> He's probably wrong about why it was broken, but it was broken.
That's going too far. If the customer misunderstands the product or misreads the documentation, that's something worth addressing, but "broken" is not an informative way to describe it.
Dan never called out Fivetran, he wrote a couple sentences about problems he experienced with an anonymous ETL provider. That was it. Hell we don't even know that he's actually talking about Fivetran.
George however should not allowed to come to HN and start talking shit about random people who had the professional courtesy to never even mention the provider in question. The fact that his post isn't flagged, is highly upvoted, and dang hasn't swooped in to chastise him is a prime example of why HN is so fucking ridiculous and hypocritical.
We know that Luu was misunderstanding at least some things, since he gave an inaccurate description of what was happening. Given that context, I find it more plausible that he was also misunderstanding other things, than that the thing was broken for him despite other people seeing it working. Even if you weigh the likelihood differently from me, you must admit that that's a possibility, so concluding that it was broken because Luu thought it was broken is at a minimum premature.
Given the other comments talking about problems here, we don't know for sure if it was inaccurate. But even if it was, "plausible" that he was misunderstanding other things is a hell of a lot weaker than the way your comment above treated it as the truth of the matter.
Overall I think it's pretty unlikely that it wasn't broken.
That's going too far. If the customer misunderstands the product or misreads the documentation, that's something worth addressing, but "broken" is not an informative way to describe it.