[kazinator]

Not to mention that awk takes filename arguments, so this is an egregiously useless use of cat.

[twmb]

From the second post,

> Alternatively, awk '{print $2}' netflix.tsv would have given us the same result. For this tutorial, I use cat to visually separate the input data from the AWK program itself. This also emphasizes that AWK can treat any input and not just existing files.

[nejenendn]

Not to mention this is the point of the < operator.