98% isn't much

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• Hacker News
• Or, phrased another way: there's a reason why we consider basic availability in nines and 2 nines is still considered pretty bad. 99% uptime means being down over 7 hours each month.
  by daveguy
• This is a basic ontological error, author conflates reliability and suitability

  >> If a website uses fancy new browser features and works for 98% of the population

  >> If an employer pays their employees 98% of the times, I definitely wouldn’t want to work there

  Are you sure about that? 2% of the population has no bank account, will your employer agree to pay in cash?

  These are different scenarios -> your employer likely cannot pay some percentage of the population; but that’s not the same as the process randomly failing (which may be worse or better depending in some cases)

  by ClumsyPilot
• I had this argument with people working on VR headsets, where a physical parameter was designed to cover the 5th to 95th percentile. I had to point out that flat-out excluding 10% of the population is a pretty crappy starting point...
  by theresistor
• I mean 2% have their javascript turned off (either on purpose or caused by failing extensions). 5% are behind corporate proxies that block your domain. Are you going to host the site on substack also so those 5% can access it?
  by throwitaway222
• Off topic (and at risk of being downvoted), I don't think I'll ever get a better chance to insist here that

  "99 and a half won't do"

  https://youtu.be/1QVJCjbgM-s

  Holy Disciples

  Trying to Make a Hundred

  by mellosouls
• Thank you :)
  by marking-time
• It reminds me of when people argued against covid restrictions saying that the virus had a 99% survival rate. A disease with a 1% infection fatality rate is a terrible disease!

  Full disclosure: I also argued against covid restrictions, but not with this terrible argument.

  by isolli
• Reading the comments, I expected this blog post to be about something fundamental. But nope. It's just about native CSS nesting. A convenience feature that merely adopts functionality that preprocessors have long provided. Maybe I'm alone in this viewport, but this isn't even worth debating unless you, the developer, are the priority.
  by artisin
• Design bloggers are about to reinvent the concept of availability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_c...

  Software standards are way too low these days. If you can't do at least 5 9s in everything you ship get out of the industry and humanity will be better off.

  by casey2
• "Truly robust engineering isn’t about what works for most; it’s about gracefully handling the edge cases"

  Not really. Truly robust engineering includes a cost-benefit analysis of which edge cases you handle. We don't live in a world of unlimited time & money.

  by groby_b
• 60% of the time, it works every time
  by 1970-01-01
• The author seems to equivocate by comparing completely different domains.

  Whether 98% is acceptable, it depends on the cost of failure, not the percentage itself.

  by WaitWaitWha
• I blame it in big part on the WebDX community group, their absolutely useless "Baseline" guidelines, and on them allowing Apple to be part of that group and make decisions on what features are "ready" to use whilst being behind the only non-evergreen browser in 2026.

  The "baseline" means nothing. The percentage in caniuse means nothing. The only number that matters is the number of Safari users stuck using a no longer supported Apple device that access your website. Of course Apple makes sure to hide usage stats of older devices.

  Everyone complains about only having three browser engines out there, but I'll be happy to go down to two if that means freeing the world from Safari.

  by Unai
• And I see the opposite: Safari is a valuable check on constant additions and bloat to the web platform.
  by timw4mail
• Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”?

  Sure, it's called a 'dress code'.

  by apexalpha
• If it's uptime it's definitively not much!
  by vb-8448
• this made me lol
  by dango369
• Jesse, we need to refactor the edge cases Jesse
  by ninjahawk1
• while true, the people who will read this and then think twice about implementing and applying things are exactly the people who already doing too much thinking
  by 217
• I am not exactly sure what is the article trying to point out
  by cantalopes
• This whole article is a categorical error. Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context. You can argue endlessly by shifting the topic that 98% is used on. I guess that's what people are doing here.
  by cj17382
• "Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context" is exactly what the article was saying....
  by miltonlost
• In today's world of AI it's fairly easy to make your site compatible with every version of internet explorer ever.

  Just tell the AI to do it. It'll find a way. The maintenance burden for you will be minimal because the AI can keep the legacy compatibility bits in sync.

  by londons_explore
• Good luck bro.
  by flerchin
• > Just tell the AI to do it

  This is the new Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

  by cryptonym
• I used to try to make the point with non-tech people using the salesman analogy: If you were a salesperson who worked inbound calls from potential customers, would you be willing to handle 1 out of every 50 calls by picking up the phone, yelling "fuck you" into it, and hanging up? That's pretty much what you're doing to your customers when your software works for 98% of them.
  by ryandrake
• This analogy is bad: Nobody is going to die or get food poisoning because their old browser doesn't work on a website.

  A better analogy would be a restaurant deciding not to cater to the 1% of the US population that have celiac disease (cannot eat gluten), or the 2% that have issues with dairy.

  by thenewnewguy
• Some things are measured from 0, some are measured from 100. Depending on Expectation.

  When expectation is 100%, telling me 98% success rate isn't enough. An example where the argument happens on Reddit, Macrumours and even on HN. When Apple's butterfly keyboard have issues. Apple Supporter was quick to dismiss the issue and point out the double entry is such a small issue because it is working 99.9% of the time. What they don't realise keyboard before that was practically 100%. That 0.1% error rate is infinitely more than 0%.

  Another example is Internet connection When you are used to perfect Internet connection, just a small beep in disconnecting turns to be major annoyance. There are plenty of these examples especially with DOCSIS Cable modem. The modem theoretically is working 99,95% of the time, hence cable companies won't fix it. But Disconnecting 10 to 30 seconds every day is annoying enough.

  I am not sure if there is a word or terminology for it so this could be better explained to people.

  On the other hand, there are plenty of things where 80% is good enough, or doing above and beyond at 96% by getting 80% out of the original remaining 20%.

  by ksec
• Feels like it's 2006 again and we're talking about IE vs Firefox.
  by docheinestages
• If a plane did not crash 98% of the time, you wouldn't step on it.
  by asxndu