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

Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 272 posts

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#261

Post by carl689 »

kalleboo wrote: post #241
carl689 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little behind the scenes info, I work for a pretty good sized seller on Amazon. If a customer who purchased an item reports it as counterfeit * All items we sell of that brand are taken down * We are required to email a copy of an invoice of between us and that vendor. I think there is a date requirement here also * We are not permitted to ship comingled FBA shipments for that brand until resolved If the manufactur…

If someone bought something from your listing but the item that shipped was actually commingled from another seller, who gets the ding and the report? You or the other seller?

That's an excellent question, and honestly, I am not sure. I know we have been asked to send invoices not attached to a customer order AND only one listing was taken down (as opposed to the entire brand), so perhaps it's all suppliers that have contributed qty to that pick location go through a similar different workflow? While I know they have the audit info to do this, I am ultimately guessing on this scenario.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#262

Post by FT_intern »

arti-fact wrote: post #258
jerdfelt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not appear to keep different sellers products separate in the warehouse. All it takes is one seller sending counterfeit products to the warehouse for their inventory to be contaminated by counterfeits. This makes "fulfilled by Amazon" more risky in some respects.

This is not entirely true. Sellers have the option to send in items to the Amazon warehouses with the UPC as the barcode OR with an FNSKU barcode. The FNSKU is a unique barcode that identifies that particular product to you, the seller. If you send items in to the warehouse with the UPC, they will be considered co-mingled which means anyone else sending the same product with just the UPC will all be stored together.…

Is there any way for the buyer to see this difference before buying?

If not, these specifics don't really matter

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#263

Post by paulmd »

user5994461 wrote: post #166
paulmd wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain types of products are extremely commonly counterfeited. I would never consider ordering luxury goods like cologne/perfume/handbags, flash memory cards or sticks, or small mass-market electronics like chargers. Due to the way Amazon commingles their stock at the SKU level, there is simply no way to guarantee that what you're getting is genuine, even if you order "sold and shipped from Amazon". Even from an aut…

Get the flash card from wall mart, it works just fine. (feel free to replace with whatever shop you go by on your way to work).

Or Adorama, or BH Photo Video. Or really anyone except Amazon and eBay and other hubs for cheap Chinese junk.

Newegg is probably still OK too, although they are now fronting for third-party retailers I haven't heard of them commingling their stocks yet.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#264

Post by Cd00d »

joshaidan wrote: post #36

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issue…

My recent experience in this was in negotiating my internet/TV bill with Time Warner. I get TV via their app on a Roku. TW rebranded their TV delivery as Spectrum. Fine, I want to give up my old plan, and sign up for a new plan that is cheaper and delivers what I want - I'm not very interested in what it's called.

Operator: "Spectrum requires you to have a set top box"

Me: "I don't want a box under my TV, or a new remote, or a new clock to set. I want to keep watching TV via my Roku"

Op: "Spectrum requires you to have a set top box"

Me: "Are you saying that the app on my Roku that JUST updated to be called the 'Spectrum' app won't work?"

Op: "No, sir, I am saying that you are required to have a set top box"

Me: "I don't want that - I want to use the Roku. Otherwise, I'd rather just go back to not having TV, so you should cancel my service"

Op: "Sir, the Roku app will still work, but I have to send you a box... (whispering) you can just put it in the closet"

Me: "You're going to ship me a box to store, and that's on the requirements list to save $40 per month"

Op: "Yes, sir"

Me: "That's absurd, but deal"

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#265

Post by praneshp »

mercutio2 wrote: post #249
noahm wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but just as with customers, the dissatisfied (ex-)employees are going to be most vocal. Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell? I don't.

> Sure, but just as with customers, the dissatisfied (ex-)employees are going to be most vocal. Agreed that Glassdoor is an outrageously bad indicator about a company, taken in isolation. > Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell? Nobody is claiming that every single employee has a terrible life at Amazon. But new col…

4 people I graduated with in 2013, plus my wife (who went to work there more recently) all work at AWS, and they all love it. More anecdotal evidence.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#266

Post by paulmd »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #239
baddox wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bought lots of flash cards, flash drives, chargers, and cables from Amazon and have never had a problem (or they were great counterfeits, in which case I'm not too upset). I don't do much research either, choosing mostly based on search results, brand name, reviews, and shipping/sold by Amazon.

