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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't need to be 100% correct. There's a place for fast sorting algorithms which are correct most of the time - basically anything non-critical, like sorting comments by upvotes.

According to the article, they couldn't find a case where it wasn't correct.

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> There's a place for fast sorting algorithms which are correct most of the time - basically anything non-critical, like sorting comments by upvotes.

Nothing saddens me more than this trend of the modern web where everything works semi-probabilistically (even if it's likely for "good" technical reasons, such as, "we wrote our server backend in Ruby which is slow as molasses so now we need 230 CDN and 800 databases instances around the whole world and transformed our simple centralized problem into an horrendous decentralized one).

The central reason for me to use computers is that they are (or at least were) deterministic to a much higher degree that normal life, and so many things in the 10 last years becoming much more non-deterministic in particular on social websites is something that frustrates me every single day as it just makes the whole experience and process of using computers & the web very unreliable compared to what it used to be.

Today's perfections are yesterday's "good enoughs". Don't be sad for the trend. In 10 years, you will have new perfections to enjoy.

Like the probabilistic bank account balance. "You have between $10 and $1000 with the greatest likelihood being $537 (52% chance)."

There was this thread a while ago with HSBC switching to MongoDB... so, yeah, distinct possibility :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507197

(The article was very light on details though, and it was probably just one team that consolidated to MongoDB, not the accounts itself... one hopes.)

A friend of mine went to a doctor, and after the medical lab the doctor told him you either have malaria or typhoid.

This trend seems to be everwhere

Jim Keller once said randomness was baked in the modern computer chip design. The execution routes were almost always different even if you ran the same deterministic code for multiple times. But in the end you got the same result almost every single time (“almost” has many 9s after the decimal point). But this layer of operations has been abstracted away from most of us. So don’t feel too sad... maybe the world has been like this for a long time

I think the good technical reasons are quite often the CAP theorem.

I know, but my argument is that a lot of time (not always, of course) the "distributed" issues could just be solved by not building a distributed system in the first place and just having more efficient tech stacks & a few big servers.

Stackoverflow was just using 4 db servers in 2016 (https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...)

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