5 ms·
This post's style and "quality" of writing is really aggravating. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall after reading so many run on sentences or
by dfc 11y ago
This post's style and "quality" of writing is really aggravating. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall after reading so many run on sentences or paragraphs that start with the same contraction. Other times the writing is so poorly executed I cannot tell what the author is trying to convey. For example what is going on in this paragraph:
"There’s the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked, for reasons that are entirely predictable from their engineering practices. This is the second thing in a row that’s basically anonymous because multiple companies find it to be normal. Multiple companies find practices that lead to 2 9s of reliability to be completely and totally normal."
- hyperpape 11y agoIt's a little bit awkward. Still, I find it oddly fascinating that you're confused, because I can't figure out what's confusing. There is a company Dan Luu knows about. This company has a reputation for great engineering practices. This company had 2 9s of reliability when Dan last checked. The reason it has 2 9s of reliability is a predictable result of its engineering practices. Although this example is about a specific company, you can't identify the company from the description. You can't identify the company from the description because it is a description that applies to many companies. You also can't identify the example from the previous paragraph [of Dan Luu's post] because that paragraph's description also applies to many companies. Multiple companies have engineering practices that cause such reliability problems and find these engineering practices to be completely and totally normal.
- momzer 11y agoThe unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.
- sageikosa 11y agoRight. 99% is an A+ in school and 3 days of downtime per year.
- marcosdumay 11y agoThat's about the reliability of my home server. A set of commodity mid-to-low quality parts that I assembled and programmed to turn on after a power outage. And I could easily double it (as in half the unavailable time) if any ok ISP become available at my place.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hyperpape 11y agoGood point. I had assumed the parent was complaining about syntax, but that could be confusing.
- dfc 11y agoWhen you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?
- hibbelig 11y agoI don't know what positive and normative statements are, but think of examples of highly available services. Electricity, Water, phone service. What do you think when those are down 3 days (or 72 hours) per year?
- momzer 11y agoI'm saying that the author believes 99% reliability to be “Bad (TM)”. Further evidence in the second paragraph of this post: http://danluu.com/broken-builds/ http://danluu.com/broken-builds/ I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is “release early, release often” which many open source projects adhere to.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dfc 11y agoSo, characteristic X is so common that it does reveal the identity of company Y. Yet the author is surprised that many companies think X is normal?
- hyperpape 11y agoThere are two points I'd make: 1) Maybe yes. If the practices are really bad, it could be surprising that they're widespread and that people don't see a problem. 2) In general, when someone is pointing out something bad, saying "you're surprised?!" is counter-productive. You don't have to be surprised to call something out (I'm not surprised anymore how much our government spies on us, but it seems bad).
- xixi77 11y agoHe writes it as if he is suggesting that 99% reliability is just bad, period. If his point was to say that 99% is bad in this specific use case, he should have made that more clear.
- mahouse 11y agoIt's convoluted and "hard to read" for a reason. The author wants to make a point by writing all sentences using the same style. If you don't see it...