[bengotow]

Yeah this is hilarious. I feel like tech companies get away with this because the internet is more "mysterious".

This is no different than a chemical plant "accidentally" building a conduit a quarter mile and dumping waste into a river. Of course they know.

[paggle]

I don't think it's equivalent. In the physical world, it's easy to make a mistake that destroys the entire thing (e.g. causes a power plant to explode) but it's hard to make a mistake that causes the system to do something completely random and not designed. Like, you can't make a mistake with a weedwacker that turns it into an airplane.

However I have made mistakes like that programming all the time... for example, having massively more data written out to disk than I had intended. You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x but I have made errors that caused a million times more data to be written out to disk than planned.

[TeMPOraL]

> You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x

Maybe not a million, but a thousand times? Sure. Just short some heavy machinery and watch the amperes light up the day like a second sun as they rush out to pour into the ground. Factories have breakers to prevent that, you'll say. Turns out software projects don't have fuse equivalents, even though they should. The reason is that bleeding electricity is expensive (and dangerous to people, which from the company's POV means "even more expensive"), whereas data leaks aren't. I hope the latter is going to change.

[shsjxjbsbs]

You really don’t think that a chemical company dumping waste into a river is worse than using phone numbers to target ads? Deep in your heart of hearts? Are you sure you don’t have an axe to grind against tech companies and perhaps that’s clouding your moral calculus?

[55555]

He wasn't saying they are just as bad as one another, he was saying the excuses are just as unbelievable.

[sdegutis]

They never said it was an accident. They just said it was an error, which is true! They did err.

[imihai1988]

why call it error ? there was no undefined behavior; someone actually implemented and tested whether it worked properly. why not call it a mistake? this was a mistake. calling it an error makes it sound like it was not on purpose.

[rdiddly]

They did call it a mistake, later in the text. Not appreciably different from an error, in my opinion.

[cardiffspaceman]

If you step into the street in front of a truck while reading Hacker News on your phone, it's a mistake. You wouldn't have done it had you been paying attention.

If you step into the street in front of a truck because you think the truck is farther away than it turns out to be, it's an error. If you are playing baseball, and you estimate the vector to intercept a ball rolling along, and you touch your glove to the ball but fail to actually catch it, it will be classified as an error, You made an estimate of what the circumstances were, and it was wrong and you acted on purpose.

[rdiddly]

I'm not saying dictionary.com is the be-all and end-all of dictionaries, but their definition of error uses the word mistake several times. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/error

Likewise their definition of mistake uses error a couple of times. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/mistake

I get it though, there is a subtle difference. I'm just saying both terms mischaracterize (intentionally) what I think was likely a very intentional, knowing and calculated action by Twitter. I'm asserting without proof that there was no inattention as in your first example, and no miscalculation as in your second example.

The baseball example is problematic because "error" has a game-specific meaning just like "run" and "base," and whether you commit a mistake or an error, they will both be recorded as errors.

[rzzzt]

I was wondering about this as well, ie. if there is a qualitative difference between error and mistake. (English is not my first language, so can't really tell.)

[rabidrat]

IMO "mistake" implies an incorrect choice, whereas "error" implies an incorrect result. A mistake may or may not cause an error (and an error may or may not be caused by a mistake). There seems to be an element of "could have been done differently" in "mistake" that is absent in "error".

Recently I read an article saying that programmers should reserve "error" for the mathematical usage of "distance from correct result" (as in, behavior of the program), and refer to their bugs and other mistakes as "blunders" instead. I have to think on it more but I like the overall direction of the distinction.