After nine years of grinding, Replit found its market. Can it keep it?

>Rather than becoming defensive, Masad and his team owned the problem. In fact, says Masad, within two days, they rolled out an automatic safety system that separates a user’s “practice” database from their “real” one. The way Masad describes it, it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s filing cabinet — the AI agent can experiment freely in a development database, but the production database, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off.

I gotta wonder who the median techcrunch reader is if the writer/editor felt it necessary to explain the point of having a staging and prod environment, and with such a pointless analogy. We surely cannot understand what a database is unless we're told it's like a filing cabinet, right?

You don't write for your median reader, you write for the vast majority of your readers.

That's a basic concept of writing. Journalism should be accessible, so even if you know what a database is and how to deploy it in different envs, you shouldn't write assuming that. If a large portion of your readers don't know what you're saying, you've failed as a writer. If your readership includes high school students, you write with that as the baseline.

Richard Feynman certainly didn't write as if he assumed the reader knew particle physics. Be like Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman didn’t use poor analogies.

'Poor' is subjective. Some might even use it to describe your comment.

Ironically, especially when you combine it with the em-dash, it really sounds like exactly the type of completely pointless and unilluminating analogy that LLMs love to generate. These analogies are essentially a bridge between two concepts, much like how a physical bridge connects two pieces of land separated by water, except in this case the 'water' is understanding and the bridge doesn't actually help you cross it.

To be fair, this was an indirect quote from a founder trying to make programming accessible to "white-collar employees with no technical background".

The bigger question here is why prod/staging wasn't an obvious design choice in the first place!

If the median has half the users over it and half under it, wouldn’t writing for most of your readers be very close to writing for the median? If we are aiming for 51% (most readers). Most readers is somewhere between 50% and under 100%.

I appreciate the idea, but I think there are always assumptions. Like you did not explain what the median is because this is hn. I like the standars of the economist, always saying what an acronym is on first usage, and what a company is (Google, a search company). What they dont do is say: Google, like a box where you enter what you want to find and points you to other boxes. That would be condescending for its readers I believe. It is a matter of taste, and not objective, I guess.

I'm not sure if any of my coworkers has ever properly used a filing cabinet

Chuck Norris doesn't even NEED analogies. He explains the original problem so hard that you understand it without reference to a similar but more familiar situation.

Chuck Norris would probably have mentioned "dev" and "production" and never needed to discuss furniture used for stacking open-faced envelopes for holding papers.

That would be writing for most users but barely. I think there’s a fair reason they said “vast majority” instead.

Spreadsheet would have been the better analogy.

I don’t think “vast majority” has a rigid definition, but I’d put it closer to 95% than 51%.

For example, in the senate passing with 51 votes is a “simple majority”.

> median techcrunch reader

Is probably a consumer tech enthusiast and not a software developer.

I am not sure the post said "vast majority" originally, to be fair. Is there a way to check?

This is all highly personal, so just banter'ing, but:

I agree there's no clear definition but 95% is even beyond "overwhelming majority" to me (with overwhelming being greater than vast). I'd call that "near totality".

Maybe, at least for US contexts, "vast" should line up with "filibuster-proof"? Eg 60-65%? 75% at most.

Of course, then that doesn't tell me anything about what it should mean in other contexts.

I think you're unaware of how vast vast is!

Personally, I feel vast is used to refer to things that 'appear limitless' e.g. vast desert, or when describing easily bound things - like percentages - to be almost complete.

Looking around it seems there is some debate on this, but it tends to end up suggesting the higher numbers:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vast_majority - puts vast as 75-99%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222264 - puts vast as greater than 75% (I can't tell if the top comment is a joke or there really is some form of ANSI guidance on this).

But to find a more compelling source I've taken a look at the UK's Office for National Statistic's use of the term. While they don't seem to have guidance in their service manual (https://service-manual.ons.gov.uk/) a quick term limited search of actual ONS publications show:

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (99.1%) of married couples were of the opposite sex"

- "In this bulletin, we cover families living in households, which covers the vast majority of families. " - this is high 90's by a quick google elsewhere.

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

- "The vast majority of households across England and Wales reported that they had central heating in 2021 (98.5%, 24.4 million)."

* https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

- "The vast majority (93.0%) lived in care homes."

This seems to put vast in the 90%+ category. There is certainly more analysis that can be done here though, as I have only sampled and haven't looked at the vast majority of publications.

(this was fun, I don't mean to come over as pedantic)

They are merely quoting the analogy from Masad — for whom it makes sense if they are targeting nontechnical users and not professional developers anymore.

Well done

I think your username checks out. :D

Apparently I underestimated vastness.

Write for your median reader, and the bottom half will stop reading you. Problem solved.

Chuck Norris doesn’t use AI, AI uses Chuck Norris.

Which wouldn't be an analogy, because spreadsheet programs can be considered and often are a database.

> Be like Richard Feynman

Oh the things he did to filing cabinets, especially "secure" ones...

It's kind of a beautiful turn of phrase, in that the filing cabinet is entirely superfluous, you can use almost any noun. "it’s a little like having two versions of a website’s sub sandwich — the AI agent can experiment freely with a development sandwich, but the production sandwich, which is the real thing that users interact with, is completely walled off".

"When you click a button on our website, a request is sent across the internet to our servers, it's a little like if a sockeye salmon was sent across the internet to our servers."