Some reasons to measure

A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his comment on some future measurement projects I wanted to do (in the same vein as other projects like keyboard vs. mouse, keyboard, terminal and end-to-end latency measurements) was, "so you just want to get to the top of Hacker News?" The implication for the former is that measuring is less valuable than building and for the l...