Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/offshoring-roulette-lessons-from-outsourcing-to-india-china-and-the-philippines/ <comment><USER2> Pretty much my experience re Indian outsourcing. What I used to find most annoying is that 'manager' mentality: I appreciate a lot of people like to boss people around and,as the author states, it's kind of safer (and better paid) step on a corporate ladder, but boy some of them are useless.. You talk to the guy, he agrees to pretty much anything,even If I'd ask to build a lift to mars.Then eventually he comes back with dev's questions.I provide very detail and explicit info on what I need(For anyone who has any knowledge in the tech they used it would almost be like asking to write a couple of loops).Again lots of yes,yes,yes.Then silence and again even more questions. Manager's function is absolutely useless in this case. Also, if the churn rate is low, the companies usually have very capable people who tend to know their shit.

<comment><USER3> It's probably because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

Edit: Apparently nobody gets this reference anymore, and I'm old.

<comment><USER4> Take my upvote fellow oldie. Office Space can't be mandatory school curriculum any more :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever offshoring comes up I'm reminded of my experience trying out an Indian development firm some years back. I decided to give it a try with an extremely simple feature for autotempest.com, just opening up a modal window with some advanced search features. Specified what exactly should be included, and it was nice and encapsulated so I figured it would be a perfect test.

To summarize, the results were literally _comically_ bad. All kinds of hand massaged spacing using nbsp's and weird off by one pixel issues and such—things that to do wrong as they did must have taken an order of magnitude longer than it would have to do them correctly.

So, I went through several rounds of pointing out really obvious issues and asking for revisions. They would apologize profusely and say essentially that the person who had been working on it previously had been a _junior_ developer, but they'll put someone much more _senior_ on it now. Never really made a difference.

But here's the one that really blew my mind. The site color scheme at the time was greens and whites. For some reason though they decided that the heading of the modal box should have a thick orange underline. How did they create this ~4px underline? _By embedding an enormous image of a sunset and cropping it to a 4px orange line._

No exaggeration. This was like a 2560x1440px image of a sunset, which they'd cropped to a sliver in the top corner to show an orange line.

I have to assume the developer(s) got sick of my nitpicking and decided to do something so ridiculous I'd just go away. It worked.

<comment><USER6> literally sunsetting a project. I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work remotely from Europe for a North American company, so here's my two cents on this topic:

Having cost as the reason for going with remote devs is a very bad idea in my opinion, and it should only be seen as an added benefit. You don't want to hire cheap devs because they usually suck, and great developers will cost you quite a bit regardless of where they live.

While it may be difficult to compete with the huge corporations in places like SF, NYC, Seattle, where these competing corporations offer huge salaries, great benefits and have brand recognition, there's quite a lot of value to be had with setting up shop somewhere remote, where there's lower competition and where you can offer above average salaries to attract top talent in the area. Ultimately, every company says that they only hire the best, but unless you're paying top dollar in your area, you're most likely not hiring only the best.

I believe that most good developers will want to be part of a stable company that is actually building amazing things, instead of being part of an outsourcing company where they get passed around from project to project, and their resume will perpetually read "Software Engineer at Outsourcing Company Ltd." \- most would trade that in a heartbeat for one of the FAANG companies.

If you want to have the best kind of success with remote devs, don't outsource, invest a bit more and set up an actual office and hire the people directly, people that want to have a career with your company, and not a contract for an unknown period of time, which they likely won't be able to put on their resume.

<comment><USER8> I think this is a really valuable perspective. Would be curious to hear from more folks on "the other side" about their experiences. I've often considered doing the expat thing and trying to work in or setup such a shop.

<comment><USER9> My experience is that it is pretty easy to find a remote job as a single developer/freelancer, but a lot harder to find a decent project for a small, well-knit team. I now live in Eastern Europe (EU) and I easily find offers at EUR 450-600 / day for consulting gigs (e.g. on-site + remote work). However, I often struggle to find a project for a team of 3 Java/JavaScript/Python/PHP developers, event at rates as low as EUR 250 / day.

I guess lots of recruiters are only interested in hiring individual contractors, but not teams.

<comment><USER10> Managers want to expand their little empires, by adding people who report to them. They're less excited about spending their precious budget on a service from an external vendor. There are exceptions, such as managers who learned that managing software development is HARD and want to outsource the headaches (with the naive hope that the outside company will do a better job).

<comment> blaser-waffle If I hire an employee I am constrained by employee-employer regs. Those can sometimes be onerous, and the remote thing adds a few wrinkles -- are you liable in your state/province/department, or theirs?

But you also have the power, and it's far easier to plug them into your existing work structure.

Hiring a small team is effectively outsourcing a component or subsystem to a foreign coding company, the laws change -- B2B contract vs hiring -- and there are communications and workflows to deal with.

<comment><USER7> > If I hire an employee I am constrained by employee-employer regs. Those can > sometimes be onerous,

Undoubtedly, but compared to hiring through an outsourced company, you do get more control over how these employees are treated, and can thus remove the risk of the operation being run as a sweat shop under your own nose, assuming that's something you wish to care about.

> \-- are you liable in your state/province/department, or theirs?

In most parts of the world you should be able to set up the equivalent of an LLC in order to minimize your risk, though of course, this will mean some extra bureaucracy to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just came out of being forced into running an offshore team from the Phillipines for roughly six-ish months, my experience was that they were very affable with good english skills and worked hard, there was a noticeable problem with technical skill which caused a number of bugs to occur to the point where I would just spend the time fixing them myself than throw them back at the team where they would cause more problems.

The biggest problem however, was that no matter how many times I asked or provided documentation/feedback, they would ignore established coding standards and established processes and just do things their way, and when I would ask about this, I would just get shrugs.

Finally, we got saddled with a "Project Manager", which I put in quotes as their contribution to the process was giving daily excuses as to not turn up to our daily progress calls, and the ones he did turn up to, he would visibly fall asleep. When I eventually pulled him up on this his response was that "he wasn't directly paid for but an included part of the cost so you can't complain about what you get."

Admittedly all of the above is rather negative, but I think this highlights the "get what you pay for" aspect of offshore outsourcing.

<comment><USER12> Out of curiosity, what are "established coding standards and established processes" for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My experience with working with Asia off-shoring is with physical products, so this was interesting to see the software perspective where there are multiple programmers working on something in parallel, whereas my experience is more serial with the (English speaking) sales contact communicating with the various engineering teams as the project gets passed along.

Definitely agree with the can-do attitude of China. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised, other times a vendor thinks they are doing us good and screw us over by completing work before we have agreed to it. This is mostly a temporary issue until you build a relationship with the vendor (in China, relationship is everything) and know each other's expectations.

While I've never worked with an Indian vendor directly, it is interesting to hear about how people there have very narrow knowledge bases. This is something I've noticed with people I've interviewed that are recent immigrants, they know their area, but when asked about the rest of what we would be asking them to do they have zero clue. This is also (lesser so) a case with recent Chinese immigrants. Not great when we are essentially hiring a mechanical equivalent of a full stack engineer.

</comment><comment><USER14> On India: I worked on a project outsourced to one of the big companies. A senior engineer there said that when people offshore, the person making the decision is a bean counter. So they only look at price. They take the cheapest and they get what they pay for.

But if they would pay twice that (still at most half their normal cost) using a smaller higher quality company they could get a much better job done.

<comment><USER15> Sometimes the math is "We can do it twice in India and still save 50%"

Anyone who has worked with the big vendors knows that the correlation between quality and price is very loose. The lowest cost provider is rarely great, but the high cost provider can also be selling you a lot of juniors.

<comment><USER16> Exactly this. Usually, they have a couple of guys who are really good in that team, along with lots of juniors who are there for billable hours.

<comment><USER17> They demo the skilled people and once they have the account they turn it over to the juniors...

But that probably works in most cases/places anyway.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, but so does every US-based consulting outfit I've ever seen... IBM, Oracle, Accenture. The knowledgable Senior Dev answering your questions during the bid goes away _quickly_ once you sign. They're off to convince the next sucker...

<comment><USER19> That's why you write the contract to the outsourcing company so that you lock in those experienced people for an extended period of time -- like years.

But then the price mysteriously increases to the point where you might as well have hired them on-shore and you're not saving any money.

So, do you want to save money by offshoring everything, or do you want to get good people to actually do the real work that needs to be done?

<comment><USER12> Accenture wont sign that. And those more experienced people might not like to work on your project for years and there is nothing you can do to stop them from leaving.

They got where they are by doing what they are doing. Spending years on your project is something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hiring good offshore developers directly as remote employees is a much better option, in my experience.

It requires more up front work to identify, hire, and retain the remote employees, but you need far fewer developers when you can appeal to the best developers who know what they're doing.

This doesn't work if your company has any attachment to headcount, though. It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the numbers.

<comment><USER21> > It can be a tough sell to hire 3 remote employees for the price of a cheap > team of 10 from an outsourcing firm if your company only looks at the > numbers.

Can you expand on this? I would have thought it was cheaper to hire the remote employees directly than hire the outsourcing company...

