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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

> Hearing aids typically cost anywhere from ₹ 50,000 to upwards of ₹ 8L depending on the correction capability

For those who don't recognize the ₹ symbol it is the symbol for the Indian Rupee and an "L" after a number means 100,000, so ₹ 8L is ₹ 800,000.

At current exchange rates that puts hearing aids in India from $600 to upwards of $9,500.

AirPods Pro 2 are ₹ 24,900 ($295).

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I’m not across the scope of hearing aid technology, but what does the product at that upper tier actually look like, and how much does it cost in another country?

I’m envisioning some highly specialised and tuned implant at that price.

You generally get a custom mold for your ear canals and a specially tuned DSP for your frequency curves + BT connection to your phone for calls, at least. Your device can be retuned over and over as long as it functions, too.

What drives the prices up is a multitude of factors: High end DSPs, micro speakers which can do good sound reproduction at required frequencies, relatively low sales volume, R&D expenses and of course an insatiable appetite for profits.

These things always cost and arm and a leg in here, too.

Not to mention that this is paid by insurance in many countries which means there is little incentive for individuals to shop around.

It might be, but in my country, you buy them for the most occasions. I'm not aware if any insurance policy pays for them, even.

Thanks for posting this. I recognized the currency symbol but was confused by the "L".

The Indian numbering system marks odd power of ten, i.e. 10 ^ {1, 3, 5, 7}. Unit, thousand, lakh, crore [1].

Ours, on the other hand, does it mod 3, e.g. 10 ^ {1, 3, 6, 9}. Thousands, millions, billions, et cetera.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system

> Ours, on the other hand, does it mod 3, e.g. 10 ^ {1, 3, 6, 9}. Thousands, millions, billions, et cetera.

To make matters more confusing, for American English it goes millions, billions, trillions. For British English it used to go millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, trilliards. (That 'long scale' is still the way German used to work ten years ago. No clue if it changed in the meantime.)

I still mourn the long scale. A billion is obviously a million millions.

Thanks! In germany we use the long scale, and this is the first time it clicks.

"Eine Billion" is Million² bi -> 2 "Eine Billiarde" is 1000 * Million² "Eine Trillion" is million³ tri -> 3 "Eine Trilliarde" is 1000 * Million³ And so on

Yes I knew what a million, milliard, billion, billiarde and so on are, but it never made click that the long scale makes so much sense.

I feel like at that point, I would rather just use scientific notation (10^x).

I also like the easy suffix for thousand (k), million (M), billion (B), trillion (T), quadrillion (Q) for written conversation. $10B revenue, 5k liters, 300M people, etc.

Your 'suffixes' are a hodge-podge. Might as well stick with SI prefixes (like you are doing with the 'k' already?)

It isn’t consistent, but a lot more people can fluently read “B” for billion rather than “G” giga and understand 10^9. The SI prefix “k” is sufficiently used that it is understood.

It is less intuitive for me as an outsider that a trillion would be a million million millions instead of a billion billions

Maybe, but either way is relatively quickly to learn by rote for the few orders of magnitude that come up in 'daily life'.

For anything bigger, you'd use 'scientific' notation anyway.

You can make an argument for that, but neither system does that so it's not very relevant to the choice.

I think an exponential system would do better to have a different naming scheme.

Yes, and something like scientific notation is used fairly often even in lay contexts.

Eg it's common to read sentences like the following in popular science texts: 'ACME produces one quintillion widgets per year, that's a one followed eighteen zeroes.' The second half is basically scientific notation, but written out.

Haven't we given up on our scale in the UK to match the US system?

i.e. the milliard was replaced with the US billion.

Anecdotally, a milliard in French is a billion in English.

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