Hacker News Reader

Comment by andreareina | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com