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Comment by liversage | Hacker News Reader

In my neck of the woods it's called "journalist units": three soccer fields, five blue whales etc.

Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

Article in Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/lynch-nu-kan-ogsaa-journalister-faa-s...

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> Somebody even created a website to facilitate conversion but unfortunately the TLS certificate has expired and Cloudflare now blocks access.

This is one of the main arguments I was using in discussions with people advocating unconditional use of HTTPS everywhere. Yes, in theory it's a good thing. Yes, in theory it should be a solved problem and you wouldn't see any broken websites anymore. In practice, we lost a small part of the Web.

Yesterday I considered writing a web scraper completely from scratch (just sockets). Without HTTPS, this is trivial. Of course, you lose out on much (most?) of the web, but I have a feeling most small / interesting sites would still be accessible.

I have found that, given a random sampling of web content, an extremely small fraction of it is interesting or useful to me (nor indeed is hardly any of it what I would consider high quality enough to use as the basis for the future governors of mankind!)

Even if you moved the entire TLS web to non-TLS, this is no longer trivial. The web requires Javascript to render, full stop. Fetching and parsing HTML alone is totally insufficient.

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

A small correction: some parts of the new web require JavaScript to render.

That's why on many websites teh experience is better without JS. To be more specific, several paywalled websites can be accessed just by turning the JS off. You could even say the opposite is true in these cases: JS is being used to prevent text rendering.

A while back I disabled JS in my browser. I think I even disabled image loading. This resulted in a vastly improved experience. You'd think mere adblock would get you most of the way there, but the difference is staggering.

That's been my way of browsing for a while now and I agree it works for the most part. I have no intention of going back.

It's especially nice to have JavaScript disabled by default, so I can enable one script at a time until it becomes readable. But not so many scripts that it becomes unreadable again.

> The web requires Javascript to render, full stop.

Then how the fuck am I reading this let alone replying?

A small part of the web that was either archived already, or wasn't interesting enough to be archived in the first place.

I get your sentiment but at some point you have to let go. Many websites die every day not because of obsolescence but because the author eventually stops renewing the domain or paying their hosting provider.

It's just a part of life.

Do you still use telnet?

No, it's no longer practical for any purpose. I mostly use openssl instead, e.g. for testing if my SMTP server is up and has a valid cert:

openssl s_client -connect myhost.com:25 -starttls smtp

Telnet stopped being useful a long time ago, is no longer shipped by default, and there are better tools to do things it was used for decades ago.

Good, so you understand perfectly the reasons for us all attempting to abolish use of port 80.

I think everybody understands the benefits of HTTPS, there is no need to discuss that. But the fact remains that forcing everybody to move, even old static websites where potential impersonation and MITM attacks matter little, turned out not so painless as the advocates had proclaimed.

The worst are the money units! Instead of writing "40 millions dollars", they often omit the number, like "millions of dollars".

This means they only use three values: millions, billions, and thousands.

My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong. If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied, which is considered far more bad than being vague.

In a local publication I follow they always round up or down to make the article easier to read. Sometimes they'll prefix the number with an "about" or "roughly" or "nearly" or whatever.

The actual number (if it's available as a fact) will be printed in the article somewhere, but headings, pull quotes and other call-outs will have some rounded number.

For example, recent article's first paragraph:

"Justice Minister Thembi Simelane took a loan of more than half a million rand from a company that brokered unlawful investments into VBS Mutual Bank by the Polokwane Municipality while she was mayor of the city in 2016. Pauli van Wyk explains what happened."

Further down in the article the "half a million rand" is revealed to be R575,600

Only a fabrication if it can't be sourced; otherwise, a source was wrong and you run a correction. When you don't have a number you're willing to point to even that far, that's when you leave it out entirely.

> If you print "40 millions", and it turns out to be 39, you've lied

That’s not what lying is. To tell a lie is to intentionally state as fact something you know to be false.

Being wrong isn’t lying.

What about being so negligent in checking your facts that any reasonable person would know they’re wrong, but continuing forward anyway?

Can’t really say based on only that.

The number is being reported accurately, but with only one digit of significance. Rounding 39 to 40 isn't lying and isn't deceitful.

> My best guess for why is that it's a way to not be wrong.

It's also often used to make things seem better or worse than they actually are. "Thousands of dollars" sounds like it's far more than for example $2,108.

The Register also have one: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

Amazing, and so is the associated article: "In a recent piece on red-giant star Mira, we rather foolishly suggested that the "comet-tailed" body was travelling across the heavens at roughly 150,000 times the speed of the average sheep."

https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stand...

There was a children's book, 'Half A Giraffe', which led to that phrase being used in size comparisons. https://old.reddit.com/r/HalfAGiraffe/

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

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