Hacker News Reader

Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

If told people that I was using a database system where one and 100th of the data was missing after every 10 transactions would you seriously take my advice as an engineer blog post like these that seem to be calmly focused toward an advertisement of a person’s or a group’s promotion and that it’s just introducing concepts.

View on HN

Wat

The user name "zitterbewegung" sounds like a German. They build sentences like that.

You have to think about a sentence like a stack and read it slowly and carefully and take note of the push and pop operations.

Germans are like RPN where everyone else is a regular calculator.

I'm afraid it's not just sentence structure that is the problem here:

> one and 100th of the data was missing

No idea what that means

> an advertisement of a person’s or a group’s promotion

What in god's name is an "advertisement of a group's promotion"?

I read that as "(an advertisement of a person) or (a group's promotion)".

>> one and 100th of the data was missing

>No idea what that means

1/100th of a dollar is a cent - goes towards the "missing cents" glossed over by calling that "dancing cents" in the blog post.

Yes, but why one and 1/100th?

Turns out people have different ways of saying the same concept because language is ultimately human and not a mathematical proof.

Yes, I was never confused about that. It's just that I've never heard this particular phrase, or anything like it. In retrospect, it appears to be a transcription error.

Meant to say 1% or 1/100 of inserts failed.

I was illustrating to the concept if you have a database solution that loses data randomly it would be seen as a joke compared to a dual entry ledger seen here. It feels like they were promoting themselves instead of addressing a real problem since dual entry ledgers have been used before computers in finance.

Did you mean just "one hundredth?" (i.e., 1%)? "One and one hundredth" suggests 101% to a native English speaker.

Edit: ah, you probably spoke "one one hundredth" and got a transcription error.

Transcription error meant to say 1% of all updates to a database (such as an insert) failed.

I don't know German I was using the voice recognition on an iPad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com