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Comment by okanat | Hacker News Reader

> > However, US has godawful standards for everything: dates, measurement units, paper sizes.

> Isn't the choice of language and date and unit formats normally independent.

You would hope so but, no. Quite a bit software tie the language setting to Locale setting. If you are lucky, they will provide an "English (UK)" option (which still uses miles or FFS WTF is a stone!).

On Windows you can kinda select the units easily. On Linux let me introduce you to the journey to LC_ environment variables: https://www.baeldung.com/linux/locale-environment-variables . This doesn't mean the websites or the apps will obey them. Quite a few of them don't and just use LANGUAGE, LANG or LC_TYPE as their setting.

My company switched to Notion this year (I still miss Confluence). It was hell until last month since they only had "English (US)" and used M/D/Y everywhere with no option to change!

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Mac OS actually lets you do English (Avganistan) or English (Somalia) or whatever.

It's just English (I don't know when it's US and when it's UK, it's UK for Poland), but with the date / temperature / currency / unit preferences of whatever locale you actually live in.

At least for any country in continental europe "English" is usually "English International", meaning English UK.

Maybe there are some exceptions if we speak globally, hence limiting myself to europe. But I assume it is the same deal.

Certain desktop environments like KDE provide a nice GUI for changing the locale environment variables. It has worked quite well for me, to use euro instead of my country's small currency :')

> FFS WTF is a stone

An english imperial measurement. Measurements made based on actual stone rock and were mainly use as weighing agricultural items such as animal meat and potatoes. We also used tons and pounds before we incorporated the metric system of Europe.

A stone is 1/8th of a long hundredweight. Easy!

My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

> FFS WTF is a stone!

It's actually a pretty good weight for measuring humans (14lb). Your weight in pounds varies from day to day but your weight in (half-)stones is much more stable.

The real travesty is the fact that the sub-unit for a stone is a pound and not a pebble. I have no idea what stones and pounds are, but if it was stones and pebbles at least it'd be funnier

There's a full metric system hidden there: rock - stone - pebble - grain.

I propose 614 stones to the rock, 131 pebbles to the stone, and 14707 grains to the pebble. Of course.

Let's introduce the commonly used unit of crumble which is 3/4 of a grain!

The commonly used unit should be 23/17ths.

Hold on, are those pebbles Imperial or Troy?

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