Edit: I think I understand now: the 'remote employees' are based in say the US while the outsourcing company is based in say India

<comment><USER22> The premise is that an excellent developer can command a high price, whether remote or not. Some developers place a premium in remote friendliness, and thus allow a slightly lower salary for it, but only up to some amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My classic offshoring story is of a team of people we brought in to do QA (literally to write the unit tests that Troy's blog post no one ever writes). This team was very bullish on getting to do more than "just" testing. My CEO wanted to let them take a crack at it, and I had more than enough to do so we tried it out.

I had written some domain models for dealing with users and I needed equivalent models for dealing with notifications. So I asked them to take the work I'd done and use it as a template for the new stuff. I got back code with the method and variable names search and replaced, pretty much exactly like what I expected. What they _hadn't_ bother to modify was the SQL that actually operated on the data (yes, I had to write it out like a cave man). So I had a bunch of notifications domain objects that operated on the USER table.

That experiment terminated early.

</comment><comment><USER24> Very early in my career I worked for a dev shop that would literally hire 2-3 Indian teams to do the same project in the hopes one would turn out ok and it was still way cheaper than domestic labor. I was often brought in to fix bugs and performance problems. It was during this period I saw the worst code of my life: Pulling every record from a sql database table with a 'select * from table' then a strcmp on each numerical (and indexed) `id` field to find the record. It had worked in testing but blew up in production. It was truly unreal to see that.

The other interesting thing I got to see was a shakedown of our company after we poached talent from a connected local company. We had the option (which we took) to pay several years worth of the average per capita income to local government henchmen to be allowed to stay in business.

</comment><comment><USER25> The worst I've ever seen: Not only did the contractor deliver a buggy, half- finished product, he also used our printer to print out an offer to a competitor to sell them our source code!

</comment><comment><USER26> Lets assume that the situation changes over the next 15 years and these outsourcing places get really legitimately good at making software.

What can we, the highly paid locals, can do to justify our high salaries at that hypothetical future point?

(playing starcraft taught me a tremendous amount of respect for East Asian creativity and work ethic)

<comment><USER2> What differentiates US (most big software names come from there) from the rest of the world is their ability to sell. There are already enough countries on this planet that can produce high quality software that could be sold as hot buns.What most of those countries don't have is the huge VC industry+ tons of people who know how and who to sell be it B2B or B2C. This, however is changing slowly and you can expect much more level field over the next 10-15 years.

<comment><USER27> This is not accurate at all. What really differentiates the US is:

* fucking largest economy by far as your domestic market ie no import duties or import/export taxes

* truly massive investment by Government and Private sector into CS research

* high tech economy focused mostly on services which demands all tools it can get to improve business processes

* high disposable income via financial instruments for cheap debt (also less taxes than most developed countries)

* largest talent pool of Universities that keeps bringing in the best and brightest across the world

The ability to sell is far far less important than the systemic reasons listed above that give the US an incredible edge in the software industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12923925)

</comment><comment><USER29> It is quite interesting to re-read this after the zoom ipo. Zoom built a huge team in China, effectively outsourcing most of the development to lower cost countries, that gave them leverage in terms of being able to deploy capital more efficiently.

There are certainly ways to work around most of the problems the author outlines. They are definitely real problems, same as spending 5x for onshore resources. Ideally you should build onshore teams, if you can spend the money. But if you can not, then do not get discouraged by these problems. Employee churns are not that difficult to mitigate, just matter contracting properly with the employees and providing enough consideration in the contracts.

</comment><comment><USER30> I heard Argentina as a popular place for "near-shoring", which likely wasn't very popular when this was written 3 years ago. Anyone here been using Argentinian tech talent?

<comment><USER31> I've worked with a number of Argentinian developers through using Avanade and Accenture on projects. The developers were great, even spoke decent English, but since it was through Avanade or Accenture, after 3 years of the managerial-interference, overhead, cost overruns, and contract disputes with what is considered in-scope/out-of-scope, the projects were eventually canceled. Had we just been able to hire the developers on an hourly basis, everyone would have been happy... well except the sales managers, delivery managers, development managers, and project managers.

That said, I didn't care for the way that our company was billed $75-150/hr for a developer that makes $350-1200/mo, and that the developers made so little when their managers were billing so high.

Early in my career, I was livid when I found out that my time was billed to the client 3x what I made, so I cant imagine how demoralizing it would be knowing you are paid 20x less than you are billed out.

<comment><USER2> This, sometimes has very interesting consequences. A friend worked for a company that basically moved parts of sales/customer service to a Northen African country.They hired people on a few hundred dollars a month(if that much) to sell high ticket hotel bookings sometimes going for thousands/day.The team struggled to comprehend that anyone could get a room that costs 10 times more their monthly wage.This highly affected their ability to service/sell. Eventually the entire thing got canned and moved to Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I worked with quite a few overseas developers over the last decade.

In our case we worked with two outsourcing firms in Russia, EPAM and Distillery. Our relationship worked very well but we had to approach it correctly.

In our case we treated the outsourcing firms mostly as recruiting firms. They pre-screened candidates and then we interviewed them just as if we were interviewing and on-site employee.

Now, people are people and are imperfect, But the reality was that from both EPAM and Distillery, The candidates that they brought to us were always the highest quality. Something about how they work internally makes it a lot easier to hire through them instead of the normal American way of hiring a software developer.

One more thing: I was part of the team that chose EPAM over some of the other contracting firms. we basically interviewed one of their engineers as if he was going to be a new hire, and we did the same for other firms. The reason why our relationship was so successful was because we we're methodical and carefully chose who we used for outsourcing.

IMO, most of the complaints about outsourcing come from people who didn't screen their contractors very well.

</comment><comment><USER33> He misses some stuff.

1) 4 hours of time overlap rule - you need to have overlap of 4 hours between teams

2) Requirements need to be much tighter with outsourcing. Often you need a full BA whereas with some devs you can work without a formal spec but some wireframes etc

<comment><USER34> No, Troy specifically mentions differing requirements depending on the country that the ousource firm is located in.

>Another pattern I found time and time again when outsourcing to India was that they'd want really detailed documentation. This is always going to be a contentious issue and there are many different views of how much should be done under what circumstances. But more so in India than the other two locations I'll talk about shortly, detail was important to them. There were many occasions where we would make assumptions that a feature requirement clearly implied certain things only to later discover they was deemed "out of scope". Now that can happen in any project in any part of the world, but it was extremely prevalent in India.

> On the plus side for China though, one of their strengths (particularly over > India) was the ability to get down to work with minimal documentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My favorite place to offshore is Eastern Europe. Genuinely love working with those guys.

</comment><comment><USER36> I really don't understand why US companies are outsourcing to India. The time difference alone pretty much sets you up for fail unless people want to be working at midnight all the time. I find it much easier to work with Costa Rica it South America where you can quickly make calls during the day. Especially with outsourcing you need to do a lot of handholding to get things going so you need good direct communication.

The whole idea of sending a big pile of requirements and then getting something useful back simply doesn't work. You need direct communication without middlemen.

<comment><USER37> worked at a place in the south (think Georgia) that opened an Indian office. about ~40 devs in the US office, they brought in.. 5? to the Indian office. It was primarily for the time difference, and their primary role was to triage and research issues during the 'off hours'. Anything they couldn't figure out bubbled up to the US, usually after several hours of initial research. It wasn't a horrible approach, and I think it worked OK because it was intentional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> With China and India getting more and more product companies like Baidu/Tencent/ByteDance/Flipkart/Paytm/etc, the average engineer left in outsourcing gets worse every month.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think all those people are leaving after a year to become managers. That is highly unlikely. More likely is that those positions sux whether you have passion for development or not - and that developers who have passion for development will run away first from projects like this.

Like with Avni, if she really had a baby and went to have baby, the relationships were nowhere near for anyone to know it. Which again, to the extend people stay in positions due to liking people there, that sort of "keep me there" relationships were not present.

I suspect this also because we had projects where more western company outsourced their project on us - coders here, analysts, management and decision makers there. The more skilled developer, the sooner they were leaving or were very particular about what exactly they will work on. Even those who stayed (because some perks and good relationships in our local company) dont like the projects they work on. It is more about frustrations and politics then about being proud what you do.

I can only imagine that it would be even worst in outsource only company that aims for cheap and does not have perks. And it is even harder to find good managers willing to work in such setup, they tend to avoid it too.

</comment><comment><USER21> "I remember one case quite clearly where the project's dollar estimate was identical to a local vendor in Australia yet the man hours were an order of magnitude greater. Yet even then, there was organisational push-back on the local vendor due to their high hourly rate"

That's very strange - I would have assumed that the code quality of the Australian outfit would be higher

</comment><comment><USER38> I do a lot of work with a few of the big outfits, as we often get pulled in to help setup a software product that they resell to Fortune 500 companies as part of their package contracts.

I have never seen a case where they actually add value; it would always be much easier if we could just get directly connected with the end-customer.

