Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte | Hacker News Reader

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte

theregister.com

120 pointssamizdis97 comments

This is a problem for me. I'm from east-bay. Every thing that's hella stuff is hella stuff, so I've been calling various amounts of hella data as hella-bytes (or my fast internet give me hella-BPS). A big cultural shift for it to mean a precise amount.

It's like aksing some New Englander to define what "a wicked lotta" is...it's hella! Oh! Why didn't you say so?

mad bytes.

That can be 10^30

F*ck yeah! https://www.hella.com/hella-us/en/History-139.html

From my experience it comes from the power of the lights often used on 4x4 vehicles used by the inhabitants.

But this one is some Cascadia slag right?

I have an issue with it and I am not sure that my stance is correct. The problem as I see it is that making things casual feels like it’s taking the discipline out of the discipline of science. I also just think that slang is not necessarily long term speech. I mean some words hang around and enter the lexicon (e.g. cool started at least 60-70 years ago and seems to still be acceptable to say) but others are very generational and transient. (23 skidoo, rad) On the other hand, I would likely be saying hellabyte in my best Del The Funky Homosapien accent. He’s from the Bay Area and throws at least 5 “hellas“ in every interview.

But seriously I think maybe a middle ground from overly clinical sounding and overly casual sounding should be the aim...

True, but that's already been the case in biology.

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

Weird that this list does not include the "sneaky fucker strategy" - or perhaps this omission is indication that biologists don't find that term unusual.

Or they just omitted it to be ... sneaky.

I don't think you're wrong to be cautious about making science too casual, but I don't think everybody will immediately look at the word "hellabyte" and think "Oh, somebody from the Bay named this"

I can't say it sounds any more silly to me than zettabyte or yottabyte

I represent the perspective parent supposed. Hellabyte sounds as reasonable as any other prefix.

Sometimes science is top down. Sometimes it’s bottom up. I welcome a balanced mix of both approaches. Let popularity (in an extremely broad sense of the word) decide which prefixes suggested by the masses win, as well as who gets to sit on committees that will dictate new prefix suggestions and approve them. When you look around, this is just how the world works.

The various quarks would like a word.

When Truth and Beauty were in the mix, I agree. I guess we still got Charm and Strange.

I disagree because I think discipline is only necessary because something was once less accessible. And then after it becomes more accessible, discipline really just elitist gatekeeping. So I'm not at all worried about the "casual way" people conceptualize and convey 10 to the 27th power, or the "precedent" that would set.

I wish "metric assload" would be a precise amount

From what I've been told in the past, it's exactly 1/1000 of a metric asston. I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia to back that up, however.

The "buttload" is a measurement, so perhaps you could shift terminology to "metric buttload".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buttload

Since the obsolete buttload is 384 gallons, perhaps the "metric buttload" could be 384 liters.

These ‘metric’ units are usually close to the original (like the 500g ‘metric pound’), so 1750 or maybe 2000 liters, or even 1500 to make the Americans happy.

The metric buttload has got to be less than the American one, because let's face it, American butts are bigger.

I got you.

Hella = a lot, I mean, really a lot

Shit load is more than hella.

Metric shit load is smaller than imperial shit load (like C to F)

I assume ass load and shit load are very close (get it ;) )

Naturally a Fsck load is more than that.

But all, IMHO, are intended to be large, yet imprecise.

Metric shit load is smaller than imperial shit load (like C to F)

Except in cases of metric shit tonnes vs imperial shit tons in which case tonnes is bigger by ~10%.

It's about 10% larger than an Imperial assload.

For the uninitiated, hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier. Hella has hella meanings for hella words.

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

Honestly, being from the Bay Area, I'm against pegging hella to a specific size. It feels more appropriate for cases where you don't know how many, but 'a lot' feels insufficient.

I always said "hell of" instead of hella if I wanted to be cool like Ray Smuckles http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11242004

If you are with a lady and have Taken a DVD, you can tone it down with “heck of.” http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06212004

Would you say hella has a ton of different meanings? "Ton" seems to do fine with precise and imprecise meanings.

Too heavy man.

Agree. If we're to peg Hella to anything, it should be as an intensifier to the one's expectations.

E.g. 'there's hella people here' would indicate there are say ~5x the number of people that the listener expects there to be in a given place and time.

IME, the hella intensifier ("That run was hella dangerous") is really widespread, but the quantifier ("There were hella trees") is really a northern California thing.

