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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

50 percent faster is 2/3 time, but yes, prominent people have made this error and even doubled down on it publicly.

When you're asked to meet a time limit, that's time domain, not rate, and so improvements will be reported in the time domain.

Time domain also works for Little's Law, which is the more prevalent measure these days anyway. If you double the throughput of a server you can halve the cluster size and retain the same level of service. Which isn't 200%, it's 50%.

If an object moves across a space 50% faster, it finishes in 2/3 of the time. It's not up for debate, it's not ambiguous. To say anything else is wrong.

> Which isn't 200%, it's 50%.

Okay.

Again, you’re insisting that rate is only ever a matter of quantity per unit time, when most user facing work is measured in time to complete a single task, or batch. There are more users than developers by a vast margin, otherwise we could not sustain our high salaries.

Additionally, in cloud computing we do not give a shit about tasks per second, but cost per day, which is how many CPUs we need for a set of tasks, which from Little’s Law is derived from seconds per task, not tasks per second.

And yet I’m the one who is wrong, apparently.

You're wrong if you are contradicting what is fact, yes. It's also morally wrong to use contrived logic to state big impressive numbers to lay people like you seem to be interested in doing. "We got 100% better performance" when you only reduced latency by half, nevermind throughput, is dishonest. That's the kind of lie you seem to be defending. If I'm wrong then I don't understand the point of your posts.

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