841–850 of 986 posts
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And you'll pay less if you become a part
Sure. If there’s anything publicly traded companies are known for, it’s passing savings onto their customers instead of their shareholders.
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 a…
I've noticed this amongst the newer "careerist" sort of software developer who is stumbling into the field for money, as opposed to the obsessive computer geek of yesteryear, who practiced it as a hobby. This character archetype is a transplant, say, less than five years ago from another, often non-technical discipline, and was taught or learned from overly simplistic materials that decry systems programming, or netw…
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 a…
For an event like this, there already exists an architecture that can handle boundless scale: torrents. If you code it to utilize high-bandwidth users upload, the service becomes more available as more users are watching -- not less available. It becomes less expensive with scale, more available, more stable. The be more specific, if you encode the video in blocks with each new block hash being broadcast across the n…
Hell, in the US, this setup might actually be illegal because of the VPPA[0]. The only reason why it's not illegal for the MAFIAA to catch you torrenting is because of a fun legal principle where criminals are not allowed to avail themselves of the law to protect their crimes. (i.e. you can't sue over a drug deal gone wrong)
[0] Video Privacy Protection Act, a privacy law passed which makes it illegal to ask video providers for a list of who watched what, specifically because a reporter went on a fishing expedition with video data.
[1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical merger of the MPAA and RIAA from a 2000s era satire article
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Wifi wifi or wifi as in your ISP Internet connection? Sp many people now call an Internet connection "wifi". Anyway, network cable is the only way to go!
"Many people", those who call their ISP connection WiFi, are technology potato's.
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Everyone keeps mentioning at scale. I seriously doubt this was an "at scale" problem. I have strong suspicion this was a failure at the origination point being able to push a stable signal. That is not an "at scale" issue, but a hubris of we can do better/cheaper than broadcasting standard practices
As counterpoint, I observed 2-3 drops in bitrate, but an otherwise fine experience. So the problem seems to have been in dissemination, not at the origin.
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Then sign a contract with Akamai, who has been in business for 25 years? You outsource if you aren’t planning to do something very often. There is no middle ground where you commit a mediocre amount of resources, end up with downtime and a mediocre experience, and then go “but we saved money.”
Well, they didn't want to spend the money or more likely their own technical team/boss promised that they can do it themselves. They indeed have a great CDN network, but it's not very good for this particular type of traffic. May be they will know/fix/buy next time...
But like you stated, they dont want to spend money and their technical people couldn't deliver on time. This isn't a technical issue a lot of people on HN and Twitter wants to discuss about. It is a management issue.
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Right? A common complaint by outsiders is that Netflix uses microservices. I'd love to hear exactly how a monolith application is guaranteed to perform better, with details . What is the magic difference that would have ensured the live stream would have been successful?
I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up co…
"Microservices" have nothing to do with it.
Does anyone remember IP multicast? I remember a lot of trade magazines in the late 1990's during the dot com boom talked about how important it would be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast I never hear about it anymore. Is that because everyone wants to watch something different at their own time? Or is it actually working just fine now in the background? I see under the "Deployment" section it mentions IPTV…
dumbing it down a bit: Imagine if anyone in your neighborhood could broadcast video and take up %N of the bandwidth to all of the routers in the neighborhood. Imagine this on your campus or at your office. This works for cable tv, as there's only 200 channels. You're just going to slurp up all of the bandwidth instead and maybe no one is watching the tv. Sure you get these black swan events that everyone wants to wat…
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I am one of the ones who complain about their microservices architecture quite a lot. This comes from both first-hand experience of talking to several of their directors when consulted upon on how to make certain systems of theirs better. It's not just a matter of guarantees, it's a matter of complexity. Like right now Google search is dying and there's nothing that they can do to fix it because they have given up co…
You can explain these problems with simple business metrics that technologists like to ignore. Right before the recent Twitter acquisition, the various bits of info that came to the limelight included the "minor detail" that they had more than doubled their headcount and associated expenses, but had not doubled either their revenue or profits. Technology complexity went up, the business went backwards. Thousands of p…
Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free.
I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an EM what he would do if given a magic wand to fix one problem at the company. His response: "I would instantly hire 10,000 more engineers."
Elon famously did the opposite and now revenue is down 80%.