16, 11/32, 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 9/16, 5/8, 11/16, 3/4, 13/16, 7/8, 15/16, 1.

* Metric Combination Wrenches: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Measured in millimeters.

Perfectly convenient.

The standard system excels when doing actual work. If you have a rod with 1" diameter and you need to take it down to 13/16", you can use a lathe to make 3/32" cut. Or if you need to divide up 13/16 into 4 parts, for example, 13/64.

The metric system's strength is teaching in elementary schools where skills with fractions are not as strong.

Thanks for this illustration.

Not exactly. Things are done in decimal fractions until you get down to around 1/64", but any farther and they're done in thou (1/1000" aka mils) or tenths (1/10000"). There's overlap, machinists will use thou up to and sometimes beyond a full inch.

Rulers, drill bits, and wrenches typically use fractions of an inch where the denominator is a power of two, but circuit board design often uses decimal fractions of an inch. The holes in a breadboard are commonly .1 inches apart.

Then the whole mils thing...

Routing a PCB is like constantly flipping your ruler around: Old, classic through-hole parts are in inches/mills, while new, modern surface-mount parts are in millimeters. All electrical aspects (traces, spacing, lengths) are measured in inches/mills, and often the mechanical aspects are measured in millimeters (if the enclosure is not made in the U.S.). And if you use the wrong system, you engineering tables and formula stops working, the whole thing is out-of-context (e.g. measuring the gap in a differential pair in millimeters, the number makes no sense), and an integer becomes a float with three significant digits after the decimal point.

So here is the joke: The electronics industry is moving towards the metric system, one mill at a time. At least CAD programs have a button to switch between the two instantly.

Engineering and machining specifications are usually in 0.001” and referred to as thousandth’s or “thou’s”. Tools like wrenches or drill bits use fractions in the form x+1/2^n like 2 1/2 == 2.5”. It goes down to 1/64, I think.

They also speak of tenths which are 0.0001" units, i.e. "tenth of a thou". This jargon tends to confuse those who are new to it, but has been around for over a century.

It's a really well-sized unit for that kind of work. I know exactly what a thou is and how to keep things in spec, but I'm lost using mm.

Thous, and tenths even more so, are more akin to microns in metric.

Since several of the lengths are in fifths of an inch, I thought it was a secret desire for the metric system.

We usually use fractions, but sometimes we're forced to use decimals, usually when related to computers, since the usual fractions don't translate well to decimal.

Wait, what?

You're saying that Americans preferentially use base-2 fractions (nearly) everywhere except on computers; on computers you preferentially use base-10, even though said computers are going to store the values as base-2?

That's the funniest thing I've heard all week.

> "on computers you preferentially use base-10, even though said computers are going to store the values as base-2?"

I don't understand this comment at all. Most people are not computer programmers and therefore have no insight into how computers represent numbers. They just populate text fields in Excel, or whatever, with numbers. It's easier to use decimal points to do that than fractions.

When I'm not using computers or calculators, I do prefer American-style fractions over decimal point representations. Fractions are a lot easier for me to manipulate in my head. If I'm out in my garage, upside down, underneath a car, and trying to decide which drill bit to use, I don't have convenient access to the calculator on my cell phone or a pencil and paper, and reliable mental math is important. The fractions are easier, so that's what I want.

I believe they're saying it's ironic that, despite the base-2 values being ideal for binary computers, users are having to use base-10 to enter them into the computer and hence getting none of the possible advantage. I don't believe they're making a value judgement.

You find it more difficult to choose between 1mm, 2mm, 3mm, 3.5mm, 4mm, 4.5mm, 5mm, 6mm, 7mm, 8mm drill bits than 1/16 5/64 3/32 7/64 1/8 9/64 5/32 1/4 7/32 3/16 inches?

What's 3/16" in 64ths, while under your car?

(Imperial numbers copied from a website selling a set, metric from my memory of my 10-bit set. I doubt these sets are similar.)

> What's 3/16" in 64ths, while under your car?

12. You just double it, twice.

I'm British, and generally partial to metric units, but power-of-two fractions actually seem quite nice to me.

A feature of some English measures is unbiased division into three equal parts, e.g. Three teaspoons to the tablespoon, twelve inches to the foot, and twelve ounces to the pound (for one of several definitions of “ounce”).

