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Comment by Anon_Admirer | Hacker News Reader

While the original ISO standard may still have its use cases, your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior. Your false belief that its long life in a group of other standards - is rather a coincidence that is in correlation to its long life and not a cause of it.

Had the USB stick and related softwares for formatting been around sooner .img may have easily won the battle between standards. Unfortunately, CD-ROM was released 1985 and USB flash drives only started really showing up in the early 2000s. We have no way of knowing the counterfactual.

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I would read

> Many old technologies are reliable and widely adopted, which in and of itself may make it superior to more modern technologies.

not as arguing that the tech is inherently better in itself, but that being popular for a long time carries benefits, mostly of the form "everything can use this" - consider FAT32, which I think we can all agree is... a product of its time (that seems like a nice way of putting it?), but which remains invaluable because (virtually) everything can read/write it.

> your argument involves survivorship bias - just because a technology has been around a while doesn't make it superior.

That sentence did not end the way I expected given its start.

Survivorship bias does imply that old (surviving) standards are unusually good. That's because standards from the time would have a range of suffering qualities, and the really exceptionally good ones are much more likely to survive in use a very long time.

The potential problem though is that the surviving standard may have been the best for a reason that's no longer relevant.

There are certainly decisions that have been made over the last 30 years that don't make sense in light of today's storage/power/ubiquity-of-connection that are just incumbent now.

For example, the inherent unsafety of many C operations and a long list of undefined behaviors in the language, which was meant to improve compile times on long forgotten processors whose performance would no longer suffice to manage a LED lightbulb.

At least we can slowly displace C with other languages, but those limitations were already obsolete in the early 1990s, and we are still wading through countless CVEs caused by them.

Didn't say superior, useful. The rest of your comment in quintessential angry performative hn.

When discussing whether something should be killed, survivorship isn't a bias — it is evidence. Otherwise the whole process of evolution by natural selection would just be ongoing "survivorship bias".

I said “may”, not “must”. Please don’t put words in my mouth — you have no idea what my beliefs are behind your keyboard. Thanks.

Ubiquitous adoption is an advantage for a given class of technology. This isn’t survivorship bias, it’s simply consumers finding a given technology useful to them and continuing to use it. Survivorship bias would have required ISO or img to fail and neither have failed (survivorship bias requires a non-survivor).

I can port an ISO between OSes from the early 90s through today. I can’t reliably do that with img as it may not use a universally accepted file system.

(And I did happen to burn a NetBSD ISO for a G4 last month from my M2 Air)

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