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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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GitHub have finally achieved zero 9s stability for the last 90 days. Congratulations to all involved
Hold on now, the uptime number contains two digits that are nines! The image itself has four nines in total!
Can't believe I'm nerd-sniped this easily. Very technically, the point at which a service should be considered unreliable or down is at γ nines, where γ = 0.9030899869919434… is a transcendental constant. γ nines is exactly 87.5% availability, or 7/8 availability, and it's the point at which a service's availability might as well be random. (Another one of the local complexity theorists can explain why it's 7/8 and not 1/2.)
... why 7/8?
Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to 3-satisfiability in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.
Bravo. The farthest i could get is 2/3 assuming the following model: x₁ is a random number between 0 and 1, x₂ between x₁ and 1, and so on. If the service breaks at x₁, gets fixed at x₂, breaks again at x₃, etc. availability is 2/3.
We can see that one 9 of availability is 90% = 0.9, two 9s is 99% = 0.99, three 9s is 99.9% = 0.999, etc. In general, for positive integers n, n 9s of availability is 1 - (1/10)^n, and we can extrapolate that to non-integer values of n. The value γ needed for 87.5% availability is the solution to 1 - (1/10)^γ = 7/8, or γ = log_10(8) = 0.903089987. γ is transcendental by Gelfond-Schneider (see this for a reference proof).
Right now, Sora is at zero 9s of availability.
Alas, foiled again! Nobody said they had to be leading 9s!
For my own services I’m aiming for .999999% of uptime
89.90999999...% uptime 🐐
If you had told this to the me of 20 years ago I wouldnt have believed you.