</comment><comment><USER39> How to do the outsourcing business if you want to provide premium service? Even if the field requires specialization, say machine learning / data engineering, it's hard to justify the price that is 40% more than average for the area (say Eastern Europe). Example: I work for a company that does ML/DE services, and I believe that everyone in the company (we're small company in Eastern Europe) tries their best to do the great job and do what is best for our clients; plus seniority and talent is way above average for the market (mostly due to specialization). But we're still having hard time increasing our hourly rate.

What is something that we can do that would say "these people are worth it, let's go with them even though they are more expensive"?

<comment><USER2> Higher prices!= higher quality. Here's how your post reads: we have senior devs+ we try charge 40% more,yet clients don't buy in. You know what? Every shop in town has senior devs and most of them are passionate. Depending on which Eastern European country you are based in, even the entire team full of PhDs in ML with 10 years experience may not sound that extraordinary. You need to find the reason why you are ACTUALLY better than your competition.Do you have tons of white papers or cases studies on your website that clearly show how and why you are solving these problems? What are you doing differently compared to the guys from the shop across the road? You need to be very very comfortable with saying " fuck yes, we are 40,50 maybe even 100% more expensive than any other company you'll be speaking, but here's 25 reasons why you search for ML experts stops here". These things are learnable, however if there's no strong sales culture in the business,I'd advice to start looking for someone who could deliver these messages to your prospects.My experience: work for a company that operates in a low entry, saturated market and sells services almost 3 times the average price in the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have some experience with offshoring to India and China.

Pretty much as described in the lessons.

One important point, setting up the cooperation is critical and you can't hope to get any positive results without considerable effort into setting up and maintaining the cooperation and close vigilance over what is happening.

There is tendency for the quality to fall the moment the team figures out you are not paying attention. Basically, anything goes unless you are constantly showing you are caring and monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER41> Anyone interested in Vietnam? I spent tons of time there (Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi) recruiting Vietnamese software developers recently for my own projects and am seriously thinking of parlaying that skillset into helping US companies setting up in house engineering sites there.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Nearshoring" in Mexico is successful primarily (IMO) because of cultural compatibilities. Plug: my firm [https://magmalabs.io](https://magmalabs.io)

When I was CTO of Andela one of my main claims to fame is pioneering the "month one" curriculum, based on principles of Applied Improv -- taking comedic improvisation education and setting it in a business context. Nigeria is definitely one of those cultures where junior people are culturally ingrained in them not to disagree with their superiors. Extremely important to break them of that practice if they're going to succeed as software consultants.

<comment><USER43> Heads up - I am getting an invalid certificate warning in your site. iOS Safari.

<comment><USER44> And in Firefox:

"Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for magmalabs.io. The certificate is only valid for the following names: m.magmalabs.io, www.magmalabs.io

Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

[https://magmalabs.io/](https://magmalabs.io/) produces the error. [https://www.magmalabs.io/](https://www.magmalabs.io/) does not. [https://magmalabs.io/](https://magmalabs.io/) works in Chrome. Does Chrome delay the certificate validity check until after the HTTP redirect?

<comment><USER44> I filed a Firefox bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1617987)

Chrome has a heuristic they call SSLCommonNameMismatchHandling: if Chrome tries to connect to a site like "[https://example.com"](https://example.com") but the returned cert is for the "www." subdomain of the same domain, Chrome will silently redirect to "[https://www.example.com"](https://www.example.com").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> >>> Low hourly rates only make sense when you're comparing a similar number of hours!

</comment><comment><USER46> Thanks for sharing. Got almost the same experience in middle-east where a part of culture within SW engineers came to low quality of development and higher time spans. Though I guess the article wasn't consider the concept #TL;DR.</comment>


Ask YC: Salary comparison for WFH vs office-based? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,<p>Does anybody have any experience with how salaries for jobs where you work from home compare to equivalent office-based jobs? Would you expect to be paid more because you have to pay for your own electricity, etc., or does it not really make a difference? <comment><USER2> Where I work, people who telecommute or frequently need to do work from home after hours have their internet access paid for. Asking for your employer to pay for electricity seems silly.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Would you expect to be paid more because you have to pay for your own electricity_

As someone who is in the process of hiring people, if you brought that up to me during the interview/hiring phase, it would be a black mark. Why? I'm offering you a great deal - WFH - yet here you are being greedy and wanting more. Depending on the needs, I might feel comfortable paying for internet but that's the only thing.

Right or wrong, that's my first thoughts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the record, I wasn't suggesting that I would say in my interview "please pay me extra for my electricity", I was aiming more for the general feel of "how do salaries for WFH jobs typically compare with office-based jobs", and suggesting things like electricity costs as potential factors as to why I thought there might be a difference in the first place</comment>


The GDPR Is a Cookie Monster - <AUTHOR> https://www.emarketer.com/content/the-gdpr-is-a-cookie-monster <comment><USER2> The dark patterns in play now to get explicit consent are pretty bad now though. Take Mashable for example.

On first visiting the site you are presented with the option to "Consent" or view more Options (where you can Opt Out of all - except you can't really because some require Opting Out on the specific Advertisers site). But if you do choose to Opt Out all, they will then show you the initial Option box on every visit to the site, where you have to go through the More Options route every time. And if you ever accidentally click I Consent, then they opt you back in to everything again and then never show you that option box ever again.

Note: I just picked on Mashable, but there are many, many sites following this same dark pattern.

<comment><USER3> I had an interesting encounter recently:

[https://imgur.com/a/i1hm1TQ](https://imgur.com/a/i1hm1TQ)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what conclusion you're drawing, the final two screenshots didn't have any explanation.

As far as I can tell, you've observed that if you force your browser to stop displaying the cookie preferences overlay, the hidden page becomes visible again.

Does this reveal something controversial that I haven't inferred?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "Factsheet" this is about (7 page pdf - [https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/fil...](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-08/Changes%20in%20Third- Party%20Content%20on%20European%20News%20Websites%20after%20GDPR_0_0.pdf))

>All results presented here reflect site activity prior to obtaining consent; the picture may change dramatically once the user provides the affirmative opt-in GDPR requires.

So, meh.

<comment><USER6> Yep. If anything, things are worse now. You HAVE to give consent to do anything useful on the website (so blocking the notice won't work), and in the consent form it's usually very hard to turn tracking off, full of dark patterns.

Not legal from the perspective of GDPR, sure, but it seems that everyone is doing it.

/edit: downvoted for stating basic facts, amazing.

<comment><USER7> And I hope they will all get heavy fines for doing so. Let's see how well the EU will enforce the GDPR.

<comment><USER8> I honestly don't get why so many sites are even paying attention to GDPR. If they don't have a presence in the EU, it is irrelevant.

<comment><USER9> Because GDPR includes provisions for handling US GDPR violators, a lot of security vendors were touting up the idea that if a European fills out a form on your site or gets cookied for any reason, you could be sued.

<comment><USER10> So they'd file suit in the EU and... what would happen? Some sort of judgment that would prevent a company from starting business in the EU at a later date?

<comment><USER11> I don't know. Why are EU companies paying attention to American laws, again?

<comment><USER12> Largest economy and military in the world are big reasons to play nice with America

<comment><USER13> Military doesn't come in to this at all.

And similar arguments could be made for why American companies would play nice to the EU.

<comment><USER12> If I were a company I would target America first and Asia second. Due to increasing regulations, political uncertainty and lack of growth I'd shift the EU to third (it used to be an obvious second to me).

<comment><USER13> Fair enough, but you'd be missing out on a huge market. And unlike Asia, it has a single regulation to follow for things like data protection.

If your company was unable to comply with GDPR, many wouldn't want business with your company anyway, especially other companies who _are_ trying to comply with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why there is so much negative impression of GDPR. Most businesses do not need to track users; they do it only because they can and it is not forbidden. Let me give you some examples:

\- Wikipedia can serve you pages without knowing anything about you

\- You can download and use Debian distribution without providing any data about yourself. Microsoft can do the same.

\- Internet shops like Amazon or Ebay don't need to track you. They earn money when you buy something and if they delete PII after the order is completed they still have the money. GDPR is not taking them away.

\- Google can work just fine without tracking users. They show advertisement in search results, they get paid for it and they don't need to collect everything you have typed to earn profit

\- Youtube can show ads and get paid for it to completely anonymous users

\- Android and Google Maps don't need to track you. You paid for them when you bought your device, you don't have to pay once more with your data and opt into dubious "help us improve your user experience" scams.

\- Netflix gets money from you anyway and doesn't need to track you

\- Facebook doesn't need to track you across the web. It can show ads and get paid for it anyway.

Look around. Most of businesses can earn money without collecting any personal information. The ones who can lose because of GDPR are only shady marketing agencies, legal spam conpanies, data brokers and three-letter agencies. I don't feel sorry for any of them.

We should think about better protection of privacy and anonimity rather than worry about profits of Californian corporations wanting to make everyone their product.

<comment><USER15> If you're looking for advertisers, all other things being equal, do you go with the advertiser who guarantees your ads will go to those most likely to have interest in your product, or do you go with the advertiser that will send your ads to random people?

Of course they _can_ serve ads randomly, but they're competing to provide the best value for those buying ads.

<comment><USER14> Corporations want cheaper ads; I understand that but I don't understand why I should be tracked. They should develop better ads without violating someone's privacy or anonymity.

