Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> over a million billion times per second

So... Over a quadrillion times per second? I don't get why people do this. Stephen Hawking did the same in his book ("X star is over a million million million million miles away"). Just give me the number straight. Breaking into millions of billions of trillions just makes it more confusing as I try to consolidate orders of magnitude.

View on HN

I go the other way. I think if we started telling people that Jeff Bezos was worth two hundred thousand million dollars [0] more of them would say, what the fuck?, that’s disgusting.

The b in billion has become meaningless. Nobody has anything to anchor it to.

[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/27/tech/jeff-bezos-net-worth-200...

There's a reason! It's to prevent confusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Except that the phrase the OP picked up on is "million billion". So is that 10^15 or 10^18?

I suspect the reason is then that readers may not know what a quadrillion is.

After a thought experiment I was able to determine the meaning of "billion":

- It can be said that there are one thousand million (1,000,000,000)

- It can be said that there are ten thousand million (10,000,000,000)

- It can be said that there are one hundred thousand million (100,000,000,000)

But it cannot be said that there are a million million (1,000,000,000,000), it is said that there is a "billion".

- Then, there may be a million billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000)

But there cannot be a billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), it is said that there is a "trillion"

- Then, there may be a million trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)

- There may be a billion trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)

But there cannot be a trillion trillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), you say "quadrillion", and so on...

Translating this with the google translator has been hell, every time I typed "one thousand million" and "million x" it translated into "billion", and every time I typed "billion", it translated into "trillion".

I don't think that's quite right

one thousand thousand (1,000 * 1,000) == one million (1,000,000)

one thousand million (1,000 * 1,000,000) == one billion (1,000,000,000)

one thousand billion (1,000 * 1,000,000,000) == one trillion (1,000,000,000,000)

Basically "one thousand ____" means "add 3 zeros"

one million million (1e6 * 1e6) == one trillion (1e12)

one million billion (1e6 * 1e9) == one quadrillion (1e15)

Basically "one million ____" means "add 6 zeros"

And... where is the error in my comment?

I just skipped the sequence: one thousand billion, ten thousand billion, one hundred thousand billion so as not to lengthen my comment and I did it by jumping to the millions directly.

Google translator makes a creeper with the "billions", read my comment in english.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com