Birbla

Discussion summary

Many commenters discuss the implications of 98% uptime, with some arguing it's insufficient for reliability. Others compare it to standards in different fields and highlight factors affecting availability.

What the discussion says

  • 98% uptime is often considered inadequate for critical services.
  • Some argue that reliability should account for user experience and context.
  • Factors like browser features, user settings, and proxies impact actual availability.
  • There's concern over low standards in software reliability and high availability expectations.
“99% uptime means being down over 7 hours each month.”
— daveguy
“Design standards are too low these days.”
— casey2

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  • Hacker News
  • Part of the problem is The US Government (and UK Government) use the "2% rule" on their websites and only officially support 98%.

    I mentioned 3 years ago that Firefox at 2.2% is dangerously close the being unsupported on government websites, and at this point it's now at 1.9%.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603

    https://analytics.usa.gov/ says "There were 1.66 billion sessions in the last 30 days." - so 2% is 33 million sessions if I did my math right.

    by collinmanderson
  • 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 it's at least theoretically still providing some value partially.

    I think knowing what kind of problem you're facing is really important when it comes to measuring percentage of "complete".

    by maderalabs
  • 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 so stable not because nobody ever makes anything new but because changing a small percentage frustrates customers

    If I can't order from some website, I stop trying. Maybe next week the ESR browser gets an update and it works again but by then I'm not clicking those links in the search results

    by Aachen
  • Reminds me of the Meat Loaf song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” which was released in Japan as 66%の誘惑 “66% is Good Enough” etc https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076
    by msephton
  • 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 100. You've doubled the efficacy.
    by phailhaus
  • 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 tiny mess can be visually distinct. In fact, as you approach 100%, the remaining mess stands out more.
    by nemo1618
  • While I agree with the general sentiment, the problem here isn't developers not being familiar with statistics, it's the simple fact all of this is profit driven most of the time.

    I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.

    Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.

    Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.

    by MatekCopatek
  • 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 their browser once a year or better.

    The tradeoff is code complexity and engineering time, vs having a larger market. And that's going to be an individual situation for every company.

    by wccrawford

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