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98% isn't much

whynothugo.nl

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Re: 98% isn't much

#351

Post by abustamam »

nemo1618 wrote: post #187

After Christmas this year, I removed the tree from our living room, and in the process of being moved, it shed of needles everywhere . I swept them up, but I missed a few areas on my first pass. So I did a second pass, but when I looked again, I saw there were still a handful left. It struck me how removing >99% of the needles was nowhere near acceptable! Lots of cleaning jobs are like this, I suppose, because even a…

In some cases (like this), 99.99% isn't enough. 100% is mandatory.

I moved into my house a few months ago and while I was exercising my foot discovered a nail that I guess was left by the previous homeowner/tenant/builder. Fortunately it was just a scratch, but it could have easily turned into a trip to the ER.

With a baby learning to walk and crawl, the tolerance for cleaning up nails on the floor is absolutely 100% (or 0% nail) so I scoured the entire house carpet with a strong magnet to ensure there no other surprises. I did this several times just to make sure

This was a few months ago and yet I still tend to have anxiety when walking on the carpet now.

Re: 98% isn't much

#352

Post by DonnieP »

spiffytech wrote: post #328
dataviz1000 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I would make the argument that people would have to weigh the cost of being accessible to the last 2% vs the cost of losing the last 2%. Anyone who delivers mail to rural farmers 100 years ago would lose money. There are 3 options. 1. If farmers want mail, they can pay the extra costs. 2. Force, by law, mail carriers to deliver at a loss to farmers. 3. Rural Free Delivery, the gove…

Why would farmers disagree?

Based on the results of US elections in the past 30 years, farmers (as represented by rural voters in general) do not vote for candidates who support "collective benefit."

Re: 98% isn't much

#353

Post by groundzeros2015 »

autoexec wrote: post #345
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when you say “profit motivated” the underlying principle is actually utilitarianism; doing the most good for the most people, for which profit Is merely an imperfect proxy.

“profit motivated” means taking as much as possible while giving as little as possible in return. The ideal situation for a profit motivated company would be collecting all of the money people have and delivering nothing. Thieves are also profit motivated.

And the ideal consumer takes everything and pays nothing. Let’s see where they meet!

Re: 98% isn't much

#354

Post by filoleg »

b112 wrote: post #324
filoleg wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a full name and personal website link in one of the comments, which contains a link to their food photography page saying that cooking used to be their profession. I would assume that should be enough to at least believe it in the absence of evidence showing otherwise, but I guess we aren't treating replies in good faith anymore here.

No, it's just one person, not all of HN, and I can't imagine why the contention.

Yeah, it's just one person here, but I am starting to see that type of a person across all HN comment sections way more often these days.

Nothing personal against that specific user at all btw, especially since they recognized it.

It was just more of a personal rant on my part, as I am saddened by slow redditification of HN comments over the years. Higher-trust comment sections is a major part of why I've been enjoying HN for so long, as opposed to many other alternatives.

Re: 98% isn't much

#355

Post by jrowen »

parineum wrote: post #293
jrowen wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, it's completely unintuitive that "Sun Protection Factor 30 = 1/30th of UV light passes through it", and I had no idea there was any correlation before this comment. The only intuitive bit about that system is "bigger number does more." I feel like I would have more readily understood it if it just said "blocks 97% (or 98%) of UV light" instead of numbers I assumed were somewhat arbitrary.

The intuitive part comes when comparing two options. If you use 20 instead of 10, you'll be exposed to half as much UV even though it's only an additional 5% of protection. The number could just be the percentage of exposure (5 v 10) and express the same relationship but the denominator has the advantage of bigger numbers being more protective while still being more intuitively comparable. Many people would see 90% v…

I'll grant that it's complicated, as the comments on this post have demonstrated.

But half the exposure isn't quite equivalent to twice the protection.

All my life I just thought they were somewhat arbitrary numbers, I didn't correlate them to any actual measurable quantity, and I would assume it's the same for most people. So while I would agree that that representation "gets the job done," I don't think it contributes to a deeper understanding.

