8 ms·
Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte
- tanseydavid 6y agoThis has been a NorCal phrase since I first visited in 1983 as a sophomore in HS. At that time it was so very cool and West Coast sounding to my ears, and instantly understandable in context. Kids with stricter upbringings had to settle for saying "Hecka" which is still funny to me. Interesting side-note: the same Cali kids that introduced me to the slang word "Hella" also used the word "tight" as a slang word with negative connotation, as in: "My parent's grounded me for a month" "Oh man, that's hella TIGHT" But over the years "tight" has managed to flip to a positive connotation and mean 'cool', 'sweet' etc. "Hella" still means "HELLA" though.
- chronomex 6y agoIf "hella" is 10^27 then clearly "hecka" would be the correct name for 10^-27.
- garmaine 6y agoYou’d better add that to the proposal!
- andrewia 6y agoThe exact same things were alive and well in the suburbs of Sacramento circa 2010. Lots of "hecka" and the coolest kids could say "hella".
- Tokkemon 6y agoI remember a lot of that in Modesto back then.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoAs someone from SoCal, hella was always a NorCal colloquialism. I grew up around actual 'valley girls' and the associated slang, lots of silly things. Even after all of that, hella always sounded off to me.
- edoceo 6y agoLike. Totally.
- Stratoscope 6y agoMy favorite north-south California variation is whether we use "the" on a freeway name or number. In the north, it's "highway 101" or just "101"; in the south it's "the 101 freeway" or just "the 101". I've always wondered where the terminology changes over. I think it may be somewhere around King City?
- tanseydavid 6y agoLOL -- here's a clip from 30 Rock with Liz Lemon doing a flashback to her time in Los Angeles (during the Rodney King riots) and making a joke about referring to freeways in the SoCal manner of "The 10" rather than "10" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lc3peq4P5s&feature=emb_logo
- 6y ago
- dheera 6y agoAs a programmer in northern California I would much rather NorCal be called NoCal, to be consistent with SoCal. Or change SoCal to SouCal. Pick one or the other. I hate naming inconsistencies. How would you like if I wrote code like: for pixel_x in range(image.width): for pix_y in range(image.height): ...
- asveikau 6y agoI would say it's better to iterate on y first because line at the time is more sequential access than column at a time. I noticed that before the naming inconsistency.
- dheera 6y agoEh it depends on what you're doing with it. If you're doing some kind of convolution type thing that is going to access a whole lot of nearby pixels in all directions, it doesn't really matter. Also there are times I like to store "images" such that accessing image[x,y] yields (x,y) as if the image were placed in the 1st quadrant, which makes code easier to read and more intuitive. In that case the outer irritation being x-wise and the inner irritation being y-wise is faster. I absolutely hate those irritating image[height-y, x] type bullshit appearing all over my code. If you want readability image[x, y] should be (x,y) with the origin at the lower left as it always is in grade school. (I hate the people who invented matrices for putting 0,0 at the top left and inverting the y-axis.)
- remolacha 6y agoBut when speaking, having phonetic distance between related words helps prevent confusion. In a noisy environment, you can mishear just the first consonant in "NoCal" and get "SoCal". With "NorCal", you have to mishear multiple phonemes. This phonetic distance/information redundancy is built into the NATO phonetic alphabet. It's also one way that linguists explain "chain shifts" in speech sounds.
- vmception 6y agoNow saying "Cali" means you're either greater than or equal to Gen-X or not from/living in California at all. It honestly makes me wince. But I'll concede to a counterpoint that there is rarely a reason to say California when you are in California, as "norcal" and "socal" and other regions are said more often.
- tanseydavid 6y agoWince away -- I am fully Gen-X and I have lived in the Bay Area for 36 years but came here from Ohio... I love the wince that I get back from use of this word. When I am in a really ornery mood I will freely drop "San Fran" and even "Frisco" sometimes just to get stimulate that holier-than-thou-Bay-Area attitude. It never gets old...
- vmception 6y agolol trolling is always fun but yeah “Bay Area” is an example of a region that will come up in conversation more than “Cali”
- m-chrzan 6y agoWould the inverse prefix, for 10^-27, be holi-?
- hirundo 6y agoIf they go with the convention of using internet petitions to set official International System of Units prefixes, brace for prefixey-mcprefixfacebytes.
- edoceo 6y agoThis is a problem for me. I'm from east-bay. Every thing that's hella stuff is hella stuff, so I've been calling various amounts of hella data as hella-bytes (or my fast internet give me hella-BPS). A big cultural shift for it to mean a precise amount. It's like aksing some New Englander to define what "a wicked lotta" is...it's hella! Oh! Why didn't you say so?
- IIAOPSW 6y agomad bytes.
- erhk 6y agoThat can be 10^30
- nerpderp82 6y agoF*ck yeah! https://www.hella.com/hella-us/en/History-139.html https://www.hella.com/hella-us/en/History-139.html From my experience it comes from the power of the lights often used on 4x4 vehicles used by the inhabitants.
- edoceo 6y agoBut this one is some Cascadia slag right?
- S_A_P 6y agoI have an issue with it and I am not sure that my stance is correct. The problem as I see it is that making things casual feels like it’s taking the discipline out of the discipline of science. I also just think that slang is not necessarily long term speech. I mean some words hang around and enter the lexicon (e.g. cool started at least 60-70 years ago and seems to still be acceptable to say) but others are very generational and transient. (23 skidoo, rad) On the other hand, I would likely be saying hellabyte in my best Del The Funky Homosapien accent. He’s from the Bay Area and throws at least 5 “hellas“ in every interview. But seriously I think maybe a middle ground from overly clinical sounding and overly casual sounding should be the aim...
