Fellow Googler here. I think it’s best to report those numbers with the appropriate SI prefix: 4.414 MB and 8.572 MB. Reporting numbers as “X thousand kilobytes” makes it harder to grok the real scale.

Pardon me making a joke at your expense cornstalks, but...

Is this what a culture that AB tests 34 shades of blue looks like?

I think we can handle the conversion here in the HN comment section!

fwiw, when i saw the prefix and no commas i subconsciously assumed it was under 1000KB and read it wrong, until that comment made me take another look.

Ha, at first I thought "cornstalks" was a new slang reference for Googlers and was just over my head.

Well if it wasn’t, it certainly is now. Thanks for that typeformer.

Also please be aware not all locals use "." as thousands separator. About half of the world [0], including we here in Germany, actually uses the dot as decimal separator. Thus your number "4.414 MB" actually looks confusingly close like ~4.41 GB to me on first sight. An easy way to avoid this is to not rounding to three digits after your only dot or comma.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Arabic_numer...

Sorry, I just copied and pasted the number as it appears on our benchmark page. :-)

Hmm, encrypting before compressing seems like a pretty strange decision. How does that happen?

I believe the literature says that compress before encrypt is less secure, because compression behaves predictably. See CRIME attacks.

But, why compress at all then? It won't do anything.

I'm not sure this is a good enough reason to never compress anything.

Maybe they encrypt with rot13. Compression should work on such a "ciphertext"...