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98% isn't much

whynothugo.nl

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Re: 98% isn't much

#271

Post by zamadatix »

rvba wrote: post #263
zamadatix wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating "old device" with "10 year old browser" here. E.g. for: > There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason. It'd be "the pool of people who installed Windows 10 immediately in the launch year but somehow accidentally blocked their browser from updating in the 10 years since, weren't able to fix the issue as the web slowly stopped working…

When will Microsoft stop doing Windows 10 security updates? I have a 10 year old laptop with 32GB of RAM, GTX 970 6GB and an SSD. For many things it is better than any 16GB work issued laptop (that often come with integrated cards - so you wont be able to run any AI model on them). Although the old ssd is starting to show its age (perhaps a full system reinstall would solve this, other option is to get a new one). Th…

> When will Microsoft stop doing Windows 10 security updates?

Last October, unless you are on an LTS type version - in which case somewhere between 2028-2032 (depending on the exact version). Edge will still update until at least 2028 even though the OS stopped receiving updates... though I'm not sure I would wish either of those usage scenarios on someone :).

> The old laptop does not have UEFI so it could not get the (free for some time) Windows 10 to 11 upgrade.

The free registration, they never actually axed the program at the end date https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/windows10spa.... Just make sure you use the same edition (e.g. Pro -> Pro). You also don't have to do an in place upgrade to do it. In your specific scenario, you would have to bypass the install requirements in the installer to get around the lack of UEFI though.

Hope that helps, Windows 11 is definitely a bit of an annoying step (even once it's installed).

Re: 98% isn't much

#272

Post by dieselgate »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #175
wccrawford wrote: post #25

Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…

Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants). 5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome! > works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my fo…

> It is impossible to make everyone happy. Don't try

The older I get the more valuable this lesson

>I always cooked what I wanted to eat and was always correct.

This is similar advice to what I've read recently about the target audience for technical/blog writings - only write to one person and it's best if that person is you.

Re: 98% isn't much

#273

Post by phailhaus »

ryan_n wrote: post #140
phailhaus wrote: post #115

The broader point is that percentages can be misleading, and are often because of that. It makes things sound better. But usually, the more accurate thing to do is use odds-notation ("1 in 50" instead of 98%). Percentages have a kind of singularity at the edges, where small numerical changes have massive real effects. Going from a success rate of 98% to 99% doesn't sound like much, but that's failing 1 in 50 vs 1 in…

Isn't this pretty much the entire point of the article.

Look at the HN comments and you'll see many saying they don't get the point

Re: 98% isn't much

#274

Post by sandspar »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #175
wccrawford wrote: post #25

Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…

Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants). 5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome! > works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my fo…

Michelin, yachts... How'd you find your way to an obscure tech forum like HackerNews?

Re: 98% isn't much

#275

Post by [deleted] »

sandspar wrote: post #274
dataviz1000 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants). 5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome! > works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my fo…

Michelin, yachts... How'd you find your way to an obscure tech forum like HackerNews?

[deleted]

Re: 98% isn't much

#276

Post by godelski »

Eridrus wrote: post #201
throwaway173738 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.

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…

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

Re: 98% isn't much

#277

Post by godelski »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #194
throwaway173738 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.

Except there was 0 analysis of the cost/benefit of supporting the end of the long tail, instead it was just economics-free shaming. Of course, you want to see who those 2% of users actually are . But nowhere in this article did I find any advice I'd actually want to use in a really business scenario.

Isn't the end of the article saying that their users are mainly in that tail? Seems to be exactly what you say: figuring out who those 2% are. In the OP's case, it's 30% of their users

Re: 98% isn't much

#278

Post by bilkow »

nchmy wrote: post #250
bilkow wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be updated stats here: https://composables.com/android-distribution-chart Which seems to indicate about 4.8% are below Android 9. But also, Firefox for Android still supports Android 8, of which there are 1.7% below. There's a discussion to be made here about who is dropping support for these users, is it Google (and especially Apple, who doesn't allow other browsers on iOS) or the site owner? Especiall…

You're misinterpreting the stats. Those are not "updated" - they're from Dec 1, 2025 and are the latest that are available from Android Studio (I just checked again). If you add up the distribution inclusive of Android 9 (which is what I was trying to refer to, perhaps unsuccessfully), it is 9.2%. That corresponds with the 90.7% Cumulative Distribution for Android 10 If you're arguing that it is Google who is droppin…

Ah you're right! You were actually very clear by saying Android 9 or below, but I misinterpreted while multitasking here, sorry for that.

> If you're arguing that it is Google who is dropping support/making people have insecure browsers, we're in agreement. As with Safari (or at least those at Apple who control/fund Safari), the Android team is very anti-Web/Chrome. Lots has been written about all of that at https://infrequently.org.

Oh, haven't seen that blog before. Incredible resource, thanks! And yeah, Google, Apple, and also a situation with vendors (e.g. Qualcomm, due to drivers) that makes it so miserable. Not only due to the way they favor their stores, but also indirectly due to how hard they make to have updated or custom OSes for older devices. I believe it's a consequence of the amount of control they exert, Apple by plainly not allowing bootloader unlocking and Google by gatekeeping essential APIs (especially Play Integrity) on "secure" (read: controlled by Google) OSes.

It's a bit insane that we live in two completely different realities on desktop vs mobile, where it's easy to install a current OS and browser in 15+ year old computers but can't even have an up-to-date browser on an 8 year old device, much less and up-to-date OS.

Re: 98% isn't much

#279

Post by Aachen »

doublepg23 wrote: post #245
Aachen wrote: post #71

Reminds me of statistic where most customers already stop going to a particular supermarket if it stops carrying a handful of the items they want to buy It may sound like a small deal to not carry one brand of chocolate paste but if some customers then also don't buy the 12 other groceries they need at your shop, it doesn't really matter that it's only 2% of products that were discontinued. Supermarket products are s…

Doesn't Aldi work against that theory?

Dunno. I stopped shopping at Aldi because we always needed to visit another store anyway, so for me that theory still holds. They've also taken cheap veggie chocolate milk out of the assortment, and the store next door introduced it, so there isn't any unique(ly cheap) product there that I can't get at the more expensive store and that's where we now do all our shopping. We only ever still visit Aldi when the Edeka, next door, is out of some product that Aldi has

In trying to find the exact figure earlier, I did see a paper where they classified people as one-, two-, or three-stop shoppers. Seems to be common, seeing as a lot of stores here are actually adjacent. You don't see that much in NL where I'm from. Anyway, I didn't end up finding back this figure and I don't know to which market this was supposed to apply; maybe in places like France the hypermarkets have everything without being expensive and it applies more to that? All results I found were about how amazing this company's loyalty cards are and you (the supermarket) should totally introduce them for better retention

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