<comment><USER16> Companies aren't paying just to show you ads. They are almost always paying for clicks on those ads that lead users to their website.

That tracking allows them to build more accurate models on what ads a user will click on and then tailor ads to the user causing increased ad click rates which results in more revenue.

And I'm not really concerned about the big companies. I'm concerned about all the news agencies that are barely scraping by with targeted advertising revenue. Remove the targeting and web journalism will get even worse as they have to layoff more people and resort to even more clickbaity news.

<comment><USER14> Without tracking the ad won't disappear, just some kinds of it can become more expensive and less effective; that is not a big problem. Companies can still show relevant ads: Google can show ads matching current search query, Youtube can show ads relevant to the video, and so on.

Regarding news sites, they have a lot of opportunities to earn money, for example, publish sponsored articles. They can also use subscription model. It is better than have mobile apps that scrap data from your phone, Google Maps that track every your step, and data brokers you never heard of but they have full information about you. We should not sacrifice our privacy only because someone out there cannot make the ends meet.

Google won't shut down if you stop it from tracking users' location. People will still search the internet and buy smartphones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad the GDPR actually manages to enforce one of it's lesser talked about principals: data minimasation. What is worrying about this article is that it implies companies are using other, even less consensual ways of tracking users. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

<comment><USER4> That was my take on it as well:

> _In a September 2017 study of 250 US digital marketers by Viant, about 60% > of respondents said they will no longer rely on cookies for the majority of > their digital marketing within the next two years._

The absence of any description about what they will use instead is frustrating.

<comment><USER17> Considering you cannot use cookies for mobile traffic, it's understandable that most firms are moving away from it. Fingerprinting and device IDs have been common for a few years and I don't think it will go away any time soon.

<comment><USER18> Why can't you use cookies for mobile traffic?

<comment><USER17> I wasn't clear enough and I apologize. You _can_ use cookies but they will only be within the context of a singular app's browser. For example, suppose that you use two web browsers on your Desktop, Chrome and Firefox. If you visit xyz.com on FF, some cookie information will most likely be stored. However, if at a later time, you visit the domain on Chrome, it will not have access to the same cookie store.

This becomes important in the context of third party cookies that want to track you across apps. Hence why cookies are not a reliable method of identification on mobile.

Hope this clears it up. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I fucking hate GDPR policy making every website to show "Cookie Policy" ad pop modal. STOP. Every single time after I have accepted it, I come back the next day, I see the same modal again. I just accept it anyway, so stop. Stop this horrible UX. Sorry, but it really annoys the shit out of me. It does and I am pissed off every single time. If I accept, stop asking.

<comment><USER20> Are you using a browser extension that may be interfering with the website? I haven't had issues with website forgetting my preferences yet.

Also being in the EU I'm used to these cookie dialogues, except before GDPR if I wanted to opt-out (assuming that it was even an option) I'd often have to wade through multiple pages, opting-out of the tracking which would take a while, especially since they were usually using every dark pattern in the book.

Now with GDPR I still get the messages but everything is opt-in instead of opt-out and I can just click the (sometimes obfuscated) "I refuse" and carry on. It's actually a huge quality of life improvement as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER19> At work I don't have any third-party blocking extensions (I use Chrome). At home and on my mobile I do (I use Firefox Focus), but neither let websites to "remember".

Is there something I need to configure?

<comment><USER21> Firefox Focus deletes all data upon closing. That includes cookies where your consent was locally stored. That's why you're seeing it every time.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but this problem exists even on Chrome which I have no extension.So Chrome has some built-in blocker interferring it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My country is so great. How on Earth did we register 30% _positive_ growth of third-party domains and 20% growth of third-party cookies?

(Good that I don't generally visit the local Internet much anyway.)

<comment><USER23> Third party scripts for dealing with GDPR requirements perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The GDPR made me switch my cookie policy, to using two Chrome extensions in tandem:

\- I don't care about cookies: auto accepts all cookies

\- Cookie AutoDelete: auto deletes all cookies

So now you can track me all you want... until I leave your website and all the cookies are gone (unless whitelisted).

<comment><USER25> Chrome and these extensions give you a false sense of privacy. Currently, no extension can remove local storage and tracking information contained within them.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78093](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=78093)

You'll either have to clear local storage manually or get a privacy-oriented browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, the upcoming ePrivacy regulation is much needed- the cookies opt- in/out needs to be handled at the browser level. The current setup is lose- lose for businesses and end users.

As a site admin, I have no problem honoring your request to not be tracked. I just can't wait until I don't have to deal with the nightmare that is OneTrust anymore.

<comment><USER26> You mean like the "do not track" request header?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track)

It never ceases to amaze me the number of companies that "value" my privacy but still somehow ignore the do not track header.

<comment><USER11> Well, Microsoft kinda dropped the ball on that one by making it the default (although they later changed that).

<comment><USER26> I don't feel like they did drop the ball there. By default I don't want to be tracked. I think that tracking across the internet should be opt in and users should be made aware of what websites are doing _before_ they start doing it.

I also find the idea of secret shadow profiles to slightly immoral for the same reason.

<comment><USER11> DNT is a flawed idea in the first place. DNT is based on the idea that users can opt out of being tracked by sending that header. But (e.g.) European privacy law requires having users explicitly opt in to being tracked -- the message DNT is meant to assert is the legal default under GDPR.

DNT only works if the assumption is that users who make no choice can be treated as consenting (which is no longer the case under GDPR). But if you set DNT by default you're not asserting "this user doesn't want to be tracked", you're just making it impossible to tell whether the user explicitly opts out or hasn't made a choice (and therefore actually do consent).

If tracking is opt-out rather than opt-in (i.e. if we disregard GDPR and similar privacy laws and go with how US startups have operated so far) that means DNT is no longer a reliable signal for opting out and thus meaningless.

Implications about consent and privacy aside, DNT only works if it is used with intent. In the absence of intent, by making it the default without the user's knowledge, it becomes ambiguous and therefore pointless.

To put it differently: if there had never been any browsers that set DNT by default (except maybe browsers explicitly marketing themselves as "privacy first" like Brave does), you could use DNT as an explicit assertion that you do not consent to being tracked. This means it could actually serve as a technical implementation to opt-out of any "implied consent" allowed by the GDPR and making use of your right to control your data.

But thanks to Microsoft randomly slapping on the header to piss off Google, DNT is now too ambiguous to infer any of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The methodology behind this study looks okay but it isn't necessarily representative of real world use. The study looks at the front page of around 200 news sites in Europe with a browser cleaned of all cookies. However in all cases the IP address belonged to a machine at the university of Oxford so it probably had some history attached to it.

It shows some reduction in cookies served before user interaction but it isn't clear is this is due to GDPR or other changes that have been made over the 3 month period.

My summary is that the data found is not statistically significant given the relatively limited sample size and lack of any control sample to compare against showing usual variation over a 3 month period.

</comment><comment><USER28> I just HATE all the pop-ups asking for permission to use cookies now.

Seriously, having to opt-in on a per-site basis has led me to loathe the GDPR. It's a usability disaster. I never thought I'd hate anything more than the "sign up for our newsletter" pop-ups... but these are even more pervasive.

If I'm the kind of person who hates cookies/tracking, I'll just install a blocker and block it everywhere, and then whitelist any domains I need to.

It just makes me feel like the GDPR was a win for lawyers and legalese, and nobody else.

<comment><USER29> I think we should have a de facto standard element class for legal notices with no required user action, like legal-notice-no-action-required. Webistes use the css class, uBlock Origin makes it a built-in default element filter. Website owners can fulfill their legal obligations and users that proactively shape their browsing experience are all set. Neither side wants these things messing up the browsing experience so, unlike the ad wars, we can work together.

<comment><USER30> > I think we should have a de facto standard element class for legal notices > with no required user action, like legal-notice-no-action-required. Webistes > use the css class, uBlock Origin makes it a built-in default element filter. > Website owners can fulfill their legal obligations and users that > proactively shape their browsing experience are all set.

Sounds like P3P ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P) )

> Neither side wants these things messing up the browsing experience so, > unlike the ad wars, we can work together.

Personally, I absolutely want to know when sites are trying to spy on me and sell the data. Despicable crap like that should be forced out into the public, not quietly agreed to by the browser. That's exactly what GDPR is for.

<comment><USER29> > Personally, I absolutely want to know when sites are trying to spy on me and > sell the data.

It's best to assume they're all doing that to some degree whether they tell you they are or not. For one, most of the world isn't beholden to EU law. Also, bad players don't play by the rules and by the time you know they're bad, it's too late.

> Despicable crap like that should be forced out into the public, not quietly > agreed to by the browser.

But the cookie law doesn't fix that problem, or any problem for that matter. The notifications are 100% pointless and we're stuck with them because of a stupid law. If anything, having a standard way to block the notices might encourage more users towards a real fix for the tracking problems, which is using something like uBlock Origin (just don't tell that to the site owners that don't want users having tracking blockers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The GDPR should get one important update and that's QUICK:

You shouldn't be allowed to ask for consent to do tracking or targeting as a pop up. The site must be completely usable using only "required" cookies (to which no consent should be required if it only tracks a limited set of data) and any option to consent to anything outside this must be a hidden option.

