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by programmer_dude 1706 days ago
Is 58.31 = 5831 here? It's doubly confusing: dot instead of comma and separator at the hundredths position.
4 comments

Your nick is programmer_dude and a dot for a decimal point confuses you?
Yes, it managed to confuse me. Here's how...

1. I did not notice the M1 was being offered on rent. I assumed it was for sale at the listed price.

2. Since 58.31 € is an unrealistic price for an M1 machine (and since this is a European site) I concluded the site must be using a comma instead of a dot. 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.

Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.

It's not selling you a Mac mini for €58.31. It's letting you rent one for €58.31 a month. That's why it says "monthly". Hetzner is a hosting provider.

[edit: this comment written before the parent comment was edited to include point 1]

The parent comment was posted with point one, the last paragraph was introduced in the edit.
Love HN's eventual consistency!
> Unfortunately the site is using a dot for a dot despite being European and the M1 is being offered on rent.

You're on the international version of the site.

If you go to the German version, they quote the price as 58,31 €:

https://www.hetzner.de/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple

> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall

I don’t know where you live, but €5000 is not a realistic price for a mac mini in any place I’ve heard of.

Dots are only used in groups of 3 (unless India, as far as I’m aware).

Anyway, not saying you weren’t confused. But I think it’s fairly easy to figure out that there’s no way the dot in this situation is meant as a thousands seperator.

> 5831 € is a realistic price for a Mac afterall.

Not really... the Mac Pro is famous for its high price, but this explicitly says mac mini which is almost exactly an order of magnitude less than 5831 € .

Hmm, sorry I wouldn't know about that either never purchased an Apple product in my life. Apple is basically a non-entity in India.
Let's not be a jerk to people who are trying to learn. We all started out unaware of things we now consider essential knowledge. For (my) example, timezones offsets can and do include partial hour offsets (+0415 is/was real), and dates should generally be YYYY-MM-DD (when not displayed to end users) for your sanity (and because iso8601).

OP, you can look up the numeric formats for Germany in your system preferences or Excel or similar — it can help to see them templated out sometimes.

The user has been "programmer_dude" for 6 years just on HN, there's no chance that they didn't learn about the dot.

I'm confused as to how they can be confused.

Even in my comma-as-separator country, our calculators have a dot. The only thing that could be confusing is encountering numbers with 3 decimals: 123,456 vs 123.456

See my reply to ginko.
In much of Europe commas are thousand separators, dots are decimal point separators. So what you're seeing is fifty eight euros and thirty one euro-cents.
You might be surprised to find that that is not the case in Europe. In fact, apart from China and English-influenced countries, very few countries around the world use dots for decimal points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Countries_us...
But English and Chinese influenced countries comprise a significant portion of the world. The top 3 most populous countries use dots for decimals (China, India, United States) according to your link.
You are right, and that is still not "in much of Europe".
58.31 € per month is between 58 and 59 euros per month.
in German comma = dot, so it is 58.31