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Comment by sinxoveretothex | Hacker News Reader

I was a little bit annoyed (enough to comment) by the use of the wrong units. 'mb' is millibit, perhaps millibyte, but certainly not megabyte (MB or MiB).

Similarly:

> it pushes about 5-10 megabits of traffic most of the time

Bits are a unit of information, not flow. Probably the author meant Mib/s.

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I agree about the milli prefix (I hate its misuse guts, too), but netadmins write the unit designation as either "Mb/s" or "Mbit", so among them it's kind of jargon to talk about "megabits" when one means "megabits per second". Jargon has this weird property of often being incorrect terminology.

But while I would accept that from a network engineer, I don't know what background the author has.

We as programmers have gotten tired of saying "per second", I guess.

Well, yeh... I would normally like this kind of correction, but I don't get annoyed by them - otherwise I'd be annoyed after everything I read :)

This annoyed me too. The author does not seem to be aware that case is highly important when dealing with SI/binary prefixes as well as unit abbreviations. If you don't even know (or care) that "b" is a bit and "B" is a byte, and you use them incorrectly, how am I supposed to trust your technical knowledge about the rest of the stuff you're talking about?

The author is the creator of ZeroTier. He is likely aware and didn't care because it's extremely pedantic and most people know what he means in informal settings, which this is. I expect he'd use the correct case in an RFC or something.

Getting abbreviations for bits/bytes correct is not "extremely pedantic", it's about communicating correctly. In a network context, which this is, "b" means bits, but he was using it to refer to bytes. Also I've never heard of ZeroTier, but even if I had, I probably would not have made the connection that he was the author of it, so being correct about these things is important for establishing credibility with new audiences.

IIRC, most if not all uses of 'mb' or 'gb' were about disk space or RAM, so not really a network context - this is about bloat, ports are just the whipping boy.

And I'm not against pedantry in the right context, but this is just a casual, relatively nontechnical rant. Pedantry is really not needed.

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