Thirds don’t fit neatly into binary nor do they fit neatly into decimal. This is what the comment refers to.

Weirdly, bennettfeely had 1776 karma when I clicked their profile. Conspiracy? Coincidence?

And 1812 when I clicked just now.

This must mean something!

1812 – that's when Napoleon invaded Russia.

1901 when I upvoted, the year when Teddy Roosevelt became President.

I now have a strong urge to keep peace on the continent and rough-ride over a company under an antitrust investigation.

1821, proudly made by me. You know, when he died on St. Helen

I think they were referring to the War of 1812. A war the US lost, and where the song "The Star Bangled Banner" comes from.

Hey, are you Svip from Paradox forums, of Ulm fame?

> I think they were referring to the War of 1812. A war the US lost

The outcome of history indicates the US won that war. Technically it was considered a stalemate. The US lost no territory, repelled a malevolent empire again, kept its economy & trade fully intact, and won numerous major battles throughout the war. In the following decades the US became an economic juggernaut, while the British Empire began to fade into the history books.

A supposedly mighty empire failed twice in less than 40 years to bring a small nation to its knees. Quite humiliating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

- "In 1813, the US won the Battle of Lake Erie, gaining control of the lake, and they defeated Tecumseh's Confederacy at the Battle of the Thames, defeating Britain's largest Native American ally, a primary war goal."

- "In 1814, the British burned Washington, but the US later repulsed British attempts to invade New York and Maryland, ending invasions from Canada into the northern and mid-Atlantic states."

- "Attempts to smother American maritime trade failed, however, and soon both sides began to desire peace."

- "In early 1815, after a peace treaty had been signed, but before this news had reached the Americas, the US defeated the British Army near New Orleans, Louisiana."

- "Peace negotiations began in August 1814, and the Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24, 1814. News of the peace finally reached America in February 1815 about the same time as news of the victory at New Orleans. The Americans triumphantly celebrated the restoration of their national honor, leading to the collapse of anti-war sentiment and the beginning of the Era of Good Feelings, a period of national unity. The treaty was unanimously ratified by the US Senate on February 17, 1815, ending the war with no boundary changes"

> repelled a malevolent empire again

That's just straight up wrong. The US started the war when they invaded Canada. The British Empire did not want to fight the war. To them, the United States was just a sideshow of the much larger and much more important Napoleonic Wars.

If anything, it was the British and Canada that repelled a malevolent United States, who had had eyes on annexing Canada since independence.

> In the following decades the US became an economic juggernaut, while the British Empire began to fade into the history books.

Uh, what. The 19th century was the golden age of the British Empire, whilst the US remained a small player on the world stage. You must be confusing the War of 1812 to the first or second world wars.

I know its the Fourth of July for you yanks, but this comment is just straight up propaganda.

And quoting Wikipedia to prove that it was a victory for the US is ironic given that Wikipedia states that the war resulted in stalemate and status quo ante bellum. The only real losers were the Native Americans.

Burn down the white house?

Those chaps from across the pond really liked to burn things down in the 19th century, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing being burnt and looted was a bit harsher.

  "This is the reward for perfidy and cruelty"

1932 now, this is getting dark.

1938 :-(

Metric inches or survey inches?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(unit)#International_foot)

Huh, I didn't know about this, that feet and inches used to differ across the world. If only they'd done pints, fluid ounces, and cups, etc. too!

(Cups are particularly annoying: there's British, US, US Legal, and metric. The best recipe-following advice is that it's never going to matter. But it's annoying.)

I thought the whole point of cups was that the actual quantity didn't matter, so long as your ratios were consistent.

Measuring by volume was from a time period before we had reliable digital scales. These days all baking measuring should be done by weight since it is far more accurate. I won’t even consider a recipe that goes by volume. Fortunately those are all written by amateurs.

For where precision matters, 100% agree. For people like me who just want something halfway tasty but also quickly, the convenience of volumetric scoops is compelling.

I have a lot of junk in my kitchen drawers (admittedly a personal problem) and will opt for measuring directly from the bag into the bowl on a scale over digging around for that quarter cup every time.

Replace "convenience" with "low cost of equipping the kitchen" then.

A set of measuring cups and a digital kitchen scale probably cost about the same.

Just checked this with a quick search on Amazon -- most results are in the $15-20 range, with some available for $10 or less.

