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wafflemakertoday at 7:38 AM1 replyview on HN

In the equation there seems to be a typo;

103 - number of ppl in queue, 4 - up to X weeks per person, 2 - number of machines 12 - ??

Maybe you initially wanted to use full months for how long a person can hold an item, but then switched to weeks, and accidently still used number of months to get the number of years?

Anyway, for an imprecise number, you can do with months - 104*1/2/12 ~4.3y.

For more precise result, use seconds, as that's the unit used for the precise length of the year. Year is not 365 days. It's actually longer, quoting Wikipedia for (tropical) year,

> Approximately 365 solar days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds

That gives

  104 * (4 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60) /2 /(((365 * 24 + 5) * 60 + 48) * 60 + 45)
Which results in 3.986 years. At maximum. Much less than 17!

Edit: getting asterikses * right


Replies

asdfologisttoday at 12:01 PM

Why was this downvoted? The math checks out. Multiplying by 4 and then dividing by 12 is wrong.

Easy way to verify this: assume only 1 person in the queue and only 1 machine. Then the original calculation yields 4/12 of a year, even though the actual wait time is (about) 1/12 of a year.