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Comment by sammyoos | Hacker News Reader

The designation of trillion is ambiguous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion

Same for one billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

I've never heard someone use the long scale, it is only ever mentioned as a novelty. I think the scientific community, at the very least, has standardized on the short scale.

The long scale is common in French, German and Spanish for example. English usually uses the short scale. The scientific community uses SI prefixes, which aren't part of either scale (you don't say a billion joules which is ambiguous, you either say a terajoule for a long-scale billion or a gigajoule for a short-scale one).

Also common in Swedish, miljon = 10^6, miljard = 10^9, biljon = 10^12, biljard = 10^15, triljon = 10^18.

Fair enough, but I still would be surprised to see the long scale used in scientific communications written in English.

Re SI Prefixes: you _could_ make the argument that they are essential another short scale since they are named every 3 orders of magnitude.

My country uses long scale. I've never seen long scale used in English, so I don't think it's ambiguous.

But! When non-native speakers read news, they are not always completely fluent in English, or even aware the short scale exists. This is true even for journalists. I've seen articles written in a serious newspapers where a journalist confused "billion" and "trillion", because they incorrectly translated English "billion" to my language "bilion". Journalists! A cross-cultural mistake not unlike foots vs meters.

So that's one thing to consider if one wants to avoid miscommunication at all cost. I'm not sure if it is important enough to take into account - after all people should know better.

what? the scientific community absolutely also uses billion and trillion by short scale

it’s all over papers and nobody is ever using the long scale that i’ve seen

Are those papers in English? Long scale may be translated to short scale if the paper is translated from the original language where long scale is common.

yes, i'm talking about the scientific community - papers are almost exclusively published in english or with an english version. long scale translated to short scale would be a mistranslation, imo

The long scale is far from just a novelty, most European countries other than the UK use it. Actually I thought it was used in all non-English-speaking countries, but Wikipedia showed me that the situation is far more complicated than I thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/F...

Besides short scale and long scale, there is a sizable "short scale with milliard instead of billion" fraction, and of course some countries (China, India, Japan, Greece) have completely different systems. Most interesting is that Portugal uses the long scale, while Brazil uses the short scale. That must be confusing...

almost all scientific writing i can find from people in portugal uses the short scale. english formal communication has standardized around the short scale

All scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too.

> All scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too.

I am able to easily find plenty of Slovenian academics using short scale in their scientific writing. Remember, English is standard for scientific writing and publishing in international journals. I have yet to find a single one using the long-scale, actually.

https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.123540 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abe6a7/... https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40294-016-001...

> observations by cataloging positions and redshifts of billions of galaxies in the next decade > and the configuration is stable over billions of years. > (networks having up to a billion of vertices; there is no limit—except the memory size—on the number of lines

>> Same for one billion:

So that's how the US government will make the mult-trillion dollar debt go away. They'll just call it Billions.

OTOH the phrase “a thousand million” for 10⁹ is not that uncommon. From what I've seen, in places where billions/trillions are mentioned and it's important that the number is accurately specified, a representation with digits or the exponent of 10 are typically provided.

Agreed that the short scale has become more prevalent, lamentably. I find 6n more pleasing than 3n+3.

my understanding is the long scale has largely died out

think it is more than permissible to use what is scientifically standard (trillion = 10^12)

“Scientifically standard” are the SI prefixes. So, given the ambiguity of what 1 gigastar is (1/1000th of 1 terastar or a really huge star?) one should say “10¹²s of stars” maybe.

Yes, the SI prefixes are one example of something that is scientifically standard. The short scale is another.

Died out in English. Not in other languages where long scale was and is used, that hasn't changed at all. I'm not aware of any other language shifting from long scale to short scale (for languages traditionally using long scale).

think it is also dying out among many other languages like portuguese

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