(I dare say there are probably very cheap measuring cups available, and for a scale you’ll have to fork out occasionally for batteries, if you want to split hairs.)

Mechanical scales were normal in the UK for most of the 20th century. Everyone I knew had one in the 1990s, from around 2000 people started buying digital scales, and I took my mum's mechanical scale when I left for university.

Measuring ingredients by weight has a long history on Britain. The old, Victorian cookbooks use weights.

https://archive.org/details/b20392758/page/698/mode/2up

I’m generally a fan of simple mechanical devices over electronics, but I think digital scales are a good example where electronics really do makes things simpler; and as it’s a commodity (like calculators and digital watches) the electronic version is amazingly cheap too.

The ability to zero the count as you add each ingredient to a single bowl is very useful.

> These days all baking measuring should be done by weight since it is far more accurate.

It also has no "tamping" problem e.g. volumetric measurement of flour can differ in the amount of actual flour by a factor of 2+ if the floor is tamped versus aerated. Volumetric measurements are supposed to use aerated aka first make flour fly everywhere then try to coerce it into your cup.

I’d say measuring by weight is also faster, cleaner and easier for my overloaded brains (how many cups did I put, was that cup semi-full, ...)

That works if everything is measured in them. (At which point obviously you can call it whatever you want, it's nothing more than a ratio as you say.)

I have two suggest volume tablespoon measures.

One is 15mL and the other is 20mL.

That's a fair difference, but doesn't seem to matter a whole lot.

I lived in Britain for over 25 years, and never saw British cups used as a measure.

A recipe given in ounces and pints might be using Imperial or US ounces and pints, but a recipe in cups is American.

(It can matter when something is in another unit, like "4 eggs".)

They're extraordinarily rare in recipes for sure, basically only in old ones.

But if you buy a 'cups' measure it ~never says which of the four it is, and it may well be there old Imperial size. (I have one. Was a popular one on Amazon, nothing obscure.)

the whole imperial system is off and doesn't make sense.

The units were already defined in relation to metric units (officially through the Medenhall Order in the US though the OWM had officiously been doing that for some time, officiously through the Weights and Measures Act of 1897 in the UK as while it defined the meter in terms of yard, as the precision of the meter increased the yard followed rather than led), but different countries used slightly different conversion factors.

Hence international inches, not metric inches.

I’m sure it inherits from the DPI your monitor reports.

I wonder if any manufacturers let you specify which one you mean, or if it’s like drives, where they always pick the smaller one to make a few extra pennies.

The standards boards should step in to avoid confusion.

American inches.

https://designsystem.digital.gov

I think its really great that this exists. Bonus points for it being a public project on GitHub that any American can contribute to. It's also really hard to argue with the licensing terms.

I didn't even know you could set inches!

Happy 4th!

Mostly useful for print stylesheets. On screens it seems to be defined as a constant 96px[1], which means it has no correspondence to physical inches.

[1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/09/css-length-explained/

But the CSS spec suggests around 1/96th of an inch for the size of a CSS pixel. So if you squint hard enough it kind of works out.

Welcome back to HNC News. Tonight's top story: US law makers have introduced a new bill that would require all digital displays in the United States to feature a pixel density of 96 ppi. White house officials say the new bill represents "the first step on the march to bring freedom to the cyber world". More on this after the break.

Anchor: "Let's bring in a Congressman who agreed to comment on this extraordinary turn of events"

Congressman: "I'm glad to support the expansion of freedom to all realms. Thankfully, it is now safe for us to do this that we can defend ourselves against the dangerous 'cypherpunks'. Thank you to everyone who has helped make this possible"

Ah, but since the retina iPhone, a CSS pixel != a screen pixel

I would scream from my office. Almost no one would understand my pain.

But it would make screens great again! Especially retina screens.

Screens around the world are sold based on diagonal inches. USA! USA!

As a European whose only familiarity with inches is that "it's about 3cm" that actually annoys me.

Back when screens were small it sort of worked, I knew what 13", 15", 17" and 20" screens looked like. Since most monitors fell in that range (yeah, I'm showing my age) that was good enough. Anything bigger than that was "damn huge", anything smaller was "damn small".