I do feel like if you saw "90%, 95%, 97%, and 98%" on the shelf it would start to make some kind of sense, and then when people talk about it ("what's the difference between 97 and 98?") the underlying concept would become more apparent. Using a kind of converted magic number scale that doesn't work like other things seems unhelpful, but I'm certainly not an expert nor the intended audience.

Re: 98% isn't much

#356

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Certhas wrote: post #335
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s confirmed in the opening summary: > A few of these routes have since reopened. Some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes > Some, such as the bulk of the Midland Metro network around Birmingham and Wolverhampton, have since been incorporated into light rail lines. Furthermore, the transformation to oth…

There are many more places that were never reconnected.

Indeed. Your rail was being subsidized.

Re: 98% isn't much

#357

Post by ipaddr »

DonnieP wrote: post #352
spiffytech wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would farmers disagree?

Based on the results of US elections in the past 30 years, farmers (as represented by rural voters in general) do not vote for candidates who support "collective benefit."

Sure they do they create co-operatives and pool resources together. They created banks, insurance that serve their needs. Farmers aren't some lone wolf. Farmers created universal health care in other countries like Canada.

They don't support the left and social politics of pushing trans, gay, racial, feminist policies. They believe in God and Christian values.

They work hard and expect others to and don't support a welfare state but that's different from collective benefits.

Re: 98% isn't much

#358

Post by m0dest »

maderalabs wrote: post #155

I think there are broadly two types of problems - ones where you get partial credit, and ones where you don't. The restaurant example is one where you don't get partial credit - 98% of food being safe isn't enough, it's all or nothing. Paying your employees - all or nothing, you miss a paycheck once, it's a huge problem. CSS on a website, however, you CAN get partial credit (to an extent). It may not be perfect, but…

Yes, the decision to rely on modern CSS is more like serving restaurant food that contains cilantro. The predominant failure mode is partial credit.

The quality perception of this user segment is relative, too. That visitor who is using a version of Chrome that is 4 years stale? Their experience on the rest of the web was not pixel-perfect today. Many sites are inexplicably buggy for them. They might even be used to having to switch devices to complete some tasks.

Continuing to surf the web with a long-unpatched browser is also overtly negligent [1]. That negligent 2% of users is not a protected class. As such, you might observe that this 2% of users contributes only 0.2% of revenue / engagement / value and make a self-interested decision to stop supporting them.

[1] Except brief windows of time when old Apple devices continue to get Safari security updates without getting feature updates. Not relevant to the author's CSS nesting example.

Re: 98% isn't much

#359

Post by anoneng »

drdeca wrote: post #232
anoneng wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes to show you’ve never been anywhere near the actual development cycle of a real-world front-end web application. “So, there is a baseline "target subset of HTML/CSS" that gives you 100% coverage.” Oh really? Which subset? Which “HTML/CSS?” And 100%? Absolutely laughable.

Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ? I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites shou…

Completely bad faith reply when your example uses zero CSS, no HTML links even, and the only script to distinguish it from a bare static text document is google analytics malware. This isn’t falling back, it is the fallback. Expecting most modern web application to function at that level is for most purposes, simply stupid. Like putting hitching posts in a high rise apartment’s sub-basement parking levels.

Re: 98% isn't much

#360

Post by anoneng »

autoexec wrote: post #342
drdeca wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know any browsers which don’t support https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ (if you remove the google traffic tracking js that’s iirc tacked on at the end of the page (or maybe I’m thinking of better mfing website (which adds a tiny bit of css)? Idr.)) ? I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. I don’t think the other commenter was saying that such websites shou…

> I get that asking a commercial website to be as basic/supported as that website is a big ask. The trick isn't to get a commercial website to accept a site that basic, it's to get the website to test for capabilities and if it can't confirm them serve only the basic version. Websites should be every bit as fancy and obnoxious as they want as long as they fail gracefully.

But this isn’t about websites or just publishing articles or the weather. It’s about web applications, commerce, products, things with customers not just readers. As soon as you have an application that’s doing anything nontrivial then you have to draw a line and say “nope we’re not supporting that at all” and there’s sections along the line where you can’t even fail gracefully.

In the real world that means there is a list of browsers and versions tested on.

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