If I'm still alive when someone says "hecka hellabytes", I'll shed a single wistful tear, for humanity will have run its course...

'Hecka-' sounds like the giggle-unit version of the 'Hella-'. So let's propose a heckabyte is 1024 yobibytes.

> "hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier"

This is too funny.

It is such a concise and accurate description of such an informal word that you wonder if the describer could ever use it in conversation.

I am not making fun of you!

A similar example is the description of "Working in the Coal Mine" in Wikipedia:

"Written, arranged and produced by Toussaint, the song concerns the suffering of a man who rises before 5 o'clock each morning in order to work in a coal mine, five days a week, where the conditions are very harsh and dangerous, but which offers the only prospect of paid employment. The singer repeatedly asks the Lord, "How long can this go on?" and complains that when the weekend arrives, he's too exhausted to have any fun. In the instrumental section, as in the song's fade, he says: "Lord, I'm so tired / How long can this go on?"

It just adds an additional context.

A "minute" simultaneously means 60 seconds which is brief, and in casual conversation it means an indefinitely indeterminate long period of time.

We can distinguish perfectly fine.

This has been a NorCal phrase since I first visited in 1983 as a sophomore in HS. At that time it was so very cool and West Coast sounding to my ears, and instantly understandable in context.

Kids with stricter upbringings had to settle for saying "Hecka" which is still funny to me.

Interesting side-note: the same Cali kids that introduced me to the slang word "Hella" also used the word "tight" as a slang word with negative connotation, as in:

"My parent's grounded me for a month" "Oh man, that's hella TIGHT"

But over the years "tight" has managed to flip to a positive connotation and mean 'cool', 'sweet' etc.

"Hella" still means "HELLA" though.

If "hella" is 10^27 then clearly "hecka" would be the correct name for 10^-27.

You’d better add that to the proposal!

The exact same things were alive and well in the suburbs of Sacramento circa 2010. Lots of "hecka" and the coolest kids could say "hella".

I remember a lot of that in Modesto back then.

As someone from SoCal, hella was always a NorCal colloquialism. I grew up around actual 'valley girls' and the associated slang, lots of silly things. Even after all of that, hella always sounded off to me.

Like. Totally.

Super rad, dude. I’m stoked to hit some gnarly waves today. It’s gonna be killer, dude. Like, totally.

Sorry, I slipped into my SoCal dialect there for a sec.

Valley girl She's a valley girl Valley girl She's a valley girl Okay, fine Fer sure Fer sure

My favorite north-south California variation is whether we use "the" on a freeway name or number. In the north, it's "highway 101" or just "101"; in the south it's "the 101 freeway" or just "the 101".

I've always wondered where the terminology changes over. I think it may be somewhere around King City?

LOL -- here's a clip from 30 Rock with Liz Lemon doing a flashback to her time in Los Angeles (during the Rodney King riots) and making a joke about referring to freeways in the SoCal manner of "The 10" rather than "10"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo

It’s also one of the things that was satirized in the SNL “Californians” skits:

https://youtu.be/Tt-tG6ufH90

To be fair, we also always talk about how we get places in NorCal.

In the 1970s, Marc Okrand, who later created the Klingon language, taught an introductory course in linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As an exercise to make students aware of language variation, he distributed a questionnaire that asked what terms the students used for various concepts. It also asked where the students were from. I was a TA for the course and helped to compile the students’ responses.

As I recall, some of the questions were about well-known differences within American English, such as soft drink vs. soda vs. pop or sneakers vs. tennis shoes. But a few were specific to California and were intended to show differences between the dialects of the northern and southern parts of the state.

For example, to the question “If you’re going to the city, where are you going?,” most southern Californians responded “to a city” or something similar, while northern Californians responded “to San Francisco.” There might have been one or two East Coasters who answered “to New York City.”

Another question was “Name a freeway.” The northern Californians almost invariably gave a number (“101,” “5”), while southern Californians gave a name (“the Harbor Freeway,” “the Golden State”).

I moved away from California a couple of years later and have lost track of linguistic trends there. Have southern Californians shifted away from using names for freeways to using numbers?

> Name a freeway

You'll occasionally hear people call parts of (the) 101 the Bayshore Freeway, or 880 the Nimitz Freeway.

Or even just "the Nimitz", especially if it's a radio traffic report. And of course there is the MacArthur Maze, not to be confused with The Stack.

https://www.google.com/search?q=macarthur+maze

https://www.google.com/search?q=los+angeles+the+stack

Living in West LA, it varies; but it's usually the number. There are a few exceptions, but they are specific to the freeway, like most people would take the PCH, not "the 1", although people would know what you are talking about.