As a counter anecdote, I ordered ("[s]hips from and sold by Amazon.com", not "[f]ulfilled by Amazon"; just double-checked) a branded microSD card a few months ago, and did a full device write / read on it, and it died on the read pass. I wasn't even thinking that it could be counterfeit at the time: this is just a basic smoke test I do on all new storage devices. But now that I think of it it does seem awfully suspic…

Yeah, it's very common that rejected cards will find their way back into the supply chain, or that employees will run "ghost shifts" with rejected sub-standard wafers. Bunnie Huang did a fascinating teardown on some fake cards.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

I do the exact same smoke-test - as I mentioned I use f3write to fill it full, and the counterpart f3read to read it back and test it.

http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/

There's no official Win32 distribution but it compiles and runs without issue on Cygwin. When I get home, I can send you a Dropbox link with a build and enough Cygwin DLLs to make it run in a standard Windows command prompt.

As mentioned on the f3write site - one of the very typical hacks is to make the controller report a larger capacity than it actually has - or a larger capacity than is actually functional/reliable. So this is the obvious test to perform - write it full and see if you can read it out.

Amazon will co-mingle their stock with third parties as long as the stocking unit (typically UPC) matches. So if some retailer sends them fake memory cards you get a fake memory card, "Sold And Shipped By Amazon.com". And of course eBay is full of this junk.

At this point I prefer to buy from camera stores. My theory is that since their customers will be making their livelihood off the memory cards that they have an additional incentive to keep their supply chain clean.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#267

Post by sib »

fbonetti wrote: post #178
sib wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the misunderstood pieces of scrum to think that burndown charts should be linear. If a team of 5 has established a velocity of 65 story points / 2-week sprint, and they accept 5, 13-point tasks for the next sprint, you'd expect a burndown chart that would look almost horizontal for the entire sprint until the very end, when it would drop vertically to the x axis. You might get linearity if there were 65,…

I think you're getting at the heart of why burn down charts are so pointless. The shape changes sprint to sprint, depending on what kind of stories you take on. If the sprint is entirely high pointed stories, your chart will be mostly horizontal. If the sprint is entirely 1 pointers, the graph will look like an exponential decay. Since the shape is always different, there's virtually zero useful information to take a…

Agreed - that is part of my own distaste for them...

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#268

Post by mejari »

cmurf wrote: post #153
mejari wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they've created, by law, many barriers to entry for any competing parties, let alone casting aside either party. Do you have some examples of these types of laws?

At a federal level, the constitution itself does this structurally by requiring an absolute majority in the electoral college for a president to win; and that makes a president from an emergent third party very difficult. That party would have to already be competitive in a majority of states, but that's also difficult if that party can't ever promote someone to the presidency and use the national bully pulpit to the…

For your first paragraph I agree, the Constitution does reinforce a 2-party system, but obviously the Republicans and Democrats didn't create the Constitution.

For your second paragraph, do you have examples of the "onerous requirements"? Because looking at the ballotpedia list[1] I don't see anything in there that is too onerous.

And again for your final paragraph, I agree that the system supports the lesser-of-two-evils way of thinking, but that isn't something instituted by Democrats or Republicans. It's built into the system at it's most fundamental level, the Constitution.

1: https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_presidential_candi...

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#269

Post by teyc »

TheGRS wrote: post #25
dpark wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” - Bezos > We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz Ouch

Yea, I'm not going to share which airline or which branch (other than to say it wasn't United or Chicago), but I have a relative who works at a pretty high position in one of them and they were, to my great surprise, in defense of United and the police in that episode earlier this week. Statements like "airlines bump people all the time", "they can't offer anymore than what they did, its a set rule", and "if they jus…

This.

I pity Munoz because culture can be hard to shift that people no longer recognize that their business revolves around service, and employees with poor people skills get promoted because they achieve their KPIs by acting against common sense.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#270

Post by paulmd »

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #239
baddox wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bought lots of flash cards, flash drives, chargers, and cables from Amazon and have never had a problem (or they were great counterfeits, in which case I'm not too upset). I don't do much research either, choosing mostly based on search results, brand name, reviews, and shipping/sold by Amazon.

As a counter anecdote, I ordered ("[s]hips from and sold by Amazon.com", not "[f]ulfilled by Amazon"; just double-checked) a branded microSD card a few months ago, and did a full device write / read on it, and it died on the read pass. I wasn't even thinking that it could be counterfeit at the time: this is just a basic smoke test I do on all new storage devices. But now that I think of it it does seem awfully suspic…

Belated but here you go with a Windows build of f3write (built on Cygwin64).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1muc0aghqjwsso4/f3-6.0.zip?dl=0

Post reply on HN