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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Deciseconds is such an oddball choice of units. Better to specify the delay in either milliseconds or seconds - either are far more commonly used in computing.

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I got really confused for a moment, thinking that "deciseconds" was some git-unit meaning "seconds needed to make a decision", like in "decision-seconds" xD

Note: english is not my mother tongue, but I am from the civilised part of the world that uses the metric system FWIW.

I get where your coming from, although deci is certainly used, it's rare enough to not expect it, especially in the context of git

I thought of the same thing!

It's a decent, if uncommon, unit for human reactions. The difference between 0 and 1 seconds is a noticeably long time to wait for something, but the difference between n and n+1 milliseconds is too fine to be useful.

Milliseconds are a commonly-used unit. It doesn't really matter if 1 ms is too fine a granularity -- you'll just have to write "autocorrect = 500" in your config file instead of "autocorrect = 5", but who cares?

Sure, yes. But for human consumption, decisecond is something one can relate to.

I mean, you probably cannot sense the difference in duration between 20 and 30 ms without special equipment.

But you can possibly sense the difference between 2 and 3 deciseconds (200 ms and 300 ms) after some practice.

I think the issue in this case was rather the retrofitting a boolean setting into a numerical setting.

The difference between 20 ms and 30ms is the difference between 33 fps and 50 fps which is entirely noticable on a 1080p60hz screen.

Sure, but that's a continous stream of frames, which is not 300 ms long or whatever.

> But you can possibly sense the difference between 2 and 3 deciseconds (200 ms and 300 ms) after some practice.

At 120bpm a sixteenth note is 125ms, the difference is very obvious I would think

But then the tune is muliple beats long, and that misses my point.

And then you have the rhythm gamers who can adjust their inputs by 5 or 10ms. Hell, I'm not even that good of a player, but in Fortnite Festival, which has a perfect indicator whenever you're within 50ms of the target note timestamp (and a debug display that shows you a running average input offset) and I can easily adjust my play to be slightly earlier or slightly later and watch my average fall or climb.

Several top players have multiple "perfect full combos" under their belt, where they hit every note in the song within 50ms of the target. I even have one myself on one of the easier songs in the game.

If you're going to store that unit in one byte (possible even signed) suddenly deci-seconds start making a lot of sense

Why would you do that?

(Perceived) space efficiency. Many of the things still utilizing deciseconds did so before the turn of the century.

But the consumers of the API aren't humans, they're programmers.

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