If anything, these few days have shown to me that many on HN don't seem to get the metric system at all. Broken math and silly conversions everywhere, baby
"ton" is overloaded with three units having the same name, although at least the "metric ton" is often spelled tonne (1 tonne = 1000 kg ≈ 2204 lbs), but that still doesn't do enough to disambiguate it in speech. In written texts, it can be difficult to impossible to know whether "ton" refers to the American unit (2000 lbs ≈ 907 kg) or the British unit (2240 lbs ≈ 1016 kg).
I've never seen non-americans take ton for anything other than 1000 kg. The real funny thing in that other thread is the guy specifically claimed "metric tons" while doing math with some other type of tons.
Who cares, though, right? What's important is sounding right
If anything, these few days have shown to me that many on HN don't seem to get the metric system at all. Broken math and silly conversions everywhere, baby
Just this week we had the highest rated comment present completely incorrect kg to ton conversion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34955578