If something happens a trillion times a day with .00001 error rate, then 50 MILLION things went wrong, affecting, say 50,000 people. 50 of them blast twitter and it seems the world is collapsing. The world is resilient.
Sometimes error rates, even nominally low ones, are bad. Would you like to have your IV changed by a nurse with 0.001 error rate?
I would think that would be quite a good error rate. Especially when considering people in the hospital are often not in good health, possibly making their veins more difficult to find.
That is assuming by error you mean missing the vein. If error is defined as a fatal complication, then 1/1000 is terrifying.
Apologies for unsolicited advice, but since you’re newish... Downvotes don’t mean anyone’s upset, there’s a large variety of reasons people downvote. Same is true of upvotes, there are lots of different reasons for them. Try not to take either personally. Downvotes don’t require explanation, just like upvotes don’t require explanation. It’s a great idea to be curious and seek ways to avoid downvotes, always good to a…
Thank you for the advice! I've always seen HN as a great platform for thoughtful discussion. I don't see downvoting a comment that doesn't have any replies yet as a way to participate in that discussion. I was genuinely curious what view point a person could have to not find my comment beneficial to the discussion. I'll try to make these queries a bit less complaint-sounding in the future! Thanks again!
Great to hear the positive response! FWIW, initially on HN I felt pretty frustrated with what I called ‘drive-by downvotes’ with no explanation, and also just generally upset when I’d get downvoted. That’s partly because it didn’t happen that often, so it felt more serious when it did. And sometimes it feels unfair, for sure, especially when I don’t know why and it doesn’t seem warranted to me. But over the years, I’ve become more okay with the vagueness and uncertainty that comes with it. The votes are communicating something, so I try to assume I did something wrong and just maybe don’t get what it is yet. But you never know other people’s interpretations of your words, or their moods or mental states either, so sometimes I just have to let it roll off. It’s fascinating to see something I write get misinterpreted after I thought I was really clear. And I don’t see this happen that often, but because votes are used to rank the comments, sometimes people are just moving the interesting discussions up and the less interesting ones down, so there might even be nothing at all disagreeable with a comment, it’s just that there are other really good discussions nearby. Believe it or not, I actually don’t ever downvote because it bothered me to get them myself, I just ignore threads I don’t want to read and upvote threads that are interesting. I usually upvote people who reply to me as thanks for taking the time to read & reply to me, especially when they disagree with me, so that’s an example of using votes for something other than liking or agreeing or ranking. Anyway, HN does have some pretty thoughtful discussion even with the occasional downvotes, so just seek out the good stuff!
Super curious about this response saying on gmail you have more control, because from where I am the “mark as spam” button does nothing but move things to the spam folder. In theory it should learn from that but when someone used my email address to sign up for AT&T no amount of marking things as spam will stop their emails landing in my inbox.
As in signed up for AT&T service? If so it's because it's not spam - it's misdirected mail, but there are tens of thousands of other Gmail users who think that messages almost identical to those are things they absolutely want to receive.
If there is no business relationship between AT&T and that user, the U.S. Can Spam Act defines it as spam.
Shame on AT&T for not validating their customer's email address.
To me this is more evidence that we definitely need public decentralized platforms that can replace Google and once we have them we need to eliminate the company. Private companies should not be allowed to monopolize platforms and control our lives.
Before I switched to fastmail, gmail would not believe me when I marked an email as not-spam. They would still get flagged. All I wanted was updates from one band. That didn’t stop me from repeatedly getting junk from every other record label my email was sold to. It was an endless procession of shit I never subscribed to.
"Inboxing" with Gmail & Outlook is a baroque, hellish process for mailservers. When either provider decides your small email server is sending spam (eg: sending an email with an attachment, or any kind of form email like a daily report) you won't get through to user inboxes, and instead you'll be routed to spam, or for Outlook.com hosted addresses they will accept mail from your server and send it to /dev/null. Gmail…
As far as I know, Gmail also does this sort of black hole spam filtering - the stuff that you see in "Spam" isn't everything.
> Gmail does not, inherently, have any network effects This is wrong. The current situation is "if you want to reliably contact gmail users you need a gmail address". This is no different than Facebook or messengers. And that may actually be the incentive for Gmail being such a bad player compared to everybody else.
(also @reaperducer) Something I didn't fully appreciate until I got here was: 1. Work (aka enterprise) sends much more email than consumer, and 2. Outlook dominates enterprise. Their market share is pretty astounding. I assure you there is a lot of email coming from Outlook/Exchange.
It doesn't feel like "... you need a GMail or an Outlook address" is much of an improvement.
Secondly, we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users. This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?
How many people don't experience problems sending to gmail? Do you think blog posts criticizing and praising gmail deliverability are in equal proportion to users' experiences?
Until recently, I didn't think I have a problem with GMail spam filtering.
Then I looked at what was in my Spam folder. I haven't looked into it for a long time before, because, well, Google has trained me that their spam filtering "just works".
I now try to check it at least once a week. The amount of false positives was staggering, and some of it was important.
Any examples? (DDG fan here; curious to know if it is filter bubbling, or something else.)
One example is the story of the sons of John Kerry and Joe Biden partnering together to form a private equity fund which received money from the Chinese government, and then using that money to acquire strategically sensitive assets, in some cases partnering with firms accused by the US government of hacking US companies for intellectual property: https://nypost.com/2018/03/15/inside-the-shady-private-equit... They d…
I see an article covering this story with both links. Google serves The Hill first, while Bing serves NYPost. On the whole, Google results seem to be better, although this may have something to do with the more detailed profile they have on me as their user.
Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems. It's big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn't received, the intended recipient will say, "I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you." And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world. I wish this was just paranoia, but we've seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and po…
Maybe AI/ML is actually broken..
It's not broken. It's just hyped well beyond its constraints.