Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

It's a little bit awkward. Still, I find it oddly fascinating that you're confused, because I can't figure out what's confusing.

There is a company Dan Luu knows about.

This company has a reputation for great engineering practices.

This company had 2 9s of reliability when Dan last checked.

The reason it has 2 9s of reliability is a predictable result of its engineering practices.

Although this example is about a specific company, you can't identify the company from the description.

You can't identify the company from the description because it is a description that applies to many companies.

You also can't identify the example from the previous paragraph [of Dan Luu's post] because that paragraph's description also applies to many companies.

Multiple companies have engineering practices that cause such reliability problems and find these engineering practices to be completely and totally normal.

View on HN

The unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.

Right. 99% is an A+ in school and 3 days of downtime per year.

That's about the reliability of my home server. A set of commodity mid-to-low quality parts that I assembled and programmed to turn on after a power outage.

And I could easily double it (as in half the unavailable time) if any ok ISP become available at my place.

Good point. I had assumed the parent was complaining about syntax, but that could be confusing.

When you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?

I'm saying that the author believes 99% reliability to be “Bad (TM)”. Further evidence in the second paragraph of this post: http://danluu.com/broken-builds/

I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is “release early, release often” which many open source projects adhere to.

I don't know what positive and normative statements are, but think of examples of highly available services. Electricity, Water, phone service. What do you think when those are down 3 days (or 72 hours) per year?

So, characteristic X is so common that it does reveal the identity of company Y. Yet the author is surprised that many companies think X is normal?

There are two points I'd make:

1) Maybe yes. If the practices are really bad, it could be surprising that they're widespread and that people don't see a problem.

2) In general, when someone is pointing out something bad, saying "you're surprised?!" is counter-productive. You don't have to be surprised to call something out (I'm not surprised anymore how much our government spies on us, but it seems bad).

He writes it as if he is suggesting that 99% reliability is just bad, period. If his point was to say that 99% is bad in this specific use case, he should have made that more clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com