That is: sites should have to work 100% without popups and shouldn't be allowed to use "marketing cookies" (for tracking and ad targeting)

Otherwise we just traded one nuisance for another.

<comment><USER30> > The site must be completely usable using only "required" cookies (to which > no consent should be required if it only tracks a limited set of data)

I think GDPR does actually say this.

> any option to consent to anything outside this must be a hidden option.

You're right that this would be a difference (although I imagine sites would still end up covered in dark patterns trying to get users to enable it)

<comment><USER31> Right. And "hidden option" is perhaps the wrong word, but let's say one that doesn't prevent using the site/service in full.

Even supposedly serious outlets like WaPo does this. Full screen splash that says "by using the site you agree to targeted ads". Why even bother with that when it's so blatantly in violation? Isn't it almost better to not look like you are _deliberately_ in violation like that?

It's not even a dark pattern, it's just a big fat splash explaining how they don't care about the GDPR and intend to show me targeted ads using tracking cookies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel like the DNT header could have been made a lot better if it worked alongside GDPR. Like, 0 = haven't chosen/prompt me (I want to pick exactly what cookies I want), 1 = don't care give me everything, 2 = functional, 3 = please don't track me at all. You could then just surface this per-site even in the browser, maybe in a way resembling the IE Security Zone settings with their nice sliders.

<comment><USER13> I don't think this would work as it makes it too easy to not be fully tracked. There are so many hoops to go through now because companies want to incentivise being tracked and punish those who don't wish to be.

If this was brought in through regulation, that's a different story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yeesh... 80 cookies on average for news sites! Down to 60... how many different ways do they need to track one person?

<comment><USER34> each ad network needs to track you separately. so most of those 60 cookies are not sending data to the news site, but rather to the ad network which bids to display the ad to you.

<comment><USER35> There's ad networks, but there's also the plethora of vanity metrics that management likes to collect to fill their charts which they will then use to impress stakeholders, with the hope of getting paid more than the engineers.

I could probably make a million dollars selling companies a "customer acquisition score" using phony baloney math if they place my script on their website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> GDPR doesn't help anyone, so let's pass more half baked regulations!

Let's just ban companies from using the internet! That will stop internet advertising for good. Thank God smart politicians like me care so much.

<comment><USER13> In what way does it not help anyone?

It certainly seems to help EU citizens, like myself.</comment></comment>


Why Companies Are Actively Port-Scanning End-Users' Computers from Their Sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.reflectiz.com/port-scanning/ <comment><AUTHOR> Learn why and how companies like eBay are actively port-scanning end-users' computers from their websites</comment>


Practice design briefs in your downtime - <AUTHOR> Hey Guys, we have been busy writing the full-length e-book which features over 100 practice briefs to help designers improve their design skills and build up their portfolio. Check out the book here https://gumroad.com/l/Briefbox-ebook <comment><USER2> Clickable: [https://gumroad.com/l/Briefbox- ebook](https://gumroad.com/l/Briefbox-ebook)

An interesting idea. Are sample pages available?</comment>


Show HN: KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic Spotify Playlist Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.dellamico.com/playlists <comment><AUTHOR> __disclaimer __This is my first Show HN, hope I followed the rules but will be watching this to adjust / respond to any feedback.

Quick little app that builds Spotify playlists for any KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic playlist (by date). You can play directly in app or download / save to your own account to take with you.

Feedback -- positive / negative -- greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER2> And first lesson, turn off uptime robot for free heroku dynos or you wake up to h82 "over free dyno limits". Sorry if anyone is trying to use this Monday 3/7 morning, it'll be back online around 11am today

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just populated my Spotify with a playlist. Painless and I'm looking forward to hearing the music. MBE has been a great way for me to discover new music.

And I have to say -- your little product made me giggle with happiness when I watched the playlist load in Spotify.

<comment><AUTHOR> And you have no idea how thrilled your comment made me! I just hacked this together and it came out way better than I expected, which is why I put it here, glad you were able to make some use of it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice! I made this:

[http://billyfowks.com/spotify/](http://billyfowks.com/spotify/)

which pretty much contains the full day's playlist

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, nice... Is this the compiled, "All KCRW" music list (outside of MBE?). Mine is meant just to cover MBE, not "all the stuff", trying to understand where your tracklists are built from -- are you building them on the fly/programmatically based off historical/most played data? For instance, your Fri 3/4/16 playlist doesn't seem to have the MBE playlist in there, but maybe I'm missing something? Cool stuff either way, actually found yours via Google while researching my own ;)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

I'm pulling the day's songs via the API:

[http://tracklist- api.kcrw.com/Simulcast/date/2016/03/04?page...](http://tracklist- api.kcrw.com/Simulcast/date/2016/03/04?page_size=100&page=1)

etc, and creating a playlist out of those. I'm parsing the artist/ song names pretty crudely, so I think it drops some.

I thought they were folding all shows during the day into that list, but maybe I'm wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, yeah, that's the same API I'm tapping into (just setting the time to `9:00` to capture the MBE playlist only. Had to do some Spotify OAuthing to get it working so you can save a playlist locally with a single click, but I might steal -- "borrow" \-- some of your UI ;) Good stuff, again!

Also, fowkswe, you cool if I add a link to your site from mine?

<comment><USER4> Feel free to use the same UI trick - I 'borrowed' it from the guy who made

[http://pitchify.com](http://pitchify.com)

I'd love it if you put a link! I'll do the same :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Done & done, thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh man, that's great. I miss KCRW so bad after moving to the Bay Area from LA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too...That's why I made this, now I have endless spotify's for work :)</comment></comment>


Paper sizes - <AUTHOR> http://www.royvanrijn.com/blog/2015/02/paper-sizes/ <comment><USER2> I really wish we'd switch to the ISO-216 sizes. A4 to A3 is so much more enjoyable and painless than Letter to Tabloid. This kind of thing came up often while making posters for campus because it was cheaper to NOT print out all of the posters on Tabloid. Rather, using a mix of Tabloid (for the important poster posting spots) and Letter (for unimportant spots and as flyers for handout). Always ended up having to spend more time to make two layouts because of it. And A4 to A5 for booklets without having to re-layout the document is a huge plus too! And for books, I like to use B4* to fold in half. (B5 pages are nicer than A5 pages for the kind of books I tend to read.) The proportions are all the same, so it just works! One layout, many paper size (of the same proportion) possibilities!

Edit: Additional note with regard to the book publication (depending on printing and binding method used)... Sometimes/often this is printed on something like A3 size for bleeding and with crop marks. The A3 paper is then folded and cut, so that the pages become B5 size. (Signatures essentially composed of folded B4 as a consequence of the cropping. There is of course difference between the outermost sheet and the innermost sheet in each paper signature, which is why it's all cropped at the end.)

<comment><USER3> Is there are reason that B5 sized paper sheets are only available as imports from Japan in Europe?

The strict interpretation of the B series as a packaging format for the A series only seems somewhat archaic.

<comment><USER4> B5 paper sheets don't seem to be easily available in the UK.

B5 books are the most common size though, most of my school exercise books were B5 or B4 — that allowed me to glue in a sheet of A-sized paper, possibly folded in half.

Why do you prefer B5 to A4 for paper?

<comment><USER2> To answer your question about my preference... For non-fiction books, A4 pages seem too big for me, A5 pages seem little too small to me, and B5 pages seem just right. Again, this is just for non-fiction books. Fiction books I prefer more A5-sized. Just my own personal, subjective preference. That's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not every European is/was happy with the A series of paper formats. Jan Tschichold (1902—1974), arguably one of the most influential typographers of all time, strived against it, arguing it was unpleasant for office use (comments by jgrahamc and johnchristopher go into this direction) and downright unsuitable for book use.

I can't seem to find an English-language version of his A series rant (found in Erfreuliche Drucksachen, p. 111), but for anyone interested in traditional book layout, this (English-language) essay is a goldmine: [http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/...](http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/jantschichold.pdf) (pp. 39 f. touch on the A series).

</comment><comment><USER6> I've lived in the US and also in a country that used the A-series extensively. While I've always appreciated the beauty and math of the A-series, I find the aspect-ratio of the US Letter paper to be much more appealing. A4 tends to be too long and too narrow.

<comment><USER7> From the article:

> US Letter: 216 mm x 279 mm

> A4: 210 mm × 297 mm

so it's 18mm longer while being 6mm narrower. At that small a difference, I would assume that a preference of one over the other is similar to that of metric vs. imperial - the one you were raised on just _seems right_.

Which one did you grow up with?

<comment><USER8> But it is _both_ 18mm and 6mm narrower, so it goes from 1.414 to 1.29 in terms of ratio.

In other words A4 seems 10% narrower in terms of _shape_ , which isn't insignificant.

Having said that, I'd rather keep A4 given the useful properties described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But what do you end up with folding the US Letter? Let's see:

> 216 mm x 279 mm ratio: 1.291

> 139 mm x 216 mm ratio: 1.554 <\- What?