The big 3 freeways down here (405, 5, 101) are all referred to exclusively by number.

That's interesting. I grew up in Pasadena in the 1960s and early 1970s, and my recollection is that freeways in the Los Angeles area were referred to by their names, both in the mass media and in conversation. Reading the following Wikipedia entry, I wonder if that popular usage changed after the overhead freeway signs were changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California_freeways#F...

While we're talking about the use of "the" with proper names, I've long been amused that, in most or all dialects of English, the names of rivers and oceans are preceded by "the" while the names of lakes are not: "the Nile," "the Indian Ocean," "Lake Baikal," "Lake Michigan." If anyone has an explanation for that, I would be very happy to hear it.

Just speculation, but I wonder if it is because of the order of words; the Indian Ocean has the same structure of "[adjective] [noun]" where the adjective is describing the noun. In that case, English requires using "the" (think "the red car" or "the small book". Lakes don't do that; English would never have "[noun] [adjective]" and so the pattern isn't recognized as requiring "the"

In that vein, SoCal uses "the" because "101 freeway" is the same pattern as "Indian Ocean", "101" is describing the kind of freeway you are talking about. No idea why NorCal doesn't do that; I blame brain damage caused by excessive fog.

In Chicago nearly everyone refers to highways by the person honored in their naming instead of Interstate number: Kennedy, Ryan, Ford, Edens, Reagan, Addams, Stevenson, Eisenhower. Lake Shore Drive is also an expressway in many sections but is never referred to by its State Highway number in writing or conversation.

This article (https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/geolinguistics/northern...) says north San Luis Obisbo county for coastal CA, so maybe Paso Robles?

My guess is that it’s a fuzzy boundary, and King City is the northern side of that fuzzy boundary. Great guess!

That is a remarkably interesting article, thanks for posting it.

And looping back to the original topic, the title is:

Northern Californian English: Hella Different?

I'm now seeing occasional usage of "the" in the southeast: "Sorry, traffic was backed up on the I-77." I'm not sure if that's the influence of much of the media we absorb being created in Los Angeles, or California expats spreading it. I'm not really a fan of it.

Having gone to a college in California, a UC where most kids were also from CA, this was a dead giveaway for who was from where. In the same vein, I love the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards where Michael Fassbender's character orders 3 drinks and holds up 3 fingers the English/American way (index, middle and ring) as opposed to the mainland European way (thumb, index and middle) and it's a dead giveaway. I don't know if that had been used in literature before, but whoever wrote that scene (Tarantino?) really picked up on a subtle difference that's a dead giveaway.

My theory on this (as someone who studied linguistics and who has lived all over CA) is that the freeways in socal used to be called by non-numeric names. My grandparents told me that what is now referred to as "the 10" used to be "the Santa Monica freeway". "The 405" used to be "the San Diego Freeway".

When all these freeways were given numeric designations, my theory postulates, people would still start referring to them by their old names, starting with the "the", but then saying the number.

As a programmer in northern California I would much rather NorCal be called NoCal, to be consistent with SoCal.

Or change SoCal to SouCal.

Pick one or the other. I hate naming inconsistencies.

How would you like if I wrote code like:

    for pixel_x in range(image.width):
        for pix_y in range(image.height):
            ...

I would say it's better to iterate on y first because line at the time is more sequential access than column at a time.

I noticed that before the naming inconsistency.

Eh it depends on what you're doing with it. If you're doing some kind of convolution type thing that is going to access a whole lot of nearby pixels in all directions, it doesn't really matter.

Also there are times I like to store "images" such that accessing image[x,y] yields (x,y) as if the image were placed in the 1st quadrant, which makes code easier to read and more intuitive. In that case the outer irritation being x-wise and the inner irritation being y-wise is faster. I absolutely hate those irritating image[height-y, x] type bullshit appearing all over my code. If you want readability image[x, y] should be (x,y) with the origin at the lower left as it always is in grade school. (I hate the people who invented matrices for putting 0,0 at the top left and inverting the y-axis.)

But when speaking, having phonetic distance between related words helps prevent confusion. In a noisy environment, you can mishear just the first consonant in "NoCal" and get "SoCal". With "NorCal", you have to mishear multiple phonemes. This phonetic distance/information redundancy is built into the NATO phonetic alphabet. It's also one way that linguists explain "chain shifts" in speech sounds.

