logoalt Hacker News

schiffern • yesterday at 2:01 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.

On a fundamental level, efficiency and resilience are always a trade-off. A perfectly efficient system also tends to be perfectly brittle! In practice everything needs some buffer.

We shouldn't aim for "as close to 100% efficiency on <metric> as possible," but rather "lowest risk-adjusted expected cost, including mishaps." The latter correctly prices rare events.


Replies

mhb • yesterday at 10:59 PM

> Ahh yes, the old "why do we have all these inefficient empty hospital beds???" problem.

Yeah. That makes sense a lot of the time. It also makes sense to reduce capacity when the need lessens while still maintaining adequate slack.