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Comment by ohitsdom | Hacker News Reader

> single-digit _multiple_ of the entire Netflix movie catalog

Strange unit of comparison, although I may start using it.

Facebook gets a Flickr worth of photos every few days.

As someone who subscribes to ArchiveTeam's philosophy, it's going to be a dark day when the time comes to scrape Facebook before it goes under with that much data behind the scenes.

It's already backed up to Blueray. They'll just hand it over.

Yeah, right. How and who exactly would they hand that over to, given that there are privacy settings on the photos that people expect to have respected?

Sarcasm son....

You'd be surprised at how many people assume these bigcos are open to doing the right thing when they're shutting down.

Hey, I've still got my complimentary MySpace zip file kicking around somewhere.

I had a hard drive crash on me with all of my photos some years back and my "backup" strategy failed. Dumping a myspace backup got me some of my most precious photos back. Thanks MySpace!

Even more. Most people don't even realize that things like FB aren't eternal.

It isn't even clear what "the right thing" is here.

I wonder if this system could be used for 'burns'.

Such as: "Hacker News has an Ask dot com userbase of number of good posters" (This obviously does not include me ;))

How many VW Bugs is that ?

Well, I remember when Library of Congress and encyclopedias were used as units of measure. I would guess Netflix is the new stack of media.

Uh, how much is it actually? (Simple searching didn't seem to get me the answer.)

We should have a list of these things.

I did the same thing. I suspect that it's just "A LOT".

That's the same as saying "the same order of magnitude"

But while "1" and "9" are the same order of magnitude, so are "1" and "0.1". To say something is within an order of magnitude of netflix, you cover a possible range from 0.1 to 10 times the Netflix catalog, a range which is ten times bigger if you consider the minimum and maximum sizes...

Um, 0.1 and 1 are not considered the same order of magnitude.

I was abbreviating. We're talking about an open end of the interval right?

He didn't say "within an order of magnitude", he said, "the same order of magnitude." There is a difference.

So you think he meant within a factor of 3 and 1/3? That's not what the original netflix comment said.

"The same order of magnitude" means a multiplicative constant of a number from [1,10). 1/3 is decreasing by an order of magnitude. That is the typical usage in the sciences. Anyway, it's splitting hairs over something even less worthy of splitting hairs over.

> But while "1" and "9" are the same order of magnitude, so are "1" and "0.1". To say something is within an order of magnitude of netflix, you cover a possible range from 0.1 to 10 times the Netflix catalog

"is same order of magnitude as" is not a transitive relationship.

You seem to live in a base-tenny world. Many nerdies train themselves to do hex mental math in kindergarten, and the geekies do it base-36 because those extra letters "are there". So perhaps a 256 to 1296 multiplication ratio (those 2 numbers there are in base 10).

the order of magnitude is well known to be defined in base 10. That's regardless of your base of choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

I've only heard of people talk about binary orders of magnitude; hexadecimal no

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