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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

If something is taking way too long, often times it shouldn't be made faster, it should be done differently. For example, it takes me 4 hours to get to work, just making the car faster isn't going to help. Maybe the solution is to take a plane, get a different job,work from home, or move closer to where you want to be.

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... unless it's something like a forgotten index in a database. Which can easily make a difference for a factor 10 or more.

That's the problem with computing: Often you don't have a very good understanding if there's a good reason for the thing to be slow. Only if there is such a conceptual reason (like, you're solving a problem involving very many variables that must be optimized), you must start thinking if a different approach is in order.

Yep. What the post described as the final solution was bringing down the running time from 24hrs to 10min using straightforward optimisations. I would guess moving from 10min to 30sec would take doing it differently.

Which is just what the guy describes in his article. At least, thats how I read it. If you only hire people who only know about cars, you're fucked. You'd need someone who knows about a ton of different transport "technologies", and knows, say, that you can combine the technologies optimally, say taking a shuttle to the airport whereas the trolly station terminates two miles away and the cab rank is always empty.

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