Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

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.”

Completely agreed. There are also former employees who have very educated opinions about what is likely going on, but between NDAs and whatnot there is only so much they are willing to say. It is frustrating for those in the know, but there are lines they can't or won't cross.

Whenever an HN thread covers subjects where I have direct professional experience I have to bite my tongue while people who have no clue can be as assertive and confidently incorrect as their ego allows them to be.

Some people can just let others be wrong and just stay silent, but some people can't help themselves. So if you say something really wrong, like this was caused by Netflix moving to Azure, they should have stayed on AWS! someone will come along to correct you. If you're looking for the right answer, post the wrong one, alongside some provoking statement (Windows is better than Linux because this works there), and you'll get the right answer faster than if you'd asked your question directly.

https://xkcd.com/386/

> Some people can just let others be wrong and just stay silent, but some people can't help themselves.

As one of thoes who cant help themselves; the way you phrase it feels a bit too cynical, I've always interpreted it as people want to help, but don't want to offer something that's wrong. Which is basically how falsifiable science works. It's so much easier to refute the assertion that birds generate lift with tiny backpacks with turboprops attached. Than it is to explain the finer details of avian flight mechanics. I couldn't describe above a superficial level how flapping works, but I can confidently refute the idea of a turboprop backpack. (Everyone knows birds gave up the turboprop design during the great kerosene shortage of 1128)