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Comment by musiciangames | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite nitpicks, but IMO 7x fewer errors means -6 times the error rate. Maybe error rate reduced by 86%.

Isn't it just errors_count/7? (errors_count * 1/7)

For example, if you got 70 errors before you now get only 10 errors.

7 times 70 =490. 490 fewer than 70 is -420. But words mean what you want them to mean, so 7 times fewer to mean 1/7th is becoming commonplace.

(edited because formatting swallowed asterisk for times)

Is there any case where your interpretation makes sense? Would you ever say 0.86 times fewer instead of 0.86 of the size?

If new is 1/7 the size of the old, then 7 * new = old. It takes 7 times of new_count to get the value of old_count. 1/7th of the old_count. 7x fewer seems like a shorthand, but I'm not a native English speaker.

  x times != x times fewer

7 times => multiply

7 times fewer => multiply by fraction

I would never say times fewer, because it is ambiguous.

When value is above 1, it's not really ambiguous anymore as only one interpretation makes sense. But I understand that it could still be incorrect, if it's not well defined term in English.

You choose an interesting case at 1. What does 1 times less errors mean? To me it means no errors.

It's ambiguous as it's not above or below 1 :)

Gotta put a back-whack in like \* for *

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