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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

You are making excuses for a multibillion dollar company that has been in this game for many years. Maybe the first to market in streaming.

This isn’t NFLX’s first rodeo in live streaming. Have seen a handful of events pop up in their apps.

There is no excuse. All of the resources and talent at their disposal, and they looked absolutely amateurish. Poor optics.

I would be amazed if they are able to secure another exclusive contract like this in the future.

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Sorry for the off topic but what’s this thing that I only come across in Hacker News about referring to a company by their stock exchange name (APPL, MSFT, etc) outside of a stock context? It seems really weird to me.

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brevity

Writing APPL instead of Apple doesn’t get you any fewer keystrokes.

also, the symbol for apple is AAPL.

Ugh. Similar (huge) pet peeve about people who say "n.B." instead of "note".

But it's "note well", not just "note"

Not sure if you’re joking, but if not: there’s no practical difference is what is being asked of the reader. Nobody predicates any decision on whether they were asked to note something vs note it well.

It’s pointless jargon.

Technically it’s one fewer keystroke (and it’s AAPL).

It’s a lot fewer keystrokes for MS (Morgan Stanley), GS (Goldman Sachs) and MSFT (Microsoft) than it is for AAPL, but it’s a force of habit for some. Once you’re used to referring to firms by their ticker symbols, you do it all the time.

E.g. an ex trader friend still says “spot” instead of “point” when referring to decimal points, even if talking in other contexts like software versions.

Tangent: Not fewer like F (Ford) or H (Hyatt Hotels). Unfortunately we don't have a full alphabet, missing {I, N, P, Q, Y}.

I guess if we allowed the first two letter ticker symbol for the missing singles, we could send messages by mentioning a bunch of company names.

Eg "Buy: Dominion Energy, Agilent. Hold: Nano Labs. Sell: Genpact." would refer to our esteemed moderator, and "Hyatt Hotels is pleased to announce special corporate rates for Nano Labs bookings" to this site itself.

[maybe it would be better to use the companies where the corporate name and ticker letter don't match? Like US Steel for X and AT&T for T?]

Technically, you forgot capitalization, so it's more keystrokes

Apple is also capitalized, so it's still fewer. Unless you hit "Shift" separately for each character in AAPL?

AAPL is only fewer keystrokes than Apple if you’re in a physical keyboard and hold the shift key, which makes it hardly more convenient. If you use caps lock presumably you’ll press it again.

On a phone, at least in iOS, you have to double tap the shift key.

I just assume it's people who spend too much time thinking about the stock context.

It's the core purpose of the organization. The ticker represents the most fundamental drive of the org. Seems appropriate and honest.

I have always assumed that a focus on stock tickers is the natural result when your primary user base is a group of people hyper focused on “total compensation” and stock grants. The name hackernews is merely a playful reference to the history of the site. Like the name “Patriot Act.”

BigTechMercenaryNews ?

In-group signaling for people who like playing or thinking about the stock market. Similar to how people who make travel a big part of their identity refer to cities by their airport code.

Or maybe they are pilots?

"I flew into LHR on Monday" - frequent flyer

"I flew into EGLL on Monday" - pilot

not really. It’s just something I adopted as part of a job I had for fintech 3-4 yrs ago

I don’t do it as some sort of “signaling” for “fintech bros” or anything like that

As a counterpoint to some other replies, I do this sometimes, not thinking at all about stocks but instead as a standardized abbreviation of sorts. Ms for example can mean tons of things from a title to multiple sclerosis to milliseconds. MSFT is clear and half the length.

`Ms` would be megaseconds ;)

Which is why we started calling it M$ in the 2000s, emphasizing its overriding goal of making ca$h off its users

I used to gather fringe signals for shitty hedge funds, “fintech” from public communities such as HN.

I think I subconsciously adopted it since it made my job easier. Sort of how I use YYYYMMDD format in almost everything from programming to daily communication.

A company that readily admits it burns out SWRs and SREs in exchange for the big bucks.

Just what the fuck are these people doing?

If I were a major investor in them I'd be pissed.

You probably are a major investor, incidentally, through your pension fund(s) and retirement savings. It is hard to avoid Netflix if you are doing any kind of broad-based index investing.

Um, aksually…

I was pointing out how dumb a multibillion dollar company is for getting this so wrong. Broadcasting live events is something that is underestimated by everyone that has never it, yet hubris of a major tech company thinking it knows better is biting them in the ass.

As many other people have commented, so many other very large dwarfing this event have been pulled off with no hiccups visible to the viewers. I have amazing stories of major hiccups during MLB World Series that viewers had no idea about happening, but “inside baseball” people knew. To the point that the head of the network caught something during the broadcast calling the director in the truck saying someone is either going to be fired or get a raise yet the audience would never have noticed if the person ended up getting fired. They didn’t, btw.

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