> 108 mm x 139 mm ratio: 1.287 <\- Ah..

> 69 mm x 108 mm ratio: 1.565 <\- HUH!?

> 54 mm x 69 mm ratio: 1.278

> 34 mm x 54 mm ratio: 1.588

> 27 mm x 34 mm ratio: 1.259 <\- Oh god...

These ratios, in fact, just go back and forth between two values (because when you cut a piece of paper into fourths, it has the same aspect ratio as the original). The other differences are just rounding errors.

He notes rounding errors earlier in the post, so I'm not sure why they get called out in this example with "HUH!?" and the other comments.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. The article writer really failed in that section. It's just rounding error. Based on his written reactions there, I honestly don't think he realized it was oscillating at the time he wrote that part. It seems like he just didn't want to bother to correct himself after the fact or is just intentionally being stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While we're at it, couldn't we also wish for the US to adopt the ISO standard date format, YYYY-MM-DD That would be great. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anecdote: the office management/finance/HR people in the european office where I work _really, really_ hate US Letter formats, because they don't really fit in "normal" binders.

They're the ones who really suffer from this, because they're the only people who deal with paper format documents these days, I guess.

<comment><USER12> US Letter is shorter than A4, so it seems like they should fit fine? I guess it's 6mm wider but that is not much.

<comment><USER13> For some important documents that you want to preserve and/or don't want to pierce there is a solution: store it in a plastic sleeve like this one:

[http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/1777660007/100-X-A4-CLEAR...](http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/1777660007/100-X-A4-CLEAR- font-b-PLASTIC-b-font-PUNCH-PUNCHED-POCKETS-font-b-FOLDERS-b.jpg)

If you happen to receive US letter sized paper, it won't fit because of the width, that is too much for these, and they get crumpled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A comical yet accurate take on why A4 is the best paper size : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb9EsAD2jGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb9EsAD2jGQ). You'll enjoy this. The tone is great as well.

<comment><USER15> Today I learned something new. And I was entertained. Tip of the hat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> His table at the end purporting to show a plethora of strange aspect ratios is just his rounding errors.

When repeatedly folding paper, the aspect ratio alternates between two numbers. (Consider after two foldings, each side is half the original. Same aspect ratio.) Unless of course you have soulless A series paper, then they are all the same.

</comment><comment><USER17> I enjoy working with paper. My favorite notebooks are ISO A4 size because they give me a bit more vertical room and still fit well in my backpacks.

The issues that come up with regard to US Letter size paper seem to be:

1) It's not metric -- yes that's true, but A4 is 210mm x 297mm. These numbers seem completely arbitrary and don't take advantage of the metric system. I wish the US was on the metric system, but it's not so 8.5 in by 11 inches at least has the advantage that it is measured in simple numbers with respect to standard measures in the US.

2) It's easier to store and work with A4 because it is one half of an A3 sheet -- however, US Letter is one half of the US Tabloid/Ledger size. The ANSI (American National Standards Institute) paper sizes in inches are A (8.5 x 11), B (11 x 17), C (17 x 22), D (22 x 34), etc. and share this advantage with the ISO standard.

3) The aspect ratio is is approximately sqrt(2)/2 for all paper in the A series, the B series, and the C series. But why is having but one shape of paper an advantage? Sometimes it's useful to have choices depending on the content to be printed on the paper. Furthermore, the ANSI paper sizes simply have two aspect ratios alternating as one increases paper size.

It is argued that printing posters with corresponding flyers is easier with ISO paper sizes. But this is true with ANSI paper sizes: one would have to jump up two sizes from letter (ANSI A, 8.5 x 11 inches) to ANSI C (17 x 22 inches). So, for the case where one would like to print at ANSI B, the aspect ratio of the page is a bit different. Here we have, what appears to me, to be the first real advantage of ISO over ANSI paper, where we need to print a flyer at A4 and A5 (but not A6). However, this hasn't been a problem for me personally. I'm usually working with pages that have additional constraints. For example space for bindings or differences in margins between recto and verso sides of two sided printing. Whenever there are bindings involved the aspect ratio advantage goes out the window.

4) Every country uses ISO sizes, why not the US (and Canada and Mexico) -- well, this is oversimplifying things a bit. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for paper sizes. There are Japanese variants, German extensions, and Swedish extensions listed that deviate from the ISO standards. There are also Architectural sizes listed that are designed to have simple ratios for their aspect ratios.

The idea that we would somehow be better off with fewer choices (just one) really for aspect ratio really strikes me as wrong. I like all the variety available in paper.

<comment><USER18> You write that the A4 numbers "seem completely arbitrary".

While they might _seem_ to be arbitrary, they are obviously not the least bit arbitrary.

The base size A0 has an area of exactly 1 square meter. Each subsequent size is constructed by taking half of the previous, so for A4 it's 1/16th of a square meter, or 0.0625 sqare meters, 625 square centimeters, which is 21.0 cm x 27.9 cm (approximately).

In order to have both the halving property and the self-similarity the aspect ratio has to be sqrt(2), and therefore you can't have nice little round numbers for the sides.

If I have to choose between self-similarity and nice round numbers, I'll take self-similarity, thank you.

<comment><USER19> > The base size A0 has an area of exactly 1 square meter.

Which is still arbitrary :)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, its the basis of paper weights too, which are measured in grams/m^2

<comment><USER20> Another thing that the US fails miserably at. 80# cover, 110# index, 24# bond … it's all meaningless.

<comment><USER21> Those numbers aren't meaningless. They're the weight of a ream (500 sheets) of that paper at 17x22.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Next step: metric measurement units everywhere. I've been waiting for that for decades. If "dozens" would die as well, even better.

<comment><USER23> Counting in base 12 is much better than base 10. 12 has prime factors {2,2,3}, so you get 2,3,4 and 6 as integer divisors, not just 2 and 5. That's why dozens stuck as a counting unit on so many things, namely time (all the way back from Egyptians).

You can even count using your fingers. Just count using your thumb pointing at each of the finger joints and the finger tip (you have two joints and one tip per finger and four fingers excluding the thumb). Actually, that's how Egyptians counted and that's why you get 12 hours in the realm of day and 12 hours in the realm of night.

The only drawback is multiplication tables. If I tend to forget the multiplication table for 7 and 8, memorizing tables for 11 and 12 would be nightmarish :-)

P.S. This is obviously tongue-in-cheek. While it _may_ be marginally better, switching costs mean the optimal course of action is to stay at the local maximum and avoid switching.

<comment><USER24> I've done some extensive analysis of number systems (almost enough to write a book on the subject) and come to the conclusion that the best are senary (6) and quaternary (4). Six has all the benefits of twelve, save the extra divisor of 2 (and thus 4), but that is easily remedied by use of the square (36) when required. Quaternary may seem an odd choice, but the square is 16, so one naturally learns hexadecimal without doing hardly any extra work --you just pair up the digits.

If your curious, duodecimal and octal come in after these and decimal falls to fifth place, which is fitting since its main advantage is divisibility by 5. :-)

<comment><USER25> Interesting. I always thought base 16 was the only suitable number system. Base 2 is the only justifiable one, since base 1 is not much fun. Squaring base 2 twice to get a fair amount of information in a single column seems to just make sense. What are the downsides of 16?

<comment><USER26> Balanced ternary is superior to them all.

[http://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/105...](http://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/105Sp10/addcomments/Hayes_ThirdBase.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is one of those things that seems technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically ... meh. The benefit exists but is barely enough to get anyone entrenched to actually change. Much like the common usage of the US Customary units, nothing is going to actually change.

<comment><USER28> Odd how every single country in the world has adopted it, except for the US and Canada. They all changed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#The_international_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#The_international_standard:_ISO_216)

<comment><USER29> But they didn't change from a widely used system to another widely used system. They changed from no standardized system to ISO.

North America already as system in place. Switching from one to the other confers very little, if any, benefit.

<comment><USER4> Ah, so America is special again? No, many countries had standard sizes before ISO/DIN.

Britain changed from "Imperial" sizes: [http://www.papersizes.org/old- imperial-sizes.htm](http://www.papersizes.org/old-imperial-sizes.htm)

France had these before 1967: [http://www.paper-sizes.com/uncommon-paper- sizes/old-european...](http://www.paper-sizes.com/uncommon-paper-sizes/old- european-paper-sizes/old-french-paper-sizes)

<comment><USER29> America is special in that it is large enough to use their own standard.

It is the reason why the EU can create their own standards that nobody else follows. Like Rohs, the reason your electronics fail at a higher rate than previous electronics. Smaller economies suffer when they can't use/make their neighbors goods.

The North America a huge economy. We can efficiently have our own standard.

Uk and France aren't big enough to dictate their own paper size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The USA and the EU are currently negotiating a free trade agreement [0]. I would say call your representative to get it on the list. Not to get too political here, but that would be much more beneficial than much of the other stuff that is already on it, where usually the lower standard succeeds _magically_.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_Trade_and_Investment_Partnership)

</comment><comment><USER31> When someone claims uncritically that the ratio of any two integers is √2, I get a little edgy. I'm also having a hard time following this simplification:

        A / √A = A × A / A = A

Huh? This only holds if √A = A = 1. I haven't checked the rest, but this doesn't give me much confidence.

