My favourite one is seeing IT admins plan for “this almost always won’t fail.” S... | Hacker News

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jiggawatts on Feb 8, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Heuristics that almost always work

My favourite one is seeing IT admins plan for “this almost always won’t fail.”

Substitute “this” for SAN array, core switch, or entire data centre.

I’ve had someone argue with me at length that simultaneous multi disk failures in a RAID5 never happen.

Two weeks later it did and the main SAN disk array went up in smoke.

kqr on Feb 8, 2022 [–]

It is useful to remember that "almost never" is a synonym for "sometimes".

wombatpm on Feb 8, 2022 | [–]

“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”

Terry Pratchett

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