Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

smashcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 178 posts

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#91

Post by bit_razor »

finnn wrote: post #43
therein wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of your points except for 2-day delivery becoming unreliable. I don't know where you live but they are still great, if not constantly improving in the Bay Area. Lately whenever I choose 2-day delivery, I end up getting it the next day.

Seattle (eastside) here. I frequently order things with "two day shipping" and it tells me right up front that "two day" shipping will have it here in > 2 days.

I'm curious if there isn't a misunderstanding here. Are you certain that the actual shipping time is going over what you paid for, or is it just the total time since order is greater than the selected shipping speed?

I suspect that the delay you see is in the time it takes their warehouse not only to package your goods, but to also privately deliver it through their network to the most optimal ship point. You also have to factor in whether the carrier they've chosen supports delivery on the days you expect the item to ship.

Amazon should really make the difference between processing and shipping clearer, and perhaps factor it into the delivery estimates when you purchase. I've also always wanted them to let you chose carriers if you pay for a certain delivery speed instead of picking one themselves. I always have to cross my fingers that I don't get USPS for that important item.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#92

Post by galactoise »

mbdev wrote: post #76
schlarpc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alexa is not compatible with EC2 backends Source on this? I know last time I played with it, they weren't doing SNI (in 2015, what?) but I've never heard of it not being able to hit EC2 IPs.

I had weeks longs mail conversation with the support and engineering team there. And at the end they gave up and said that yeah its something deep in the implementation and I should use something else. I don't want to post the mails but anyone can try it out !

This is incorrect - you can absolutely host in EC2. Our two skills are running off of a single EC2 micro instance.

There is one really weird thing where you can't use US West to do an Amazon Lambda passthrough to your server, but as far as I know EC2 instances in any region should work for Alexa to call out to.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#94

Post by petra »

goldenkey wrote: post #72
School-Cotton wrote: post #13

It's really remarkable how much Amazon's reputation has been self-destructing in the last year or so. Even 6 months ago when I told people I thought Amazon was an all-around shitty company (having worked there) and shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as Google, FB, etc., people looked at me like I was insane. Somehow the stock keeps going up... I don't have any material insider info but just on a hunch I doubt…

Having worked there as well and recently left, I'm super surprised as well to see them considered with the likes of Google or Facebook, etc. Shitty middle managers are rampant. The engineering culture is defined by Levels..Level 3, 4, 5 etc. Consistency is promoted over quality. Codebases were so horribly not DRY it makes me want to vomit. Unit tests for constants -- unit tests for specific code inside of functions.…

If AWS is so shitty on the inside, why aren't the blogs filled with stories about bugs etc after the enormous amount of use it gets ?

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#97

Post by mbdev »

galactoise wrote: post #92
mbdev wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had weeks longs mail conversation with the support and engineering team there. And at the end they gave up and said that yeah its something deep in the implementation and I should use something else. I don't want to post the mails but anyone can try it out !

This is incorrect - you can absolutely host in EC2. Our two skills are running off of a single EC2 micro instance. There is one really weird thing where you can't use US West to do an Amazon Lambda passthrough to your server, but as far as I know EC2 instances in any region should work for Alexa to call out to.

I'm sure that the issue can be fixed so it might have been.

But I have the mail conversation here (10 people at least and dozen of back and forth).

This was 2 months ago and I gave up on it for this specific reason.

Re: Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

#100

Post by galactoise »

Apocryphon wrote: post #48

What would be the solution? Is there even a way to verify that web services are not malicious?

The solution is to not try to verify the content of a rest service.

There is a lot of good that Amazon can do with their certification process - things like helping a developer figure out appropriate example phrases, or making sure that all of the appropriate fields are filled in (like providing a thumbnail for the appstore, etc).

Their weird pedantism about an arbitrary set of rules, however, serves only to scare off those of us who are actually interested in advancing the default user experience. Out of the box experimentation is frowned upon, and the result is that they're basically handing the ecosystem to the shovelware creators.

Post reply on HN