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Comment by nicky0 | Hacker News Reader

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nicky0

Title should be 7,207 frames per sec.

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Depends what country you're from :)

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/inde...

And some countries call a "period" a "full stop": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop

Frightfully good point, old chap.

Well the article is in English as is this entire site, so that would be a fairly obtuse argument to make.

I agree that ideally it would be formatted the English way (being an English language article and this being an English language site) and agree that ambiguity is a bad thing but I think the context makes it pretty clear what the intended meaning is.

I'd guess that most people intelligent enough to discuss the localisation of thousands separators are also intelligent enough to infer the difference between 7.207 frames per second and 7,207 frames per second when applied to the photography of lightning strikes.

So I think we should extend the original poster the benefit of the doubt and assume that they just wrote the title in their native tongue without a second thought rather than maliciously intending to deceive us all.

> rather than maliciously intending to deceive us all.

No one think they were trying to deceive, but it's possible they were trying to provoke commenters or appear worldly. Still, most likely explanation is just a mistake.

perhaps just 7207 so everyone's happy

Some countries reverse the notation used in the English speaking world. E.g., 1,000.01 would be 1.000,01 in France

The preferred separator in French is a non-breaking space, so it in fact would be 1 000,01. But that is irrelevant because this article is not in French. It really should read 7,207 images per second, which incidentally is the name of the video in the original article.

One very "good" application to learn these things is Microsoft's Excel. It fully implements regional settings, so if you want to open/save a .csv file, it will automatically use the list separator for your country as the field separator. If the .csv is a "normal" comma separated file, and your regional list separator is set as semicolon, tough luck. You can still open them with the advanced "something-separated" wizard, but it's manual. Also, if you type a formula you just found on the 'net that looks like =CONCATENATE(A1,B1) it will not be recognized because you still have to use the regional list separator, so you need =CONCATENATE(A1;B1) to work.

In that case the title should be in French and should say 7.207,00 right? :)

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