Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxndxx | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com