Of course, knowing those Europeans, these sizes do probably make tons of sense on paper (see what I did there?), even if this isn't the best explanation of it.

<comment><USER32> The article's not claiming that the ratio of any two integers is √2, he's claiming that when the ratio of the lengths of the sides (the aspect ratio) is √2 that it's easy to keep that ratio with smaller pages by cutting the longer dimension in half.

As for your equation above, A/√A != A x A / A, but I'm not seeing where in the article you got this either.

<comment><USER33> > The size is 210 mm × 297 mm and has a ratio of √2 (math!).

That looks like a claim that the ratio of two integers is sqrt(2), but it's fairly obvious that he really means that it's very close.

<comment><USER32> I don't think anyone would attempt to assert that any measurement (or ratio of measurements) made with our current technology could ever be _precisely_ √2 or even π (that's pi)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Everyone who supports the A* sizes of paper (start with a square meter because it's nice and clean, then just declare that all other paper uses that humankind might ever need should be specific fractions of that square meter and no other sizes are ever needed) should also support Swatch time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

Alternately, if Swatch time seems dumb to you, then you might also accept that paper should be sized to fit a usage, not just a "clean" measurement scheme.

Does this hold true for other things as well? Should all cell phone screens be sized to be a specific fraction of a square meter, just because it's "cleaner"? Or should they be sized to fit, you know, people's hands and pockets?

And for that matter, the math isn't even right! Because SQRT(2) is not rational, you'll get noticeably different sizes if you actually started with 4A0 and sliced it in halves until you got to A10 versus directly cutting an A10 piece. That should drive you math-obsessives _crazy_.

<comment><USER33> I agree that fanaticism over an arbitrary paper standard seems silly, but I don't buy your analogy. The reason Swatch time probably feels dumb is that the notion of changing the time format used by essentially the whole globe is itself dumb. The transaction costs are almost certainly higher than any benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?

<comment><USER36> English is far from being streamlined.

In fact it's the only language I know that requires you to learn how to pronounce EACH word.

Most languages only require learning how each letter sounds, and maybe a few dozen di/trigraphs, the rest is regular. Not so in English.

<comment><USER37> No, you don't.

You only need to learn separate spelling and pronunciation rules for each of the languages English has evolved or stolen from.

The _tough_ spellings usually come from Germanic roots via Old English and Middle English, whereas the French-Norman spellings are less _difficult_.

Greek-Latin spellings are markedly less confusing when you learn the transliterations of the Greek alphabet. Of course Philadephia is pronounced with fricative 'f' sounds instead of plosive 'p' sounds, because the Greek letter for that sound is 'phi'. Because of that, I dislike it when people pronounce the feathered dinosaur archaeopterix as [ar-key-OP-tur-iks] rather than [ar-KAY-o-(p)TEAR-iks]. It isn't incorrect either way, because in English, correct is whatever other people will understand. (Suck it, French.)

This is why I get sick of people complaining about "monolingual" English- speakers. The language has been glued together from Dutch-Germanic, North- Germanic, French-Norman, Greek, Latin, and centuries of absorbing and assimilating immigrant populations from all over the world.

You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word- specific association. The remaining ten percent of words are correct when spelled and pronounced as in the native language or as anglicized renormalizations, even using the rules specific to unrelated languages. That is why the plural of octopus can be either octopodes or octopuses. Octopi is colloquially correct, but it is then acceptable to deliver a short lecture on Latinized Greek words. Similarly, the acceptable plurals of cactus are cactuses, cacti, or (los) cactus (pronounced as in Spanish). As Spanish has an increasingly large influence on American English, I have found it useful to know that it only has five vowel sounds, and knowing how to pronounce burrito and enchilada correctly gives you all five.

Despite what your elementary school teachers may have said to you, you are only incorrect in English if other people cannot understand what you are trying to communicate. Nevertheless, failure to be incorrect does not imply correctness, which is why grammar nazis exist.

<comment><USER38> >You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word- specific association.

Don't you also need to learn the language from which every word is derived from?

<comment><USER37> No. The rules come from different languages, but once the word is considered an English word, only the orthography matters. If you make a new word by combining skip and hop into "skiphop", someone may mistakenly pronounce it [ski-fope] rather than [skip-hop], despite the fact that neither "ski" nor "phop" are identifiable as Greek roots, because phi makes an 'f' sound, and that makes the subsequent 'o' vowel pronounced as the 'o' in 'phobia'.

Knowing the etymology helps, but is not necessary. When linguistic researchers create nonce words for their experiments--words with no etymology at all, like "gluff" or "splim"\--they find that people still generally pronounce them in the same ways.

They also find that people impute meanings to the nonce based on structures found in the word. For instance, when given the nonce words "plorkish" and "erildophate", and told that they are synonyms, subjects may claim that the latter is more sophisticated or scientifically precise. Or perhaps they are told to match the word to the person who spoke it, and a significant fraction of subjects match the words to the pictures the same way.

You can do the test yourself. Print out photos of Bill Nye and Kanye West. Write out "plorkish" and "erildophate" on index cards. Tell people the words are synonyms, and ask them to match the word to the photo of the person who said it. If they don't swing at least 60% in favor of West=plorkish and Nye=erildophate, and pronounce the words the same way, I will eat a tiny portion of my least favorite hat.

I claim bonus points if they also use them in a sentence or identify the part of speech as adjectives. Perhaps ask your subjects to also guess the sentence their chosen person spoke when using the word.

People do actually get paid to test this. This might be a good Science Fair project, actually.

<comment><USER38> >Knowing the etymology helps, but is not necessary.

Well, often it's necessary to either memorize a pronunciation or know the etymology, because often people pronounce English incorrectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I know that there is a continuing fight between US measurements (inch, ...) and European measurements (Metric system) -- but I really was shocked, when a printer wanted to have "US letter" pages. The advantage of the A-System is so big over the US letter system, that I don't understand that there are still countries that don't want to adopt it. Just ask your photo copier manufacturer!

It also can't be reasoned, that so many cars or traffic signs have to be changed ...

</comment><comment><USER40> HN effect killed the article, can't read it, have to estimate based on existing comments. Assuming they actually read it, of course.

Paperless office, checking in here. Our printer is only used for people screwing around doing non-work related projects, printing school essays for themselves or their kids, real estate MLS records, car insurance forms, stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think I'd be okay with A4 if it were a bit smaller. Pegging A0 to a sq. meter is the problem. That's just arbitrary.

</comment><comment><USER41> Let's work on a demand for a metric standard instead of this..

</comment><comment><USER42> My personal rant is that I want a global setting on every printer to override differences in requested page size.

For example, being in the UK, I print to A4, and that is the only size of paper I have available for my printer. If I print stuff from browsers, or documents from US people which are set to page size Letter, I DO NOT WANT TO HAVE TO GO TO THE PRINTER AND PRESS A BUTTON TO PRINT ON THE ONLY PAPER AVAILABLE (A4). Just print everything on A4 please - ignoring page size requests (or at least let me choose the option to do this override).

This is such a pain, and occurs very frequently. Am I alone? I rather assume the inverse applies for US people.

It could be a setting on the printer queue, but then you are at the risk of every operating system or indeed application such as browser getting it wrong... Printer manufacturers please just add a setting to your options - pretty please...

<comment><USER43> Haven't had that happen for ages...

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I went into a Fedex/Kinko's in the US, to try to print something on A3.

They looked at me as if I had just asked them to sell me a unicorn. They then offered to custom cut a piece of paper for what I'd approximate as several tens of thousands of percent markup.

</comment><comment><USER45> And what about US legal? Or Architectural Sizes?

Nevermind folios (and quartos and ovtavos).

It's a big diverse world with room for all sorts of paper applications.

[Architectural Sizes]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Architectural_sizes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Architectural_sizes)

[folios]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folio_%28printing%29#Size](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folio_%28printing%29#Size)

[big diverse world]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Other_sizes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Other_sizes)

<comment><USER2> It is a big, diverse world. And various, special use-cases are best addressed with different aspect ratios. But, to me, the point of ISO 216 adoption in place of US Letter (and other common sizes) is about having a general- purpose/common-use aspect ratio with inherent properties that help simplify things across the board for a lot of people. If it wasn't already used so much elsewhere, I'd be a "harder sell" (even to myself). But, it is used elsewhere... a lot... and has beneficial properties too. Trying to clean up the mess and simplify the chaos. Remove the unnecessary extra baggage associated with other systems.

Aside: If I was king of Sun III (previously known as Earth), my replacement for "US Legal" sized paper would be 210mm × 340mm. This maintains the width of A4, but gives it a length similar to that of US Legal. Moreover, it achieves this using the Golden Ratio. Calling it φA4 for the time being.

        US Legal..:  8.5"  × 14" (Before mm conversion.)
        US Legal..:  216mm × 356mm —> approx. 1.647:1 ratio

        A4........:  210mm × 297mm —> approx. 1.414:1 ratio
        φA4.......:  210mm × 340mm —> approx. 1.619:1 ratio

See [http://i.imgur.com/S0rrRnP.png](http://i.imgur.com/S0rrRnP.png) for an example.

