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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

That thousands separator notation is ambiguous when communicating outside of a country that uses it as a standard[1]. You mean 100k mails/s, I think? Using a SI prefix like that is the easiest way to deal with it, or thinsp (u+2009) seems to be the international standard for digit group separation.

[1] only a handful of countries use it, and they don't have English as their primary language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Examples_of_use (row 5)

edit: regarding the disagreement over "only a handful" in a reply: that map is showing the separator between units and fractional part I think, not the thousands/millions/etc grouping separator.

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Interested to know how one could send anything less than a full email :)

they did specify a rate. so it could just be a really slow connection for some mail servers.

yeah, sorry. I just forgotten about it. currently I work so much with the german thousand seperators that I totally forgotten about the other standards. currently i use scala's bigdecimal library which handles these things really great. While before I used python where I sometimes needed to manually convert between them. but you are right I shouldn't use anything like that in a global forum.

While I grant you the "don't use English as primary language", "a handful of countries" does not stand up to scrutiny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#/media/File:Decim...

I don't even need to count to figure out that 80+ countries use that system :)

From the page you linked:

The convention for digit group separators varies but usually seeks to distinguish the delimiter from the decimal mark. Typically, English-speaking countries employ commas as the delimiter—10,000—and other European countries employ periods or spaces: 10.000 or 10 000. Because of the confusion that can result in international documents, the superseded SI/ISO 31-0 standard advocates the use of spaces and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry advocate the use of a "thin space" in "groups of three".

That's a map of decimal marks, not group delimiters. They're not the same thing, nor are they always opposites.

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