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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, please change it to 3MM, which also abbreviates to "3 million". My first impression was strongly that 3M had some lock system that was now compromised, not that it was referring to 3 million locks in the wild.

Also perhaps consider expanding the headline character limit above 80, or maybe not count numbers in the total.

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How about "Hackers Found a Way to Open Any of 3 Million Hotel Keycard Locks in Seconds" its only 75 characters. Nobody has to guess about abbreviations or whether it's really Latin or mm.

Or just drop all the clickbait crap from the headline - "Hackers", "any", "3 million" and "in seconds" are all just fluff meant to create an emotional response. Change the subject to where the responsibility lies, the locks themselves or the lock manufacturer, and add "major brand" or "widely deployed" if it's necessary to separately indicate notoriety.

3 millimeters is a really small lock.

I think its the lock found on most kids' diaries!

It's the World's tiniest open-source lock.

Actually, I believe what you want is 3mm, which I believe they use in accounting. Lowercase m in this instance would stand for milli-, as in thousand. So 3mm would be 3 thousand thousand. 3M is technically correct, though confusing in this specific case. Capital M would indicate Mega, as in the progression from kilobit to megabit to gigabit.

3mm hotel keycard form factor.

3MM is three million, for US accountants and thus engineers writing docs for VPs. 3mm is three millimeters.

Gamers just write it as 3kk. (PS: never seen MM used as a "million" even in my two decades on the internet)

Eh... Haven't seen anyone using 3kk to abbreviate 3M. 3M is common and B for billion. Those are also used in many games to shorten currencies.

This seems to be a (IRL) cultural thing - the vast majority of people I play EVE with use k/m/b/t, but a small percent does use k/kk/kkk

Afaik it came from the first Korean MMOs, like Lineage. Maybe even earlier, but I saw such format there first.

Interesting, I'd seen it as "MM", as in "Thousand Thousand" in Roman numerals.

Of course lowercase "mm" is most recognizable as millimeter, so that would be confusing in a different way.

it would take all of about 3 seconds to realize why an unlimited character count would break the site's layout and know that it will never happen.

i do agree that the "don't editorialize" and strict char count are very contradictory, but suggesting that the site changes because of it is also naive at best.

It took about 1 second to realize that "80 characters" and "unlimited" aren't the only two options.

Exactly; thank you.

I was definitely NOT thinking of unlimited.

I was thinking of 80chars, but excluding numerals (123, etc) and number text ("thousand", "million" etc.) and maybe a few other items excluded from the count, with a maximum of 100, or whatever number actually will not break the layout.

I've found it frustrating trying to fit in 80chars, and e.g., finding that ampersand gets expanded so it actually counts more than "and", so it is not a single-rule 80 chars; perhaps a few more sophisticated rules might help. Just a suggestion.

Not that it really matters, but I found it interesting thinking of ways this could be broken...

    million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million million

you missed the

>>"with a maximum of 100,"

mm is milimeters. MM does not exist.

MM = 1,000 * 1,000 == 1,000,000 <- thats where MM comes from Roman numerals.

jeasus christ:

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/fixed-income...

Seems like you engineers have been behind code and not having to defend your project budgets to CFOs and stakeholders often.

MM is 2,000 in Roman numeral notation, not a million.

Yeah, but finance people (way after the roman times) adopted M as a suffix for thousands, and once you treat it as a suffix or prefix it made sense (to them) to use MM for million. You sometimes see the same done in engineering-adjacent contexts with SI prefixes, like using kk for million.

The finance people that I know uses K for thousands and MM for million.

Tech and science use K for thousand and M for million.

Using K and MM in finance reduces the odds of an incorrect interpretation of a single M.

Sweden faint memory of using ' and " for accounting. 1' is 1 000, 1" is 1 000 000. Or something like that, didn't spend much time on it.

So MMXXIV = 1,000 * 1,000 * 10 * 10 * 1 * 4?

Maybe 3M should rename themselves to something less confusing.

They were originally "Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co."

Seems the 3M branding has worked quite well...

"In business news, 3M and M&M have merged to form, get this, Ultradyne Systems." Simpsons S14E12 [0]

[0] https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_script...

Many 3M adhesives would hold the hotel doors closed.

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