Orders of magnitude
gabrielweinberg.com
Orders of magnitude
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Orders of magnitude
#2"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times."
I think this gives "people" too much credit.
In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.
Re: Orders of magnitude
#3"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times." I think this gives "people" too much credit. In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.
Not saying you're wrong, but in my experience I only hear this phrase from technical people, and my understanding is they always mean base 10. Which was surprising to me cause in my CS education I was basically taught to forget base 10 and only think in 2s).
Re: Orders of magnitude
#4"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times." I think this gives "people" too much credit. In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.
Well for marketing people it can mean '2' and for technical people it does often mean '10'. But it gets also lumped into people who use the term "exponential" growth.
As Gabe points out, decimal orders of magnitude are good sign posts because they often separate the space into meaningful chunks, what ever it is.
Think about your own earning potential, the differences between earning $100/month, $1000/month, $10,000/month and $100,000 a month. Those are very different places to be.
Re: Orders of magnitude
#5"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times." I think this gives "people" too much credit. In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.
Not saying you're wrong, but in my experience I only hear this phrase from technical people, and my understanding is they always mean base 10. Which was surprising to me cause in my CS education I was basically taught to forget base 10 and only think in 2s).
In physics and astronomy, 10 is the dominant logarithmic base. It's my impression that it's also the case in engineering circles.
An important upshot of the article is really the idea that you should think logarithmically about scaling. It's a scale-independent way to think. It's an easy way to get a website that gets 10 hits/day on the same plot as one that gets 10^9 hits/day.
An example is here: http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers...
Re: Orders of magnitude
#6"When people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude they usually mean ten times." I think this gives "people" too much credit. In my experience when people say they're looking to grow by an order of magnitude, they don't know that has a very specific meaning and they're just talking about getting bigger by some vague undefined number that could be anything from about two times on up.
Not saying you're wrong, but in my experience I only hear this phrase from technical people, and my understanding is they always mean base 10. Which was surprising to me cause in my CS education I was basically taught to forget base 10 and only think in 2s).
That's because we already have a word for a base two growth: doublings. Being engineers and having two words, it's best to be maximally precise by assigning each a distinct, unambiguous meaning.
Re: Orders of magnitude
#7My company recently grew by 1000% in less than 24 hours with regards to user base (and even higher with regards to content created and user interactions). Same product, same team, but perception of our company to outsiders has changed entirely. On the inside the only difference has been stepping up our support game, and having the opportunity to try things out on a much large scale -- plus server expenses...
Re: Orders of magnitude
#8I've heard "10x" (pronounced "ten ex") very often and I think it's less confusing than "one order of magnitude".
Re: Orders of magnitude
#9Growing infrastructure by orders of magnitude makes more sense to me, and is often how I hear the term used. I was at a conference in Berlin a few years ago and Joyent gave a talk about scaling which touched on this very topic.
The argument given was that you should plan infrastructure expansion with orders of magnitude. For example, increasing disk space from 10tb to 100tb. Or replacing a network switch with one that has 10x traffic capacity. The reasoning goes that the time spent engineering the expansion is a better investment at 10x, rather than having to increase infrastructure incrementally.
Re: Orders of magnitude
#10I've heard "10x" (pronounced "ten ex") very often and I think it's less confusing than "one order of magnitude" .
But it fails if you are talking about any changes greater than 1 order of magnitude. For instance, from the article: "we're still about one order of magnitude from making a measurable dent in the search market and two from a major one". The terminology of "orders of magnitude" lets you talk in terms of the logarithm of the value rather than the value itself, and for certain kinds of thinking this is useful. The terminology "10x" does not help do this (or at least I have never seen it used that way).