

Orders of magnitude - gwil
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2013/01/orders-of-magnitude.html

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georgemcbay
"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.

~~~
vegashacker
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).

~~~
ISL
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...](http://measuredmass.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/more-hn-numbers/)

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foz
Growing 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.

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zmitri
My 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...

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bialecki
Tangent: One of my favorite classes in college was one that taught physics
only at the level of order of magnitudes. It'd tackle questions like: Why is
nuclear power more efficient than coal? How much more efficient? and then
sought to answer those questions in terms of simple math and fundamental
constants.

Considering problems/situations from an orders of magnitude point of view is
an under appreciated approach IMO.

Of course the orders of magnitude argument get abused by marketing people (but
what doesn't?). That aside, they're extremely valuable for personal or team
understanding of the problems and goals.

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fatalerrorx3
I liked the commenter on the article that suggested using fold as a unit of
measure. Grow 2 fold, etc. That's how I think of things. Sometimes if you
think about growing in orders of magnitude you end up with too high of an
expectation. If you're just simply looking to double or triple, you're more
likely to reach the mark, and even exceed it, which is probably better for
morale.

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martinced
I've heard "10x" (pronounced "ten ex") very often and I think it's less
confusing than _"one order of magnitude"_.

~~~
mcherm
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).

~~~
bigiain
This is exactly the same "trick" as plotting graphs on a logarithmic scale -
it gives you a different point of view on the data which sometimes (but
certainly not always) reveals useful insights.

I wonder if there are interesting scaling/growth/startup point of view changes
that are equivalent to other data visualization transformations? Is there a
growth-data version of changing from cartesian to polar coordinates perhaps?

