Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by iab | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

iab

They raised two gillion??

View on HN

2 Gigadollars.

For wages that's 1000^3, for taxes it's 1024^3.

$2.4 billion - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/flexport/company_fin....

G => SI prefix for 10^9

"2 Gs", in the US at least, means "two thousand" (G as in Grand)

I wouldn't immediately parse that abbreviation in the US--but if I did I'd parse it as G being shorthand for grand. More commonly 2Gs would be used for 2x the normal force of gravity--i.e. you weigh twice as much.

> More commonly 2Gs would be used for 2x the normal force of gravity--i.e. you weigh twice as much.

That's a lower case g.

As with many things I never expect others to be respecting arbitrary style guides when they write something. (Same reason I wouldn't use semi-weekly or biweekly.)

The guy went to the trouble of adhering to the guide, appending the unity at the correct place, and contextualizing it so it's clear.

It's everybody here that is getting out of their way to avoid understanding the number.

Also G (uppercase) doesn't have units that result in G$ being a plausible quantity even if you could combine number-unit quantities and use like a unit like that (which you can't for this exact reason): dollar-cubic metres per kilo per second per second.

It's also rather small.

And in many places M stands for thousand, from Latin "mille" (as well as the Roman numeral). That doesn't keep people from counting in kilo-, mega- and gigadollars. Still less confusing than dealing with short vs long scale numbers in translation.

Which is why you see millions of dollars often abbreviated as $5MM, to avoid the confusion with single M.

So 2 gigabucks, gotcha!

G$ - > gigadollar. Not exactly standard, but I like it.

I prefer gigabucks, but tomato, tomatto

is 1 Gigadollar = 2^10 Megadollars?

or did op mean Gigidollars = mere 1e3 Mebidollars ?

Two googols

Reply on news.ycombinator.com