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Comment by lalaithion | Hacker News Reader

The number 1 isn't the SI unit for dimensionless constants. The SI unit for dimensionless constants is 602214076000000000000000.

No, "amount of something" or "number of atoms" is not a different unit than dimensionless constants; that would be like if the SI unit had "the amount of charge held by 10^30 electrons" as a different unit than "charge".

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> The SI unit for dimensionless constants is 602214076000000000000000.

The radian and steradian represent firm rejection of the mole as a general dimensionless unit, despite it being a base unit and arguably (depending on how you feel about particles as a dimension) dimensionless.

I don’t get this. What do moles have to do with dimensionless values?

I think they're referring to the fact that there is one dimensionless base unit already standardized in SI: the mole. There aren't two length units, so there "shouldn't be" two dimensionless ones.

(Whether they were trying to be funny or not I couldn't tell you.)

It's a mol not a mole (sounds the same)

lol (or is that lole?)

"they" are not trying to amuse anyone.

How do you know that lalaithion was not trying to amuse anyone?

The "mole" is the unit, "mol" is the symbol for the unit, like with "kilogram" and "kg".

Since moles count the number of atoms, perhaps they can only be used for natural numbers? Whereas you could legitimately say that something was -1.7 unos.

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