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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

> CloudFlare’s graph shows a 1.07 increase in IPv6 requests under iOS9:

I'm curious: is this written correctly? The number of IPv6 request did go up by 1.07%. But the way it's phrased I would think they'd be referring to the percentage compared to before... a 33% increase.

Is this one of those cases where English can be ambiguous? Or to be correct does it need to be changed to something like "CloudFlare’s graph shows an additional 1.07% of requests use IPv6 under iOS9"?

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It's a 1 percentage point increase and also a 33 percent increase.

It's a 107 basis point increase.

It's a 1.07% increase. Not all that many people know what basis points are. ;)

It's a 33% increase, or an increase of 1.07 percentage points. It's not a 1.07% increase.

Yeah that seems to be the core of it. Without the percentage sign what they wrote seems technically valid but very likely to be misunderstood.

It's an increase.

Hmm. As old as the concept of percentages is, you'd think that there would be a good symbol to indicate an increase in percentage points.

> As old as the concept of percentages is, you'd think that there would be a good symbol to indicate an increase in percentage points.

Uh, there is such a notation -- (sign)(# of percentage points change)pp. Or, in the instant case, +1.07pp.

(Though it would probably be more ideal if %p were accepted instead of pp, because then there would be a natural extention to ‰p, etc.)

I rather like %p.

What would ‰p mean? Percent-degree-points?

"Per-milleage" [0] points (same relation to per-mille as percentage points are to percent; 1 percentage point = 10 per-milleage points = 100 basis points.)

[0] I have no idea if there is a standard term for this, and if there is, that's probably not it.

Promille points.

Its a 1.07pp (percentage point) increase, which is identical to 107 basis point increase. A 1.07% increase is a 1.07× multiplier, which this is not.

A 1.07% increase is a 1.0107 multiplier.

Your re-written version is definitely the correct way to phrase it. As written in the article, one would expect IPv6 to have moved from 2.92% to 2.95% (1% of 2.92 being 0.03), which is clearly not the case.

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