Time Unit Confusion

Comments focus on humorous corrections and debates over mix-ups between seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, and other sub-second units in performance timings, benchmarks, or rates.

➡️ Stable 0.5x DevOps & Infrastructure
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#6769
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
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2008
16
2009
27
2010
60
2011
77
2012
109
2013
134
2014
152
2015
117
2016
141
2017
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2018
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2019
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2020
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2021
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2022
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2023
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2024
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2026
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Keywords

FYI wikipedia.org OSRS CMS seconds milliseconds second 21 resolution fraction ms unit sizeof resolutions

Sample Comments

tomnis Sep 25, 2013 View on HN

milliseconds. only a few orders of magnitude off. fuck.

sarciszewski Jan 10, 2015 View on HN

If by seconds you mean milliseconds ;)

K2L8M11N2 Jul 25, 2019 View on HN

Maybe it’s counting in microseconds?

perl4ever Oct 19, 2021 View on HN

Did they specify the time down to the nanosecond?

sci-designer Aug 5, 2025 View on HN

Wow, this is wild. billionths of a second?!

coin Mar 27, 2017 View on HN

Not a second, but a minute is too coarse

e12e Apr 14, 2015 View on HN

Well, once every 120 seconds is still quite a leap from 10 every second...

pests Nov 5, 2023 View on HN

At the rate of 1 second/second.

Tempest1981 Nov 1, 2025 View on HN

They probably meant millisecond

simonh May 6, 2017 View on HN

Doesn't it depend on how much less than a second it is?