Top all-time · #8651
Saul Pwanson
Personal blog · saul.pw/mag · on HN as saulpweconomicsscience
Saul Pwanson's personal blog at saul.pw covers economics and science. Since 2018, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Mag World – thinking in orders of magnitude”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Saul Pwanson's site for his magnitude-based "Mag" notation for order-of-magnitude numbers, an idea for making logarithms more accessible, and his biography page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Mag World – thinking in orders of magnitude4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-14
- /mag2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-10-24
- Mag Wealth (2024)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-11-15
What Hacker News says?
Related: in a reaction to a comment I wrote about logarithms about a month ago[0], saulpw recently linked his own idea of making logarithms more "accessible" to the masses by introducing magnitude-based notation: https://saul.pw/mag/ I think it is a really nice idea that should be spread more widely. It might be Pi day, and while I traditionally complain that Tau is better for contrarian reasons (hey at least I'm ho…
Comment linking /mag/
on “The Lost Art of Logarithms”Submitted Mag Wealth (2024) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionI think this should be front and center. To that end I propose "magnitude notation"[0] (and I don't think we should use the word logarithm, which sounds like advanced math and turns people away from the basic concept, which does make math easier and more fun). https://saul.pw/mag
Comment linking /mag
on “The Lost Art of Logarithms”Submitted Mag World – thinking in orders of magnitude as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI agree! I use ^3 etc for the notation: https://saul.pw/mag
Comment linking /mag
on “Satellite powered estimation of global solar potential”Submitted Orgo as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJohn Napier is my current math nerd hero! I've been trying to promote "magnitude notation"[0] as the next evolution in numeric notation. If we used mag numbers in science and journalism and even finance, we'd get the same increase in mental superpowers as we got with positional notation. [0] https://saul.pw/mag
Comment linking /mag
on “Why Does Integer Addition Approximate Float Multiplication?”I agree. I did writeups on order of magnitude of RAM and computers over history: https://saul.pw/mag/memory https://saul.pw/mag/computer The IBM 360 is ^4 RAM and the iPhone is ^8 RAM. So the iPhone is ~10,000x more powerful.
Comment linking /mag/computer
on “Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM”The author's biography is quite fascinating. If there's a museum of visualization, it'd be an exhibit: https://www.saul.pw/biograph/
Comment linking /biograph/
on “A File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal (2019) [video]”I thought I was being original when I redid my website[0] in a similar style this past summer (right down to the text appearing to come in at 9600 baud). But it appears this repo is at least 2 years old.. [0] http://saul.pw
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on “Vintage 1980s DOS inspired Twitter Bootstrap theme”It's an order-of-magnitude notation used in Saul's "MagWorld" writings and podcast. Recommended: https://saul.pw/mag/
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on “Mag Wealth (2024)”Ah, I was missing important context: https://saul.pw/mag/
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on “Mag Wealth (2024)”This error would have been much easier to catch if they had used mag notation[0]. [0] https://saul.pw/mag
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on “A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils”This is yet another reason I'm promoting the ^45 "magnitude notation"[0]. https://saul.pw/mag
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on “The Tiny Star Explosions Powering Moore's Law”What level of computing would you checkpoint at? https://saul.pw/mag/computer/
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on “Chuck Moore: Colorforth has stopped working [video]”Are you saying that based on the semantics of "poor" vs "may require assistance" vs "low income", or...? My comment has a link that's backed up by a government website. If we look at $105k in San Francisco, minus federal, state, and local taxes, you're looking at roughly $6,400/month take home pay. If you make a budget out of that, you get $3,000 for rent, $800 for groceries, $250 for transit, $250 for medical, $150…
Comment linking /mag/wealth/
on “Britain is one of the richest countries. So why do children live in poverty?”The author is asking for overly-precise numbers in scientific papers , because the science data publishing/sharing/reproducibility process is broken. I won't argue against this specific case. But in almost any other context, I think comprehension would be better served with zero significant digits, or at most 1. This is one reason that I propose magnitude notation: https://saul.pw/mag .
Comment linking /mag
on “Please Show Lots of Digits”
