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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

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.

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