> Different units: traffic of visitors vs people running sites. I think we confuse them. Yes we do. All. The. Freaking. Time. It’s availability bias: most of

> Different units: traffic of visitors vs people running sites. I think we confuse them. Yes we do. All. The. Freaking. Time. It’s availability bias: most of the web sites we visit are popular and big and complex and have had to solve serious scalability issues. Most of the web sites we make have few visitors and are small and simple and do not have any scalability problem beyond the occasional aggregator hug. Likewise, most of the software we use is big and complex and used by many. Most of the software we make have less than 10 users. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon… are everywhere, but a stupidly small proportion of companies in the world are as big as they are. Mike Acton urges us all to "understand the data". That includes how much data we’ll be processing. How many request per days are we expecting? Are they evenly spaced, or will there be spikes? What’s considered acceptable latency? Stuff like that. Remember, the Pirate Bay at its most powerful only needed 4 rack servers, on top of each other. Very few of us will exceed the capacity of even a single server. It’s not always easy to see, because the front page of HN (and the front page of pretty much anything for that matter) doesn’t feature the ordinary. So we only see the extraordinary, and get the impression that we have to measure up to that.