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bjourne • today at 1:34 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

My pet peeve are numbers with too many decimals. If you only run a benchmark three times and take the arithmetic mean you don't have five or more significant digits. At best, you have two. And for benchmarking the geometric mean is a far superior mean.


Replies

jrk • today at 1:45 AM

For averaging multiple different benchmarks, the geometric mean makes sense. For removing measurement noise from a single benchmark, min or median is usually the right statistic.