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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of money in that. Look at how many startups and large tech cos are solving this problem under different skins. Everything from Notion to iCloud to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem.

Imagine if you were the Stripe of multi-device sync. Sure maybe end users will never know your name but damn you’d be drowning in money.

Like imagine adding multidevice sync to your product with a simple library instead of everyone cobbling it from scratch and hiring huge teams to make it reliable.

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> to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem.

Funny you give this as an example, that feature is completely unreliable for me. Netflix frequently forgets where I left off, and in the case of TV shows, which episodes I really did see all the way to the end, and which I didn't. Similarly on Prime Video, it's quite unreliable.

Distributed transactions are a notoriously difficult problem. Unsolvable in theory if I recall.

So a company tht solved it well enough as a backbone tech could be quite valuable on the market

I don’t think you can use that to infer that remembering when a user stops a video is an unsolvable problem.

See: multiple ways to skin a cat

Unsolvable during a network partition, you mean? It doesn't matter if a streaming service can't update your position perfectly across multiple locations during something that breaks the internet.

I'm pretty sure that every time Netflix thinks I did not see an episode all the way to the end it's because I skipped out just before credits, or just the second credits started, or I accidentally started over and then Netflix thinks I have that whole episode to watch.

Aside from that it does seem that Netflix sometimes 'forgets' if I wait a long time to go back to something, in which case I suppose there can be some sort of cleanup going on. I mean sure I would want to keep these timestamps forever, but probably at a certain scale you want to get rid of old ones as much as it might annoy me.

No, with both Netflix and Prime Video, if you cancel the skip-end-credits-to-next-episode (either intentionally or by configuration) and watch the credits and then close the browser, the next time you tell it to continue that series, it'll start from the start of the episode you've just watched. (At least when watching in Chrome on Windows over the past year.) Given that failure, it would be entirely unsurprising to see other bugs in the progress-tracking.

It's important to note that many of these companies are operating under different constraints than us.

Bigger companies are able to reduce the price of storage based on it's value to other features.

Some companies make storage cheaper by going through your data and/or selling it, this goes against our values and we won't do it.

That sounds like Firebase. Or what Firebase was once going to be.

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