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"A composable build system for reproducible environments" Is there another meaning of kurtosis that is applicable to this product? Kurtosis is used to describe

• georgeoliver 3y ago
  Perhaps a build system with a very high kurtosis means the builds are usually the same.
  • dpflan 3y ago
    I think high would actually mean more outliers and not good for managing a distributed system...
  • dooglius 3y ago
    It's the opposite, high (positive) kurtosis means fat tails.
  • galenmarchetti 3y ago
    Ahh this is the closest one to what we originally meant haha..(founder here). but the intent was to mitigate the impact of “kurtosis” on your system by enabling engineers to see how the whole environment worked in testing (and other parts of the development process). We also have a love for taleb’s books about excelling in uncertainty, in high “Kurtosis” environments, so going with the theme made sense for us. But I see from the comments it is decently confusing!
• verdverm 3y ago
  I wonder if it's related to their crypto / web3 leanings?
  • galenmarchetti 3y ago
    (Founder here) I love the thought! We definitely have a smoother understanding of the name from the users in that space from anecdotal experience, but actually it comes from both our own love of the concepts in the book “antifragile” by Taleb that talks about excelling in volatile (high Kurtosis) environments, plus the fact that our first users used it for E2E test environments which we imagined were catching “tail risk” bugs between components. Although I see how the overloading of the term is pretty confusing here
• chongli 3y ago
  I think this is yet another example of developers coming up with bad names for things. People seem to love using highly specific, technical terms for their projects which seem only vaguely/tangentially related to the proper meaning of the term. I think it’s a way of borrowing the credibility attached to the term. But at the same time it dilutes the original meaning of the term and confuses people over time.
  • thfuran 3y ago
    And it just gives a shitty search experience. You don't want people finding math stuff instead when searching for your product and people searching for math don't want to find some unrelated software.
    • galenmarchetti 3y ago
      Founder here…have definitely seen this. Trying to find some of our users’ open source work on public GitHub repos to see what they’re doing can be tricky because it does pop up a lot of data science / stats work that’s totally unrelated!
  • mieubrisse 3y ago
    Hey, one of the founders here! As Galen mentioned in the other threads, it wasn't our intention to borrow credibility or dilute the term. Rather we're big fans of Nassim Taleb's Black Swan theory, and to us founding a startup (and our first usecase in testing) both related to high kurtosis. That said, I hear you that it's confusing when people need to distinguish between "kurtosis the statistical concept" and "Kurtosis the company"!
• galenmarchetti 3y ago
  Hi! Founder here, and apologies if reposting content in other comments above is too much. I can give some context on the name, although of course ideally context from me wouldn’t be necessary if the name was easier to parse. Our very first users were test engineers who used our tool to spin up test environments for E2E and integration tests, and we called it Kurtosis because we imagined them catching “tail” errors that were out of the expected norm for devs focused on only one component of the system. We imagined a tool that detects bugs happening in a “high Kurtosis” error environment. We’re also big fans of the book “antifragile” by Taleb, about strategies in general for excelling in the face of volatility environments (can stretch that to kind of look like high “Kurtosis” environments) The combination of those two things felt right when we started building - but I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here!
  • dpflan 3y ago
    I see, thanks for explaining -- let me see if I understand: you are trying to control kurtosis of a system, to reduce the outliers/errors in the distribution of functionality of a distributed system?
    • mieubrisse 3y ago
      (other founder here) Yep, you got it! This is particularly relevant in the testing usecase where we started: "can we do whole-system E2E testing, so you catch more outliers before you hit Prod?"
    • galenmarchetti 3y ago
      Yes! Nailed it :D
  • Terretta 3y ago
    > I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here! Peanuts from a serial entrepreneur in the gallery, having been a co-founder of a full stack digital agency that helped and watched 10^3 startups ramp during the dot com boom... ## TL;DR: If you're explaining, you've already lost. Consider changing to something you don't have to explain. ## Pick a name you don't have to explain because it's so excruciatingly clear... or so totally meaningless you get to define it. Consider it a red flashing warning sign if you find yourself having to explain because the term you liked is pre-pigeonholed as something else. The comments here are valid, you and the team are hearing, then saying ‘good point but here's all this background’ -- means you market tested the name, and found out. Sooner is always better than later to fix market confusion. Your footprint to fix will never be smaller than it is today (unless someday marketing doesn't matter any more). Plus in the "awareness" stage of marketing you can't fix by explaining. Your first chances are "engagement" or "onboarding" and by then you've already lost revenue to the confusion.