Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking.

Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes.

Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue.

His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website.

Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.

View on HN

I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!!

The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.

The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues

He is saying the most inane things ever, I don't know why I need to be charitable here.

Kicking out 2% of your existing customers in a physical venue violates people's expectations, so it's going to get you disproportionate bad reviews and word-of-mouth.

Good thing that we've managed to keep everybody's expectations a hell of a lot lower for software quality then :)

Every nightclub in Berlin has a few Google reviews that say "we were black and they didn't let us in because they are racist." These are the reviews you will see on Google and it can dampen your excitement before you even leave your home.

But if they instead were blocking the people with the 2% most out of date fashion, then it's not an issue. The problem is the racism not the 98% acceptance rate.

imagine not 2% of users not being able to use the site, but any given user not being able to use the site 2% of the time, and see if that changes the calculus for you.

Yeah, that changes it, in both positive and negative ways.

I can't tell if this is in support of the article or not though.

I mean that's my experience with a lot of modern software anyway. I have to reload or force close and reopen or please try again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com