Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

wsj.com

131–140 of 195 posts

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#131
post #78

Amazon's rationale for its lack of profits is well known... Why does this rationale not apply to its cloud business? Is the cloud business so good that it generates profits regardless of the investment it makes... or is the retail business so bad that it can't generate profits regardless of the investment AMZN makes in it?

The retail and video streaming are really just a massive distributed integration test for their cloud services. We're paying for the privilege of doing their QA for them.

It's the same exact thing they used Toys R Us and Target for, when launching their partner shops originally. With Amazon's extremely frugal nature and thin margins, they'll always look for ways they can get someone else to pay for their learning mistakes.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#132

You know what this means, right? Jeff Bezos will increase investment into AWS and Blue Origin, while not investing anything into improving engineer work-life balance. Seriously, at least cover MSP and transit! Even partially covering a transit pass would be nice! Sincerely, an Amazon Vancouver SDE I

Transit pass is partially covered as of last year in Vancouver. Unless something's changed, you might want to double check on the benefits for Vancouver. If I recall correctly you get approximately 80 dollars give or take.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#133
post #42

Why do people link to basic stories like this behind a paywall? If WSJ has an original piece out, fine, but this could've come from any one of a thousand sources. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/amazon-sal...

maybe HN could auto-correct...

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#134
post #42

Why do people link to basic stories like this behind a paywall? If WSJ has an original piece out, fine, but this could've come from any one of a thousand sources. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/amazon-sal...

So....block ad blockers and HN screams. "I will pay for content", they say. "I just don't like your 25MB flash ads." Link to crap, and HN screams. "Is journalism dead? This stuff is just click bait. I appreciate good writing and quality content." Put up a paywall and HN screams. "Why u make me pay?!?!?!?"

I work for a publisher. I appreciate quality content. This is a rehashed press release, I shouldn't be expected to pay for it.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#135
post #77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something HN should just do anyway; that is high rep users flag a source as paywalled, and going forward the submitting user gets an alert with suggested alt links. No idea why HN isn't open source with an open source API to insert data too.

A variation of it is open source. The anti-spam features are guarded secrets. They take a pretty conservative approach to adding features.

By variation, do you mean a clone. If so, that's not what I mean, I mean that the site is open source, community is able to make pull requests, and it's a community driven resource, that driven by content, code and community, not an singular interface.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#136

You know what this means, right? Jeff Bezos will increase investment into AWS and Blue Origin, while not investing anything into improving engineer work-life balance. Seriously, at least cover MSP and transit! Even partially covering a transit pass would be nice! Sincerely, an Amazon Vancouver SDE I

I don't think the work-life balance issues at Amazon revolve around whether they pay for your transit or negligible medical fee

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and this is why I like state-run media sources. 99% of the time I'm not looking for things the ministry of foreign policy doesn't want me to know and it is favorable toward high quality accessible content. everyone concerned about competition and the competition gave you shit that makes state run news a breath of fresh air

> 99% of the time I'm not looking for things the ministry of foreign policy doesn't want me to know The other 1% is the news that actually matters.

When there is a missing airplane, and I just want to know relevant information? I'll get the relevant information in a straight forward, to the point fashion.

Local news? Straight to the point, no sensation, build up. Just what happened, what it means.

Military skirmish between two nations that the state has no stake in? Straight to the point.

You are concerned about the human rights abuses and political dissidents. If you need that to rationalize why you prefer to put up with privately owned news sources that can't monetize worth shit, then keep it up. They aren't exactly effective at turning people against about the establishment.

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#138
The most interesting tidbit for me is that Amazon would have reported losses without AWS.

The AWS business generated $2.6B in revenues in the fourth quarter, which is only 9% of Amazon's total revenues of $29.1B; but operating income for the AWS business was $607M, or 118% of company-wide net income of $513M.[1]

Without AWS, Amazon would have reported losses!

[1] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N...

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#139
post #135
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A variation of it is open source. The anti-spam features are guarded secrets. They take a pretty conservative approach to adding features.

By variation, do you mean a clone. If so, that's not what I mean, I mean that the site is open source, community is able to make pull requests, and it's a community driven resource, that driven by content, code and community, not an singular interface.

By variation I mean HN is based on http://arclanguage.org/install ... I don't know how much the code bases have diverged.

They do have an API: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api

Re: Amazon Reports Surge in Profit

#140
post #42

Why do people link to basic stories like this behind a paywall? If WSJ has an original piece out, fine, but this could've come from any one of a thousand sources. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/amazon-sal...

[deleted]
Post reply on HN