But now monitors and especially TVs are immense. I see TVs with diagonals of 30", 55", 65"... That means absolutely nothing to me. I have to convert into centimeters for it to make sense. Fortunately some resellers do put the metric measurement next to the inches, but not everybody does it.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm from the US and the unit is kinda meaningless. It's not like I can visualize 42" (without converting to feet first), and because it's the diagonal length it makes it basically impossible to visualize - I have to have seen it to know anyway.

Hah! Yeah I hadn't even noticed that I do this too.

I'm writing this on a 42" display, it was sold as a "TV" but it's just a dumb display as far as I'm concerned, so cheap 1080p monitor really.

Everything bigger than 42" is, in my mind, just unnecessarily big as you have to sit progressively further away from the display to comfortably watch motion pictures.

So, from my perspective, huge displays are what you need for unnecessarily huge houses.

In Japanese, they don’t translate “55"” normally, instead it becomes a “55 unit” TV. FWIW, as an American, the diagonal is unhelpful, so you need to look up the horizontal and vertical measurements anyway to know what will fit on your shelf.

Depends where you are, in France typically inches are used almost only for phones & laptop screens. Anything above (like TV) tend to use centimeters.

Definitely only tested on chrome. The .usa-conic item doesn't render at all in firefox :)

I'm no web dev, so feel free to improve upon it. Think I got the proportions right though.

Coming to US after living in UK for a few years, what astonished me was not the fact that US is using the imperial system, but the US Gallon is different to the UK Gallon...!

Cool! This is the kind of things that I love to see on HN.

This is fantastic. Happy Independence Day!

Beautiful!

As an European this is really cool and unlike others self-loathing Americans here in the comments I understand the idea, humor and originality. Happy 4th USA, you are great today due to the greatness of your forefathers and the men that built this nation.

Given your previous comments, this looks like trolling. Please stop posting like this to HN.

Thank you! I for one am not self loathing and proud of my country and thinks it doesn't need to be destroyed as a prerequisite to getting better

Good to see some patriotism in a time when American patriotism has become faux pas. We live in a great country that doesn't need to be completely deconstructed in order to get better

Patriotism is about fighting for the principles and values espoused in the constitution, and working towards improving an imperfect republic, not worshiping the flag.

It’s a fun project and I like the colors, but let’s not pretend that the flag and the idea of ‘patriotism’ are anything other than distractions from the work that needs to be done.

Interestingly, everytime I hear this I feel like the constitution is treated like the bible, some holy book holding the truth. That is very dangerous imo

The Constitution is THE Supreme Law of the land. It literally is the ‘bible’ in how America is to be governed. The difference is that The Constitution has mechanisms within itself for change. This is the opposite of dangerous. It is the reason slavery was abolished, women have the vote, etc. It is a living document and it serves the people.

I would say one of the tenet of the Bible and other holy books is that there are immutable. It's the words of God, and he doesn't make mistakes. (In theory at least, I've heard the Bible's translations haven't always been kind to the original text.)

That's a huge difference with the constitution, a fundamental one I'd say. And, most of the time, the people I see treating the constitution as gospel denies this very important mutability. The founding fathers were right and will always be right. The constitution must not be ammended, it is already perfect.

The constitution is the document that defines the existence of the United States and all of the rights, freedoms, and protections it provides and aspires to provide. It’s not perfect, but it is a heck of a lot better than blind adherence to the flag and whoever waves it.

Seeing as the constitution defines the United States, I think you get a lot closer to the truth when reflecting on it than you do when worshiping the flag or the military or whatever else it is that July 4th is supposed to be about.

It is also important to remember that the constitution is a living document, meant to grow and evolve over time. If there are problems - and there are - it is up to us to change it.

> whatever else it is that July 4th is supposed to be about

The Declaration of Independence; an aspirational document saying why the constitution was needed, and also a big F-you to Britain and tyranny around the world.

What are some reasons to use inch units in screen-based CSS, aside from this kind of project?

Edit: Removed all sentiment to my profile, leaving a beautifully rational shell of a comment.

If you need to rive a 5cm length in twain and you don't like fractions. Or if you're making a website devoted to larval geometer moths.

> If you need to rive a 5cm length in twain and you don't like fractions

125/127 is as much of a fraction as 1/2.

