Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

I propose that we shall use bananas as the unit for request rate (one banana = one request per second); it's obviously appropriate as:

1. Bananas are the de-facto standard for measuring the relative size of things posted online. Request rate is a relative quantity, since requests can have varying payload sizes, transfer rates, or server-side resource usage, even within the context of a single service (unlike decay rate, which to my understanding is usually considered within the context of a uniform sample of radioactive material).

2. The web has been steadily turning more toxic over the past several decades; you could call it a form of decay, but all radioactive decay eventually produces stable elements; no such trend has been observed with the web.

3. While bananas can trip up radiation detectors, they are much more likely to just go bad - same with web requests on your server; if you can't process them in a timely manner, better just throw them away.

I think 1 banana should be 16 requests per second.

This is because a banana has around 12 - 18 Becquerels of radiation. 16 is a nice power of 2 number.

Americans will use any unit of measure but SI units… /s

SI derived units are still SI.

The foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters, does that mean it’s an SI unit?

No, while the Mendenhall order 1893 defined all US customary units off of the Metric system, in SI "Derived units" are defined as products of powers of the base units.

If you look at section 2.3.4 in the link below you will notice that there are no scalars in those derived units.

They will all have the form:

x^n * y^m * z^o

Also note how they define a 'degree Celsius' which is equivalent to a degree K, but then invoke a T_0 to include it to avoid breaking the above rule.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-...

The sievert has a hidden numerical factor.

Tell them that the only patriotic measurement unit is a gun, specifically the American M16.

Since there are multiple versions, we use the latest and greatest: the M16A4. It is 39.97 inches long.

That‘s what American distances and lengths are measured in! I‘m 1.9 M16s tall!

After a while we swap M16 for meters, since the M16 is not only 39.97in, but also -quelle surprise!- exactly one meter long.

1 meter is 39.37”, as is one M16A3. The other A’s are different.

The M16 is capable of about 900 rounds per minute, which is about 15 rounds per second, so we can call the Si "banana" the "M16" in America and have it be the same measure of requests per second.

That’s a good switcharoo right there… Just as remark, it’s 39.37in :)

Bananas are a measure of complexity dating back to the Jargon File. E.g., you could easily persuade a trained monkey to fix a one-banana problem.

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