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Comment by rhplus | Hacker News Reader

8.5”x11” is a standard size for the US and Canada, but not for the rest of the world. Which leads to the eternal problems for any NGOs or contractors working for the US government overseas who have to source Letter size for US gov partners and A4 for local partners!

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Yep. Every time I have to renew my Australian passport I have to buy a ream of A4 paper. Every time I forget where last time's ream was stored. I suspect someday I'll find thousands of sheets somewhere lost in my basement.

Deep within your subconscious memories is a series of you unloading A4 from your printer, thinking about where to best store it, finding 20 reams already there, stacking this one on top, and then promptly forgetting the location.

"I don't put things where I think they should go, I put them where I am likely to look for them" - Adam Savage

I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Closest I can find is his concept of "First Order Retrievability"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyCrHLYiGNo

I recently watched the video where he said it, but I can't remember which one it was. It was one of the ones on the Tested channel, either an ask Adam or one of the questions from a live stream they made in to a video.

One of his "Ask Adam" videos, I believe the same one he discussed Pica pens.

> I really like this quote, but I can't find any reference to Adam Savage saying it.

Maybe, instead of attributing the quote to someone who said it, they attributed the quote to someone who they'd think would've said it.

No, Adam Savage has said something to this effect every time he talks about how his shop is organized and why it shifts around over time. The gist of it is that while most of his tools and common materials are first order retrievable, but theres a whole world of stuff in the shop that can't, so he thinks about where it should be stored and puts it there or there are times when a particular tool or set of tools is always used with some other thing in the shop, so it lives next to that other thing rather than on some rack of the same tools. What is most likely happening is that its all been in videos of which no readily searchable transcript exists, and he is not always very concise about explaining his core practices, so finding the exact quote is non-trivial.

Here's a Q&A where he says something like this: https://youtu.be/og0yYQAN1JE?t=233

I'd be better off putting them where I wouldn't look, that's probably where I'd look.

I've been following this since I heard him say it a few years ago, and I try to impress this upon my family as well

Periodically I buy things like Post-its because I can't find any--and then the next rare time when I really deep clean my office or attic, I find enough office supplies to open a stationary store.

A4 is an antimemetic paper size

Just buy a printer with two paper trays and reserve one for A4 paper. Problem solved!

Seems pretty heavy handed for something that happens at the cadence of Australian passport renewal (10 years in most cases). I believe I replace my printer at least that often.

The trick is, next time you need it, make note of where you first look for it, and when your acquire more, put the newly acquired paper on the first spot you looked for the old stuff.

Ah, but now I need to figure out where to put the "remember to leave a note" note so I find it in 2026.

Leave it as a reply to this comment.

Wherever you store your passport of course.

Why doesn't renewing it online work? is there still a paper based component to it? I don't think I had that problem last time I renewed mine online.

Sounds like a PC LOAD LETTER issue.

PC LOAD A4, you mean.

I went the other way with it. Bought a ream of A4 and I use it for everything. I hope it causes chaos.

In the Philippines, it is even worse. At least four standards (A4, Letter, Legal, and Long Bond), and all of them are necessary for communication with various government agencies such as BIR.

I did not even know anything else than A4 existed, I just learned that now

Oh, come on. Everyone knows about A3 and A5.

For Americans et al. who don't know:

- A3 is (within physical tolerances, anyway) twice the size of A4

- A5 is half the size of A4

- A0 is the biggest size and and has an area of 1 square meter, although it is not a square but instead it has an aspect ratio of 1:sqrt(2) (technically all A-series papers have this aspect ratio because math says it is the aspect ratio that retains itself when halved)

- In practical sense, A5 is the smallest pre-packaged A-series paper that I have personally encountered, although I guess someone would chime that they handled A6 (half of A5) or smaller.

Never saw A6 printer paper, but it’s quite common for note cards / index cards.

> technically all A-series papers have this aspect ratio because math says it is the aspect ratio that retains itself when halved

I never knew this, but that's awesome. Thanks for the info!

Sure, I meant the imperial sizes in inches, never heard about that before. I assumed A4 was the global standard.

Why would anyone care if they received the other paper size? The differences are tiny.

Never underestimate the pettiness of a bureaucracy

Asetter us a bit wider it might not fit in a folder properly and when stacked with other A4 forms it won't match, which can be a flying also it probably is processed by a machine where it might not fit. (Say a scan er which extracts the signature to print onto the passport)

Does it really matter? Letter size is close enough to A4 that I doubt anyone but paper nerds would notice

Filing systems, automatic paper handling systems built for A4 won't process US legal. Passport forms include machine read sections such as signature, as do tax returns.

It won't fit in binders, envelope, storage boxes or tab folders.

It's asking for trouble, rejection is likely.

For sending official paperwork to a judge or a visa or something like that, there are a lot of rules. Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

Someone told me a horror story about a PhD thesis rejected because it has wrong margins (probably something about the margins of the document and additional margins added by the driver). He has to reprint all the copies. Most universities are not so stupid, but if your university is stupid enough, remember to triple check the margins.

In the 80s at UIC, there was famously a woman in the graduate school who checked measurements of all margins and other spacing with a ruler and rejected dissertations which didn’t meet the strict requirements.

In the early 2000s there was a person at Indiana U who also did this. You had to get any dissertation approved by her before printing. And there was a ruler. Are PDFs accepted for dissertations yet?

Dissertations go through the library's Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) service these days. Margins still matter, as do tons and tons of fiddly bullshit.

My personal ETD "hilarity": there is/was a bug in Adobe Acrobat that caused the font I set my dissertation in to glitch/look jagged at exactly 100% zoom. If you shifted to 99.7% or 100.1%? It re-rendered and looked perfect. Only on Acrobat. Not in Chrome or Firefox or Preview or Foxit or anything else. I had to change the font for ETD to accept my document.

Changing the font doesn't sound like a big deal, and in principle it's easy to do, but it means none of the figures match the main text. The line breaks are now totally different, so those typeset line-endings and paragraphs that were rephrased to avoid awkward hyphenations? All gone.

For that and a few other more important reasons, I have two versions of my dissertation. There's the one hosted by ETD, and the one that I actually share and use professionally.

For my MFA, my cohort was the first (and, it turned out last) to submit electronic copies of their theses. I doubt anyone was checking margins on that, although I made a point of making sure I hit all the formatting requirements. Of course, because I (and I think everyone from my cohort) requested an embargo of our theses expecting that someday we’d get NY publishing deals for our work. it effectively means that nobody will ever read them, unlike the cohorts who submitted printed theses which are shelved in the library so someone could go to the library and read them (at least in theory). Our program director mentioned something about some significant writer’s thesis in the University of Iowa library which has a note written inside the printed copy saying, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.”

> Sending A4 instead of Letter will make them reject your paperwork on the spot.

This generally happens not because anyone actually cares about the paper size, but because some employee has a target to 'process 5 applications per day, and then you can go home.' If an application is made on the wrong size paper, thats an insta-deny, and the employee just saved themselves an hour!

It's more about making nice folders where all the sheets hace the same size, and be able to make holes in the same spot in all of them. The employee has to be there 8 hours per day, even if there in no application to process.

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