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492 points storf45 | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.003s | source
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shermantanktop ◴[] No.42160502[source]
Every time a big company screws up, there are two highly informed sets of people who are guaranteed to be lurking, but rarely post, in a thread like this:

1) those directly involved with the incident, or employees of the same company. They have too much to lose by circumventing the PR machine.

2) people at similar companies who operate similar systems with similar scale and risks. Those people know how hard this is and aren’t likely to publicly flog someone doing their same job based on uninformed speculation. They know their own systems are Byzantine and don’t look like what random onlookers think it would look like.

So that leaves the rest, who offer insights based on how stuff works at a small scale, or better yet, pronouncements rooted in “first principles.”

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1. croes ◴[] No.42161703[source]
You are basically saying, everybody who criticizes Netflix now has no clue.

That’s a bold claim given that people with inside knowledge could post here without disclosing they are insiders.

Is that some kind of No True Scotsman?

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2. shermantanktop ◴[] No.42161858[source]
I’m just pointing out that there are Netflix engineers reading all these words.

For every thread like this, there are likely people who are readers but cannot be writers, even though they know a lot. That means the active posters exclude that group, by definition.

These threads often have interesting and insightful comments, so that’s cool.

3. pfraze ◴[] No.42162127[source]
At the scale that Netflix just dealt with? Yeah I honestly think this is a case where less than 5000 people in the world are really qualified to comment.
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4. tomcam ◴[] No.42162847[source]
> You are basically saying, everybody who criticizes Netflix now has no clue.

GP clearly meant some people not everybody. You are the one making bold claims.

5. chgs ◴[] No.42163548[source]
Not clear what scale they were attempting, but yes delivering a live stream to 10m+ users on the public internet with a reasonable end to end latency (under 30 seconds glass to viewer) is not a trivial problem, and it’s not something Netflix do a lot.

It’s a very different problem to distributing video on demand which is Netflix’s core business.