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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

> %53

What's with that weird way of writing a percentage numeric? Some weird "i'm an insider, trust me" signalling?

Please don't take HN on offtopic flamewar tangents and certainly please don't perpetuate them, as you did below. That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm sorry. The tangent was a sincere belief in this crazy GME situation. Perpetuating the tangent was just stupid.

In some languages you put the percentage sign at the front - like, in Turkish for instance[0].

I mean, it's not that weird. It's how currency symbols move to either front or behind of a number. Why is it $300 but 300zł?

[0] https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/percent-sign-positio...

It’s generally said that the dollar sign is in front to stop people adding extra numbers to written cheques. Since the end of the number is finished with .00 and the start is $ there is no room to add anything extra.

All the checks I've seen have a box for the number and the $ printed outside the box. There wouldn't be room even if there was no $.

Also that's why the amount is written in words below it, a double-entry to prevent one of the two locations from being modified.

Does Turkish say “out of ten, four” rather than “four out of ten”?

If you must know, I now use them interchangeably because on my android keyboard the % symbol is two meta options deep, so i am now in the habit of using it first because I don't want to risk typing additional characters triggering the auto-correct.

Wow.

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