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craftkiller • last Friday at 7:25 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

If you go to the home depot page for torque wrenches and click the filter for drive size, you get this list:

  1/2 in
  1/4 in
  1 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  Specialty
Here is the same list in decimal to make the insanity plainly obvious:

  0.5
  0.25
  1
  0.375
  0.75
What sadistic lunatic made that sort order?! It's not based on size and it's not alphabetic.

Replies

tomjakubowski • last Friday at 7:29 PM

I had to check what the gold standard McMaster-Carr does: their torque wrench drive size widget is sorted 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4", 1", 1 1/2". Glorious. https://www.mcmaster.com/products/torque-wrenches/

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bluedino • last Friday at 8:39 PM

Now look up impact wrenches.

  1/2 in
  1 in
  1/4 in
  3/8 in
  3/4 in
  7/16 in
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SoftTalker • last Friday at 7:45 PM

It's probably a default ordering or an ordering by an unshown database ID value. It's a small enough set that it doesn't really matter for practical purposes, but I guess it does betray a lack of attention to detail.

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gtowey • last Saturday at 2:50 AM

SELECT ... ORDER BY RAND()

nunez • last Saturday at 1:19 AM

This is sorted mostly alphabetically with an allowance for people being bad with fractions. That's my guess.