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Comment by unwantedLetters | Hacker News Reader

I watch F1 regularly, but to hear him speak of getting a gain of "tenths of a second" as a huge thing is still astonishing to me. Must be a frustrating life. Specially speaking as a software developer, where we're getting a free doubling of the speed every 18 months. I'm sure Moore's Law will run out at some point, but I can never quite appreciate exactly how much that helps us. The helps give a little perspective.

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An F1 car going 200mph; that's about 293 feet/sec. So a tenth of a second is around 29 feet, which is about two car lengths.

So a few tenths of a second is around 6 car lengths, per lap.

That's one way to think about it...

Just be glad you don't work on high-frequency trading systems if "tenths of a second" seems like a frustratingly small gain. Our office erupts into cheers when we shave a microsecond or even 500 nanoseconds off our loop times. :)

Loop of what, some kind of numerical iteration? Sounds like fun, what kind of platform is this on. I assume any kind of OS or HLL is out of the question.

    I assume any kind of OS or HLL is out of the question.

Not really, computers are fast! Per message costs of a few microseconds are pretty standard even in Java/C# stuff.

Ditto for when I worked on improving the speed of Google web search. Shaving 100ms off of page load time was (and is) a major accomplishment.

I think I understand what you are saying.

It's a competitive sport, so given the current resources and technology, how much performance can you eke out is really what I should have been thinking about. In an adversarial environment like you describe, I'm sure every bit of time you gain is a huge plus. So yes, our speed doubles every 2 years, but so do our competitors'.

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