Hacker News Reader

"200 million million", "actions per second" and "100 million moving parts".

Why write like this?

Either the writer is trying to dumb it down to a ridiculous level or they have no idea what they are talking about and just threw technical words together.

View on HN

I think 200 million million is a British English thing because of the long scale/short scale ambiguity:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

As a Brit, no one has made the million/milliard distinction for my entire life. 1000 million is a billion as far as anyone is concerned, a million million is a trillion. It’s just comically bad writing.

Good to know.

I think the writing in this article is not so good, but I've seen this usage by plenty of respectable writers. Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" is not comically bad writing, and it's full of even more outlandish usages of "million million million ..."

https://www.google.com/search?q=brief+history+of+time+"milli...

Ah yes point taken: I was implying that the author had used this (nowadays) non-standard construction in order to add some sensationalism.

I am laughing at this. He is describing it as if it were a steampunk device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com