alt Hacker NewsYeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking.
Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes.
Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue.
His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage on his website.
Our b2b dashboard didn't support Safari for a while at all and it was entirely not an issue because everyone had a simple workaround to just use Chrome and the dashboard wasn't really the main product.
I think you're not being generous in your interpretation. How I read it he could be talking about the number of 9s a server's uptime is. If you pay for 1 9 you'll lose a lot of customers. Hell, true for even 3 9's. Look at all the complaints about GitHub this year. 5 9's is the standard and that's 99.999%!!
The thing is that it is all context dependent. A lot of times 0.1% is nothing and can be ignored or pushed off. But sometimes that 0.1% is worth billions of dollars.
The point is that data means nothing without context and interpretation. If you're lazy in your analysis you are going to have lots of issues