Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once. A single stupid mistake by a software developer can impact millions. The Yahoo leak alone was half a billion users.

That's a lot of dough!

What do you mean? I don't believe there was much indication that that cost yahoo anything at all? The stock didn't respond. I doubt many customers left. The page rank has not changed. And there is no indication from previous large breaches that the customer cares or at least thinks anyone else is doing it better.

So what leads you to think that the impact to a business (especially of comparable scale) would cause more financial impact if it was your average dev job vs a chef?

The stock was being held up by Version's offer. They've asked for a discount of 1B, and are considering backing out altogether. The stock will probably respond then.

> "We're looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact they believe it's not," Silliman said. If Verizon concludes the breach had a material impact on Yahoo's business, then a key condition of the deal would not be met, he said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/13...

Yeah, Yahoo was already dying of attrition anyway. I suspect the majority of those accounts were not active.

That doesn't affect the alexa ranking. They still have a lot of traffic, and there's no indication it slowed in the month following.

>Ah, but a pastry chef can only disappoint so many customers at once.

Bad food incidents tend to travel by word of mouth, and they can even hit the papers (bad review etc).

Besides, a pastry place has a much smaller client base than an internet service.

Ask Chipotle if that matters.

Are you familiar with Amy's Baking Company? Sometimes disappointing one customer can have catastrophic consequences.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/2015/12/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy%27s_Baking_Company

They disappointed a lot of customers! It was a pattern of behavior that blew up in their faces, not one incident.

Slightly harder to kill or physically harm someone with a software bug though. Bad food can be catastrophic, although fatal results are rare.

Never forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

This is true and there are others too. However everyone eats, not everyone gets a zap to the brain. The below link suggests nearly 40 million cases of food poisoning and 3,000 deaths per year in the US alone. Obviously that isn't all from pastry chefs, but it's vastly more than I'd have guessed. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/

I'd imagine that food-born illnesses are mostly attributed to unclean surfaces at various points in food logistics. From the farm that grows and distributes, say, lettuce to the cutting board and dinnerware used by chefs.

I'd imagine that most restaurants/food distributors employing pastry chefs have other people to do the cleaning. So the likelihood that one could point a proverbial finger at a pastry chef as the source of a food-born illness is probably extremely low.

Interesting statistic. Let's say the 3000 are certainly due to bad chefs. What would be interesting: How many of the 40 million are due to bad chefs? From my own cooking experience I'd say you cannot always say before if some food is bad, so probably "only" a percentage of that 40 million is due to chefs failure, but which percentage ..

I had to call 911 recently, and I was really upset to discover that some idiot had pushed a software update to my phone that replaced the dialer with an "improved" version that changed the way the keypad worked -- in particular, they hid the keypad interface behind a tiny grid icon that I'd never seen before, which made it much harder to figure out how to dial.

If my circumstances had been different, that update could have killed me!

I'm not so sure. I'm the sort of person that quite enjoys going to expensive restaurants and tries to keep up with what's happening in that world. And I've never heard anyone say "don't go to restaurant X, they might have a good wine list and the starters and main courses was great, but their deserts are terrible". At worst they'll say "when you go to X, don't bother ordering deserts".

The truth is that while having a great pastry chef is a really nice perk, for the vast majority of restaurants the quality of the deserts are near the bottom of the list when people priorities which restaurant they want to go to.

In terms of reputation, you may well be correct, but then thinking of the restaurant's bottom line, the generally agreed-upon admonition , "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.

Are desserts that big a part of the bottom line? Surely as long you order drinks and a few courses I doubt the restaurant cares too much one way or the other if you then order desert.

the generally agreed-upon admonition , "Don't bother ordering dessert there," is a devastatingly horrible outcome.

Is it? I would say that about many of my favorite places to eat.

There was actually a (NYT article iirc) HN post about it a while back - deserts are apparently often very high margin and main courses loss leaders.

EDIT: apparently I was wrong and it was the other way around! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/why-r...

With that in mind, my earlier post there, about the devastatingly horrible status of restaurants where desserts become known as bad, well, that's likely inaccurate, I must apologize for being mistaken there! :)