[verisimi]

> 80,508 people

Not 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated.

It's funny to me when someone does this sort of minor hyperbole that's verging on lying - you have to wonder what is going on.

[cpburns2009]

80,000, 81,000, 80,500, and 80,510 are all valid ways to round 80,508 depending on the number of significant digits you want to preserve. For a number in the tens of thousands, it's natural to round to the nearest thousand which is appropriately 81k.

[verisimi]

I get it, I know how rounding works. I mean, its basically 100k - why not just say that? That would be justifiable too, right?

What would you have done, in those circumstances though? Would you 'round up', overstating your case, like Anthropic did? Or would you ensure that you avoid the suggestion that you were misrepresenting the numbers?

[cpburns2009]

I'd round it to 81k whether the number is good or bad. It's less than a 1% difference. What I wouldn't do is round it to 100k because that's a 24% increase, unless the number was really inconsequential. Say you have a website with 10m requests over a month, 9.9m were successful, and "100k" were failed requests for nonsense pages.

[verisimi]

Thanks for your thoughts. You would round up 99k to 100k (fair, imo) but don't round down 80.5k to 80k? I guess this is just one of those things...