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A comment on Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? by haskal on Sunday November 18, 2018 @12:25PM (#18481454)
If the request you are talking about actually gets executed once (maybe it gets cached or something), then you shouldn't be pitching the time difference anyway.

If it gets executed 100s of times in a day per person, you can say this is 50 ms * 100 = 5s, 200 ms * 100 = 20s. And that's just per user.

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Re:Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved? by Izkata on Sunday November 18, 2018 @07:08PM (#18483236)
Yeah, actually doing this math tends to surprise people. We had an automated background process that took ~2s to run, which doesn't sound bad at all considering it includes an API call over the internet. But multiplying it out to the number of backlog items we actually had at the time, 30-40 hours doesn't sound so good.
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