Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZYinMD | Hacker News Reader

It's funny you call it 1G instead of 1B. I've never seen people do that. Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Btw, it's 1.5G, not 1G.

Btw, the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

View on HN

> Now I think about it, why is GB not called BB?

Because it doesn’t scale. Giga is the metric prefix for “times billion”.

However, large (and small) numbers don’t end there. What about Quadrillion and Quintillion? What about milli and micro?

OK, so what you mean is, million and mega happen to share the initial, and trillion and tera happen to share too, but billion and giga happen to not share an initial.

Also, the metric prefixes are used cross language, and the ms, bs, and ts aren't the same cross language

Yeah, might’ve been a coincidence

> the Chinese government lies about many things but the COVID case numbers weren't lies, at least no lies after March 2020.

Why would that be?

I would clarify that numbers won't be grossly exaggerated. Because can't disguise compounding numbers for more than a few cycles. Over reporting GDP by 2% consistently for couple decades and real economy would be only 2/3 size as projected. Under report covid for a few days and you have millions of cases instead of hundreds. Also PRC epidemic controls / contact tracing require accurate reporting to even work. The outbreak numbers since March 2020 have been so small that large discrepancies would be hard to hide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com