Hacker News Reader

> why they would eschew the simple-and-obvious m and b suffixes in favor of alternatives

Because not everyone is an American. Those suffixes are not used in other countries.

Yes but in all English hundred means 100, thousand means 1000, million means 1000000. 'MM' means... what exactly? Without prior training, can you tell just by looking at it?

In accounting, M has long been used as 'thousand'. Therefore, MM was used for million, as it's a thousand thousand.

This is something that I didn't think would be this contentious. It's an old standard.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us...

This clarifies exactly... thanks for the link!

More troubling is 'm' being used to refer to thousands, when the rest of the English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

> English-speaking financial world uses 'k' (which also makes little sense to me)

It likely comes from SI prefixes. While there's not a standard base unit for currency, the fact they work for so many other units lends them towards easily inferred usage when applied to others.

1: http://www.npl.co.uk/reference/measurement-units/si-prefixes...

k = kilo - prefix for one thousand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com