Now saying "Cali" means you're either greater than or equal to Gen-X or not from/living in California at all.

It honestly makes me wince.

But I'll concede to a counterpoint that there is rarely a reason to say California when you are in California, as "norcal" and "socal" and other regions are said more often.

Wince away -- I am fully Gen-X and I have lived in the Bay Area for 36 years but came here from Ohio...

I love the wince that I get back from use of this word. When I am in a really ornery mood I will freely drop "San Fran" and even "Frisco" sometimes just to get stimulate that holier-than-thou-Bay-Area attitude.

It never gets old...

lol trolling is always fun

but yeah “Bay Area” is an example of a region that will come up in conversation more than “Cali”

If they go with the convention of using internet petitions to set official International System of Units prefixes, brace for prefixey-mcprefixfacebytes.

I'm sure some are too young here, but there used to be a thing in California in the 80s called "valley girls," and this is how they talked lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIOocUQkfzk

I think the only time I've really heard "hella" in mainstream is No Doubt's "Hella Good" song.

The same was done with "uber," until a company took it for their name. Uber-this and uber-that was all over the place. Rarely hear it now outside of ride sharing.

The chin movements are actually not dissimilar to the kind of British English you'll hear from privately educated people with names like Hamish and piers

There was a song from the 1980s that highlighted/parodied California slang - Valley Girl, by Frank Zappa, with the main and narrative vocal line provided by his then-teenage daughter Moon. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song)

Edited to add: I should have checked out the link in your post, which is mainly about this track.

Edited again to add the Wikipedia entry on the track Valley Girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song)

Too young? Valley girl speak is alive and well in younger circles I assure you.

> I think the only time I've really heard "hella" in mainstream is No Doubt's "Hella Good" song.

It's used several times in Macklemore's Thrift Shop:

  Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty
  The people like, Damn! That's a cold ass honkey.
  Rollin' in, hella deep, headin' to the mezzanine
  Dressed in all pink, 'cept my gator shoes, those are green

  [snip]

  That shirt's hella dope
  And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
  Peep game, come take a look through my telescope
  Trying to get girls from a brand? Then you hella won't
  Then you hella won't

I am not in favor of naming scientific measurements after stupid puns whose time has already passed.

This reminds me of how the time derivatives of displacement "are" velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, crackle and pop. Everybody agrees on this, except for the weirdos who use jounce. Official recognition is the lame way to get a unit adopted.

But if you skip jounce, then you can't define brisance as jounce per ounce!

Would the inverse prefix, for 10^-27, be holi-?

SFBA has hella. Boston has wicked. Put them together for some cross-country slang fusion. [0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hella%20wick...

The symbol collisions for H and B disqualify some other superlatives (eg. Hyper, Buncha), but leave some others viable such as Lotta, Super, and Ultra.

Ultra seems appropriate for something like 10^(10^10), which would make 10^(10^(10^10)) an Ultraplex.

A real hellabyte ought properly to be called a cenobyte.

I've lived in California for six years and I've never heard a native Californian use the phrase "hella".

It’s a Bay Area thing.

Not just bay area, I grew up using it 250 miles north of there

More like Arcata, Humboldt?

Do you live in Northern California?

Regional dialects tend to occupy borders smaller than state borders

I've lived in the California bay area all my life and my friends and I use it all the time

I've only heard one person say it, and it was the only native Californian I've ever worked with.

Fascinating. I am already anticipating Utah's knee-jerk hecka- and/or flippa- crusade

I forget where but one time I said in a post something about doing Hellawheelies on my motorcycle and they asked if I was from possible California. They said they only heard it the one place but then heard me. It’s here in Canada as slang.

10^27?

Then for bytes we also need 2^90. Hebibytes?

Hella can be the binary version. The decimal version can be hecka.

Let's make this happen.

I first heard "hella" at Berkeley in the early 90s, it was popular with the undergrads at the time (I was in grad school).

It shouldn't have a particular numerical value, I don't think.

This would be a lot of fun if it were to be selected. I think it’s cutesy, but so are our quark names. Fun things are fun and I don’t see much reason not to make this the standard.

That's funny, I remember this being a popular facebook group 10 years ago, alongside the "7 degrees of separation official experiment"

This is hella dumb.

It would be hard to define how large hella bytes is but I know it when I see it.

> brontobytes

Sorry hella, my vote was easily placed.

still, a standard supernova would be be 10^17 hellajoules, or 100 petahellajoules (hellapetajoules?).

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