Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucgommans | Hacker News Reader

Literally never seen this (wish I could grep all comments I've ever replied to) and I do not understand what makes you say that it's clearer when it's dropping information, making it relative rather than a fully qualified number

In speech, it's common, and misunderstandings are usually not a problem (if you're not monologuing on a recording) because someone will just ask; but in writing it looks like the range is the wrong way around. Maybe I expect more care in writing because the feedback loop is longer, or maybe it's just habit and I think it's wrong in writing because I never see it?

View on HN

I think you're just not used to it.

Quick, tell me how wide this range is, just as an order of magnitude:

285368737954–285368783645

Would be a lot easier if I only included the range at the end which had actually changed, wouldn't it?

That's why it's clearer. Now obviously that was an extreme example, but it's also easier to see at a glance that 1,387–9 is just three pages, as opposed to 1,387–1,389.

If you format your numbers properly, you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645"

That's a change of about 50K, which isn't really that hard to notice.

"285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range? Hold on a second while I line up the digits again... uh... let me rewrite that to "37,954 - 83,645", okay now I can read it. No, that wasn't any easier. I kept getting lost tracking where in the first number I was leaving off. Much easier to compare 737 vs 783 - digit groupings are really useful!

(I'll agree that 1387-9 is pretty reasonable, it just breaks down the longer the number is. Also, if the page count is important, you can just say "1387-1389 (3 pages)". This feels like the sort of shorthand you used to get on Twitter)

Actually, if you format your numbers properly, you get "285 368 737 954–285 368 783 645". Or "285.368.737.954–285.368.783.645".

Or, sure, sometimes you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645". But it's not like that's some kind of default. Except if you suffer from defaultism --- typically prefixed by "American".

>"285368737954-83645" is... well I have to assume somewhere in the 10-100K range?

83645 is five digits, so certainly in the ~10,000 range.

Thus why I have to assume it's somewhere between 10K and 100K, yes :)

Taken to an extreme without formatting, sure, but what ranges have that many digits in human-readable situations? And if there are those exception situations, you can word around it for that case ("285368760800±45691" or "45'691 years after 285'368'737'954")

Genuinely trying to think of an examples, since e.g. books aren't ever that long and search results don't have that many pages (that you'd all read and refer back to). A salary range, perhaps, can get into the seven digits in extreme cases (not that you care about any individual digit when you make a lifetime's worth of money in a bit more than a year): "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 2'432'000" seems to convey the relevant info as well as "Prospective salary is 2'423'000 to 9'000" does (except that I wouldn't understand the latter and ask what this second number means, but that's plausibly attributable to me as an individual not being used to it)

MLA-style citations call for abbreviating page ranges in that way. I mostly see it in literary papers, and not many other contexts, so it would be easy to notice them rarely if at all. Outside of that context, I occasionally see it used for year ranges.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com