Comment by fouronnes3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fouronnes3 | Hacker News Reader

When I worked on a radar project, my fellow radar engineers (I'm software) used dB a lot. A lot of them would actually agree with the article, but historical sometimes wins even when you're aware of its shortcomings. Aren't we the same in software anyway? The email protocol, terminal escape sequences, the UX of git command line, etc... Each of those could have an "X is ridiculous" blog post (and I would enjoy every single one).

One upside of dB not touched in the article is that it changes multiplication into addition. So you can do math of gains and attenuations in your head a bit more conveniently. Why this would be useful in the age of computers is confusing, but on some radio projects both gains and losses are actually enormous exponents when expressed linearly, so I sort of see why you would switch to logs (aka decibels). Kinda like how you switch to adding logs instead of multiplying a lot of small floats for numerical computing.

> A lot of them would actually agree with the article, but historical sometimes wins

Indeed – as evidenced by some parts of the world still using non-metric units in daily life or even engineering :)

As a European if somebody tells me the diagonal size of a display in cm or meter, I'm simply not able to "grasp" it. I need to whip out the calculator and divide by 2.54, turning it into inches. It's just how monitors are measured in my head at this point.

When the Euro was introduced, I've heard people say things like "older generations will never adapt to the new currency, they'll always refer to the old denominations in their head" – which turned out to be completely untrue.

Adapting to new units is very possible, but it needs a concerted effort. Absent a good inherent reason or anybody capable of artificially creating one, it won't happen on its own.

Did it? I feel like 60+ year olds (current age) mostly still convert (bonus points for not accounting for inflation)

Wasn't arguing otherwise. If anything, I was illustrating so: I used inch so much, that despite it not being the native unit of length measurement over here, for the specific purpose I used it for it managed to stick incredibly hard.

It was a true concern, I know people who never got used to it. But were 70+ at the time and dead by now, so it eventually gets fixed, yeah.

Using the diagonal to measure the size of a display is also a bit weird because it doesn't compare well across aspect ratios. A 34 inch 21:9 ultrawide is actually smaller (in terms of area) than a 32 inch 16:9 display.

Statistics once got me off-guard because that historical baggage. I thought I knew the probability theory pretty well to carry it to Statistics, but man, Statistics is a very different beast because it developed independently of Mathematics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com