Hacker News Reader

Comment by hsfzxjy | Hacker News Reader

I mistakenly think the guy took over a year to boot Linux/4004 due to the comma in the post title.

(I was aware that comma represents decimal point in some regions, just didn't get this in the first place.)

Commas are used for the decimal point instead of the period character in many countries, including many European countries.

We do, but most of software engineers out there hate it and use the dot, for obvious reasons (CSV in particular).

Having said that, I like our Swiss decimal group delimiter: 1'000'000.

I'm from one of those European countries and still also read it as it taking over a year to boot...

Unless the title is internationalised somehow (possible, but I doubt it), it's "4.76" in the original article. That's what happens when submitters editorialise ;-)

Also the comma would be after 3 digits, no?

Like 1,000 and 100?

Truly. But at first sight I couldn't parse the comma as anything else except a delimiter :(

Check out what they do in India[a]. It's not beyond the realm of possibility to misremember it exactly.

a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousands_separator#Examples_o...

Yes, in India we use 3 places for the first and then 2 places for the rest. But comma was never a thing. Fun fact: In India we use upto Crore as mentioned in the link, but recently had to learn upto Lakh Crore as the politicians looted bigger recently and went beyond normal. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com