Comment by rurp

6 years ago

Building skyscrapers is hard. Does that make it OK for them to fall down regularly?

GitHub hasn't collapsed killing thousands or needing to be completely rebuilt though, so that analogy doesn't work. This is more like there's a flood in the lobby so maintenance has closed the front door for a bit.

  • I didn't mean for the point to be about the consequences of the failure. What I was trying to argue against was the notion that it's fine for things to fail, just by virtue of them being hard. There are a lot of complicated systems in the world that work extremely reliably.

  • Planes sometimes crash without killing people or needing to be completely rebuilt; that doesn't mean that this is clearly undesirable.

    • It's not a good thing that Github is down. It's an inevitable thing that comes from complexity at scale though. Hard things are hard, whether that's planes, buildings, or web apps.