Hacker News Reader

Temp in Celsius doesn’t need getting any extra data :)

Fortunately the insanity of "standard" units has everyone used to memorizing silly facts like boiling is 212 and there are 5280 feet in a mile.

If you're used to that, it's easy to remember that C = (F-32) * 9 / 5.

Uuuhhh, no? More like freezing is 0C and there are 1,000 meters in a kilometer

What's so special about the boiling point of water?

defining a scale using the two transition points of a common naturally-occurring substance which is crucial to life and chemical processes makes a lot of sense.

Using a random human’s body temperature and a strange random mixture of chemicals as scale points does not make any sense. Might as well pick a random hot day and a random cold day and use that.

Regardless, I don't see how in practice it matters that water boils at a hundred degrees. E.g., never when boiling water have I set a temperature.

You must not care about the quality of your coffee then.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm by no means an aficionado, but I've had coffee via automatic drip brew, Keurig, French press, even boiled some water in a small pot and had it like tea a few times. But I've never had to deal with the temperature personally, and that seems rather niche anyway.

Thanks for proving my point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com