Aside: Apparently the 210mm × 340mm size is used for some folded paper towels and some pastry bags already. Also, Mexico's "Government-Legal" is 216 mm × 340 mm — same height as my proposal but with a 6mm width difference. (Theirs matches US Letter/Legal width of 216mm instead of the A4 width of 210mm.)

<comment><USER45> Are you volunteering to transition Sun III's physical files cabinets, storage boxes, warehouse shelving? To reconfigure their printers, rewrite their report software etc.?

There's a lot of friction and it all takes place on the ground, unlike translating Python 2 programs to handle Unicode, there's no cloud service model that facilitates the transition.

 _The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Grace "disputed attribution" Hopper_

<comment><USER2> As King of Sun III, yes I am forcefully "volunteering" my subjects to do the work. Archives can remain as-is. Everything new shall use the new system. Doing otherwise incurs penalty. If you don't use the new system, you will get pain treatments and possible death. /humour

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have to note that A4 (what goes in a standard printer) is just a _shitty_ format for documents. There is no way to get a proper layout done, you basically need two columns to use a reasonable amount of space with regards to font size and text body layout, which leads to other problems.

There is a very good reason you don't see any A4 books. A5 works OK for book layouts but still is too wide actually...

A5 booklet printed: [http://mr.gy/blogopy/max/3589981109.html](http://mr.gy/blogopy/max/3589981109.html)

<comment><USER7> > There is no way to get a proper layout done

This is puzzling - how do you explain the abundance of people who seem to have no problem with this whatsoever?

Finally: I have seen lots and lots of A4 books, but they're simply not as common. It probably does help to live in Europe in that regard.

<comment><USER46> Are you a bookmaker? The are the ones with the problems. ;)

> I have seen lots and lots of A4 books

And they all have suboptimal layouts.

<comment><USER7> > And they all have _suboptimal_ layouts.

(my emphasis)

My question would be - would you be willing to ascribe that to taste?

<comment><USER46> No. Try to layout a document on A4 while maintaining at least basic standard rules (e.g. lines of 8-12 words, a pretty text body layout, e.g. a "nice ratio" like 3/4 or 1/2, with standard margins, that is 1 on top, left and right and 2 on bottom). Since your font size will either be 11 or 12 pt on A4 because otherwise you use less than half of the paper or your font is really huge, you're not left with many options.

<comment><USER47> All of this is voodoo that you learned working with your preferred aspect ratio and size. None of these rules have any kind of objective basis.

<comment><USER48> I wouldn't be so hasty to dismiss hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of aesthetic tweaking by experts as voodoo simply to defend a page size and proportion whose primary advantage is not aesthetic but function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Another fun fact:

An A0 piece of paper has an area of exactly 1 square meter.

<comment><USER50> It says that right in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One could just imagine Letter to be 11" x 7.7781" (preserving the sq. root ratio) but with a 0.7219" side margin for bindings. Feel better now?

</comment><comment><USER51> I have been keeping all of my notes on B5, while living in the US, for the past ten years for this exact reason. 8.5 x 11 is simply not an attractive shape.

</comment><comment><USER52> I personally want Japanese B5 notepads -- they are the perfect dimensions. I ran out a long time ago, and they are hard to come by in the US.

<comment><USER53> They're cheap at Muji. [http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks/recycled- paper...](http://www.muji.us/store/stationery/notebooks/recycled-paper-note- double-ring-b5-plain-80.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The post seems to be inspired by a hot question on Math StackExchange [http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1143132/is-there- a-s...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1143132/is-there-a-size-of- rectangle-that-retains-its-ratio-when-its-folded-in-half) . Probably the author should also acknowledge it?

</comment><comment><USER55> As a young european the printer message "Please insert letter", or something similar, always confused the hell out of me when printing certain PDFs. Letter? What letter?

</comment><comment><USER56> Yay math. But we're not changing. Were you around for us trying out the metric system?

If you really want to start, let's begin with QWERTY keyboards

</comment><comment> mark-r And let's not even get started on standard(?) photo sizes! Who came up with that mess?

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this the place to bring "inches vs cm" on the table ? :p

<comment><USER58> It's not the place, but not that you've brought it, as an American I say imperial units can go die in a fire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is A4 sized paper hard to get hold of in the US?

<comment><USER59> I tend to buy two reams A4 for each ten reams Letter, but each time availability and pricing varies. OfficeMax used to have Boise A4 paper around $8 a ream, but now they are selling a Hammermill paper for $11. Never in the stores of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Practically, the number of people who need to ever use a paper size other than letter/A4 is minimal. So any elegance is pretty much lost.

<comment><USER4> Not true, at least outside the US where using other sizes is easy. It all "just works", so it's used all the time.

Age 5, my school work book is B4 size. I can glue the a A4 sheet (or two A5 sheets) the teacher hands out.

A little later, and the work books are B5 sized. A4 sheets fit in if folded.

I want to make a poster at home. I set the document size to A2, design it, press print, and four A4 sheets are printed, exactly the right size. I can change it to any other A-size very easily.

I want to photocopy / print some A4 documents, but save paper. Two (or four) sheets fix neatly on one page. Or, I can enlarge it to A3 — most photocopiers in most offices have A3 paper in one of the drawers for this. There's an A3 laser printer in my office, it's useful.

From my desk, I can see things laser-printed by me in A4 and A3; things produced in A5 and A6; and notebooks in B5. If I need a poster in A1 or A2 size there's a printer upstairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I've tried in the past to explain how awesome the sqrt(2) ratio used as the basis of DIN/ISO page sizes is, but there are some very dumb people on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821947)

<comment><USER61> They are more or less agreeing with you that convenient scaling is a feature. They just use a bad analogy, and you talk past each other a lot.

(I agree that they miss the point that you aren't promoting metric)

<comment><USER62> Yes. talideon wrote two unrelated sentences next to each other, Turing_Machine thought they were related, and the two of them started talking about different things. (This is my impression, at least. I can't seem to bring myself to properly read the whole thread, it's too frustrating.)

talideon, you do not come across well from that exchange. You may or may not have been talking to a brick wall, but you weren't listening to one. I more- or-less agree with raldi: instead of fixating loudly on what Turing_Machine did wrong in that thread, think about how you could do better next time.

<comment><USER60> Look, I repeated told him that the units didn't matter, and that it was the ratio that mattered. Other than disengaging sooner (which I would've done if I'd any cop-on myself), what could I have said differently? I'm truly at a loss. I straight-up wrote this:

> _The units are irrelevant._ That's what you're not getting. What is relevant > is that the same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different > page sizes.

When I was younger, I would've had more patience with this kind of thing; but as I get older, it becomes less and less worth my time and energy.

<comment><USER61> You say that "same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page sizes" is the important thing, but it's the result of using that particular ratio that is important, when you take a page of 1/2 the area by cutting across the long dimension, the aspect ratio is maintained.

If you aren't worried about maintaining the aspect ratio for 1/2 pages, you can maintain any arbitrary aspect ratio as you scale up and down (but you don't get the 'easy' scaling to half or double areas).

That's where the imperial fluid analogy comes in, there is convenience derived from having it be base 2.

<comment><USER60> The fluid measurements analogy doesn't work though because volumes don't behave the same way as areas with fixed aspect ratios. Moreover, the reason why √2 is such a useful ratio is _because_ it maintains the same aspect ratio when the sheet is doubled or halved. That's why his argument was nonsensical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Nooo... Dunder mifflin will be out of business!

</comment><comment><USER64> A lot of US "standards" (only US uses them) should be banned.

<comment><USER65> There is nothing weird about __national __standards. Everyone does it. Germany has DIN, for instance. Even tiny Belgium has the NBN.

Usually, these standards are either equivalent to international standards or are only relevant in the home country of the organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Please ban letter size, ever been at the printer realsing nothing printed and facing PC Load letter message? Ever been in a foreign country trying to find your home countries legal size of paper in a local store?

I think we should switch to metric, a4 paper and right hand driving.

<comment><USER67> All of the countries using US Letter already drive on the right hand side...

<comment><USER68> I think the sentiment was "standardize on the majority", not "everything the US does is wrong".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Correlation of personality type and programming language preference? - <AUTHOR> Is there a known correlation between personality type (e.g. Big Five, MBTI) and programming language preferences?<p>Has any research been done on this topic? <comment><USER2> I suspect that there is some correlation between abstract thinking and preferring FP, and between concrete thinking and procedural programming. However, I know of no research to either support or disprove this.</comment>


Show HN: A 3D Todo 'List' - <AUTHOR> https://todo3d.app <comment><AUTHOR> Not another ToDo app?

I've always wondered why ToDo apps are so stuck on lists. The Eisenhower Box ('four quadrants') is a much better idea but hardly anyone uses it. What I've always wanted though, was a 3D plot. Since AFAIK no one has built one yet, I made one myself.

This is just a rough demo, not an actual product. I'd be interested if anyone thinks this (the idea or the implementation) is useful.</comment>