- odomojuli 6y agoFor the uninitiated, hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier. Hella has hella meanings for hella words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella Honestly, being from the Bay Area, I'm against pegging hella to a specific size. It feels more appropriate for cases where you don't know how many, but 'a lot' feels insufficient.
- npunt 6y agoAgree. If we're to peg Hella to anything, it should be as an intensifier to the one's expectations. E.g. 'there's hella people here' would indicate there are say ~5x the number of people that the listener expects there to be in a given place and time.
- Lammy 6y agoI always said "hell of" instead of hella if I wanted to be cool like Ray Smuckles http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11242004 http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11242004
- jdminhbg 6y agoIf you are with a lady and have Taken a DVD, you can tone it down with “heck of.” http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06212004 http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06212004
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoWould you say hella has a ton of different meanings? "Ton" seems to do fine with precise and imprecise meanings.
- edoceo 6y agoToo heavy man.
- caturopath 6y agoIME, the hella intensifier ("That run was hella dangerous") is really widespread, but the quantifier ("There were hella trees") is really a northern California thing.
- anonAndOn 6y agoSFBA has hella. Boston has wicked. Put them together for some cross-country slang fusion. [0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hella%20wicked https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hella%20wick...
- benibela 6y ago10^27? Then for bytes we also need 2^90. Hebibytes?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoHella can be the binary version. The decimal version can be hecka.
- chairmanwow1 6y agoThis would be a lot of fun if it were to be selected. I think it’s cutesy, but so are our quark names. Fun things are fun and I don’t see much reason not to make this the standard.
- staunch 6y agoIt would be hard to define how large hella bytes is but I know it when I see it.
- jedberg 6y agoThis is hella dumb.
- themodelplumber 6y agoFascinating. I am already anticipating Utah's knee-jerk hecka- and/or flippa- crusade
- gautamcgoel 6y agoI've lived in California for six years and I've never heard a native Californian use the phrase "hella".
- jakear 6y agoIt’s a Bay Area thing.
- TinkersW 6y agoNot just bay area, I grew up using it 250 miles north of there
- mixmastamyk 6y agoMore like Arcata, Humboldt?
- __s 6y agoDo you live in Northern California? Regional dialects tend to occupy borders smaller than state borders
- thesandlord 6y agoI've lived in the California bay area all my life and my friends and I use it all the time
- dx87 6y agoI've only heard one person say it, and it was the only native Californian I've ever worked with.
- not2b 6y agoI first heard "hella" at Berkeley in the early 90s, it was popular with the undergrads at the time (I was in grad school). It shouldn't have a particular numerical value, I don't think.
- c3534l 6y agoI am not in favor of naming scientific measurements after stupid puns whose time has already passed.
- cozzyd 6y agostill, a standard supernova would be be 10^17 hellajoules, or 100 petahellajoules (hellapetajoules?).
- webmaven 6y agoThe symbol collisions for H and B disqualify some other superlatives (eg. Hyper, Buncha), but leave some others viable such as Lotta, Super, and Ultra. Ultra seems appropriate for something like 10^(10^10), which would make 10^(10^(10^10)) an Ultraplex.
- cronix 6y agoI'm sure some are too young here, but there used to be a thing in California in the 80s called "valley girls," and this is how they talked lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIOocUQkfzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIOocUQkfzk I think the only time I've really heard "hella" in mainstream is No Doubt's "Hella Good" song. The same was done with "uber," until a company took it for their name. Uber-this and uber-that was all over the place. Rarely hear it now outside of ride sharing.
- mhh__ 6y agoThe chin movements are actually not dissimilar to the kind of British English you'll hear from privately educated people with names like Hamish and piers
- samizdis 6y agoThere was a song from the 1980s that highlighted/parodied California slang - Valley Girl, by Frank Zappa, with the main and narrative vocal line provided by his then-teenage daughter Moon. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song) Edited to add: I should have checked out the link in your post, which is mainly about this track. Edited again to add the Wikipedia entry on the track Valley Girl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song)
- reducesuffering 6y agoToo young? Valley girl speak is alive and well in younger circles I assure you.
- deathanatos 6y ago> I think the only time I've really heard "hella" in mainstream is No Doubt's "Hella Good" song. It's used several times in Macklemore's Thrift Shop: Ice on the fringe, it's so damn frosty The people like, Damn! That's a cold ass honkey. Rollin' in, hella deep, headin' to the mezzanine Dressed in all pink, 'cept my gator shoes, those are green [snip] That shirt's hella dope And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't Peep game, come take a look through my telescope Trying to get girls from a brand? Then you hella won't Then you hella won't
- slyrus 6y agoLet's make this happen.
- mantap 6y agoThis reminds me of how the time derivatives of displacement "are" velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, crackle and pop. Everybody agrees on this, except for the weirdos who use jounce. Official recognition is the lame way to get a unit adopted.
- samatman 6y agoBut if you skip jounce, then you can't define brisance as jounce per ounce!
- blacksqr 6y agoA real hellabyte ought properly to be called a cenobyte.
- 14 6y agoI forget where but one time I said in a post something about doing Hellawheelies on my motorcycle and they asked if I was from possible California. They said they only heard it the one place but then heard me. It’s here in Canada as slang.
- mNovak 6y agoThat's funny, I remember this being a popular facebook group 10 years ago, alongside the "7 degrees of separation official experiment"
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago> brontobytes Sorry hella, my vote was easily placed.