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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

If thorough testing and 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect.

If you can get 100 experts to agree on something then you've cracked a much harder problem than software quality.

Agreed. We cant even get 10 dentists to agree which toothpaste to use. Getting 100 experts to agree on anything is a miracle.

> We cant even get 10 dentists to agree which toothpaste to use.

The 1 in 10 who didn’t recommend $PASTECORP made up the 9 in 10 who recommended $NUTRAPASTE

Toothpaste brand/variant, by and large, doesn't matter.

There is over 30 different variants of Colgate Toothpaste, do dentist believe ALL the Colgate ones are better than the alternatives?

Sometimes yes. My dentist explained she recommended Colgate because none of their 30 equal choices used to contain stannous floride, so it was easier to shop by brand than search for which ingredient to avoid specifically amongst the competitors 30 choices

Oh but it does, they just don't give the US access to the good stuff. Sensodyne Repair & Protect with NovaMin is available in Europe, but because American Crapitalism, aka money aka FDA, you can't get it in the US.

Fluoride is good for teeth but not for your gut and the rest of the body

I don't think you're supposed to be eating the toothpaste.

I eat a quarter of a tube of toothpaste per day. Other than the weight loss, hair loss and reduction in bowel control, I have not noticed any negative side effects. Helps keep my insides clean.

Because different toothpaste is helpful for different cases and reasons?

The same applies to software though.

Most people with bad vision want higher contrast for text, while most people with dyslexia want text with lower contrast.

Take curl, it has had many more than 100 experts going through it over the years, and yet with new tooling (AI) they located a bunch of other issues. Perfection in software does not exist, but that's fine as long as you're aware.

(in the case of curl, any security issues inside the library should be mitigated by its environment)

Presumably, this is why the next paragraph opens with "Perfection is impossible."

So, if 100 experts can’t find a problem, the thing is probably perfect. Unfortunately, this will never happen, because perfection is impossible.

Top money's worth can play a big part if there is no shoddiness. Does not have to be luxury range at all.

I didn't see this addressed in the article, and it could be more important than some of the main points.

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