It's cute that this library is 1776 bytes, but that's quickly going to change as bugs are found and new features need to get added. It seems like coupling a product's name to something that will likely change very shortly is just bad product naming.

meh, call it done. it's modifiable by the user, so leave it alone and let the user mess with it. i have no idea what the author's intentions are/were for the project, but it seems like 'mission accomplished'.

FWIW I'm not saying I dislike the project, I love when people post quirky projects like this to HN for fun. I'm just saying that even the smallest change to this project would cause the author to lose the "1776 USA" marketing strategy. One could say it's an unstable strategy at a local maximum.

What name are you concerned about? The file is called 'usa.css'. The file size is specifically listed right next to the download link. Not unusual. If the file size does change, it'll just be another number, yet the name of the file/project is still 'usa.css'.

I'm talking about the cute fact that the library is 1776 bytes. It was obvious that author deliberately tweaked the file size to be 1776 bytes, to aid in the marketing of the library, and that expecting to keep the file size at 1776 bytes is an unrealistic goal if the author wishes to iterate on the code. I don't get why this is being made into a huge issue. It's a simple observation.

I can't tell if this is intended to be serious or a parody? "All units set in inches" makes it sound like a parody, but the "God bless America" footer makes it sound serious? Hmmm

It's just a bit of fun. Not everything has to be some sort of statement.

I guess ... but "God Bless America!" seems like a statement to me.

It’s Independence Day in the US. Patriotism is the theme of the day. This is just a humorous holiday-themed style sheet with a readme to match. It is not a serious style sheet that the author expects anyone to use.

Perhaps this is a cultural difference, but the entire thing just seems strange from my own (European) perspective. Only in the US do people seem to take pride in their measurement system as some sort of patriotic symbol, which is why I originally thought it was a parody shrug

I'm not even going to get started with all the problems I see with "God bless America", which would be long, tedious, probably inflammatory, and fairly off-topic.

You're reading way too into this. Someone just decided to have some fun and share it with HN. It isn't really serious, but parody isn't the right description. People aren't taking pride in the measurement system, that's somewhat of a joke. "God bless America" is a common cheer taken from a popular song. The UK has something similar with "God save the queen".

Yeah, maybe. Probably. I'm just not a fan of this kind of stuff shrug.

I also don't like "God save the Queen" by the way, or "God be with us" (short for "If God is with us, who shall be against us?" from Romans) we have on the Dutch Euro coins :-)

Trying to imagine someone from France, Australia or Brazil to do something similar and failing.

Système international? We already use french units

No, 'international' does not mean 'French'. Yes, the French came up with it but since it now has international adoption it is the international standard with the United States as one of the last hold-outs. That's what you get when you have a country run by lawyers with very limited input from science.

Inches are in fact an international standard to which multiple nations have formally agreed

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

You'll notice that they are defined in terms of SI units.

I do notice

The metric system is decidedly biased in favor of languages that use 10^3 prefixes as opposed to 10^4 prefixes or 10^5 prefixes.

Uhhh why France?

Within the EU France is quite nationalist compared to others, and yet, I fail to imagine someone there producing something like this. I'm a bit allergic to flag waving.

Ah, I interpreted it as a comment on the difficulty of creating the national flags in pure CSS.

The French one, in that case would seem trivial in comparison.

Hence the reason for my original comment.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21311330/twitter-engineers...

Only a true American patriot who is deeply devoted to the nation's ideals would zealously protect a system of units that has been thrown in the dustbin of history by the rest of humanity.

Was your point against the user, the concept, the measurement standard, or just triggered by any vague mentioning of the United States?

It's difficult to sort through the negative sentiments to get to real point. Be more clear with your hostility and anger next time, would'ya?

I can't understand what's going on with some of these comments. Is it a genuine inability to see the levity of the project? Anti-americanism so strong to ignore the levity? It's humor, people.

> Be more clear with your hostility and anger next time, would'ya?

You're projecting.

I'm projecting?

But I haven't even thrown out 'true', 'devoted', or 'zealot' yet!

eagle screams

Actually a red tailed hawk.

For those not following, the Red Tailed Hawk’s call is nearly universally used as a substitute for the sounds of Bald Eagles in most media. Bald Eagles don’t sound similar.

It's understandable. Bald Eagles sound genuinely hilarious for a bird that big.

I think you meant turkey.

Drinking from an obsolete CE pint glass here. Brexit!!! (?)

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