Amazon Home Services • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Home Services

#221

Post by brudgers » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #214

brudgers wrote: post #97

I don't think this is game changing. Home Depot and Lowe's are already in that space and they haven't changed it. The reason is that construction is refactoring and debugging much of the time. Typical houses are built on the LAMP stack, not Rails. A lot of configuration and many of the conventions embodied are Rick 's and Rick ain't around. There are lots of corner cases built into any structure, and clean quick and…

> I no-shit-know someone who had no problem taking back fresh from the ground annual flowers to Home Depot at the end of the season for a refund. And when he did, they asked him for his driver's license. There's an annual limit to how much you can return without a receipt. Home Depot doesn't care so much, because if you're returning things that way ... they're just giving you store credit. You're going to have to buy…

The person kept the receipts. It was systematic behavior.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#222

Post by eropple » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 5:59 PM UTC

DickingAround wrote: post #158

eropple wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You called him a liar. That's pretty defensive. Personally, I have no trouble buying a lot of what he's selling, not least because I've seen his posts around here for a good while and he seems like a decent sort, but it also dovetails with my own experience. YMMV, but I'm not calling you a liar.

It seems fair to call someone a liar if you know they've said something factually untrue. (I'm no weighing in on the debate itself, but it's possible for someone to be factually wrong and it's appropriate to highlight that when it happens.)

You can be correct in the face of untruth and still be shitty and defensive about something; remember that Reddit storm when the CEO beefed with a fired employee?

I'm somewhat doubting that MCRed is lying, because he has some credibility to me through a history of good and productive posting, but it's possible.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#223

Post by cek » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:03 PM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#224

Post by FD3SA » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #205

jasonlotito wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless…

I'm wrong about the culture of HN? I've been on this site since 2006 or 2007. I've earned 5,000+ karma on most of my previous accounts. Everyone of them was shadowbanned at one point or another. In one case I linked to a scientific paper about global warming that does not agree with global warming hysterics. That was the only post in several months at the time and the only commentary I added was "these guys disagree!…

My experience matches yours precisely. Certain viewpoints here are ruthlessly censored, to the point of insanity. The justification is always "that is so wrong as to be offensive", which of course is absurd to a community that purportedly values free speech.

If the views are so absurd, why not allow them to stand and be downvoted? Why the need to flag and ban?

For example, regarding the Pao issue, numerous reaction articles from differing viewpoints were instantly flagkilled.

I find that HN is a group of clever people who conform an extremely narrow ideology.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#225

Post by sp332 » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #192

sp332 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time, sure. But since then they've added a bunch of country-specific domains. The store aimed at the USA could be hosted on a .us domain by now.

Why would they want to break or redirect thousands (millions?) of existing links and confuse many non tech people who get redirected to a .us site? Sure it might make us on HN feel good that .com does not equal USA and we are the center of the world, but it would make little sense otherwise.

Well, it would stop confusing the other 2 billion people on the internet that aren't in the USA.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#226

Post by aedocw » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:32 PM UTC

flyinglizard wrote: post #12

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

Amazon drone delivery WILL happen. This will be completely disruptive to how stuff is consumed. Amazon being able to reach any point in an urban environment from its outskirts, at any time of day, within minutes and at a cost of just cents, will completely change consumption patterns (at least for existing Amazon users). Once something has such a strong financial implication, any other obstacle in its way is going to…

Somewhere along the way it seems people are forgetting everything that has to happen before that stuff is quad-coptered to your doorstep a few minutes after you (via clever marketing) determine you need something as quickly as possible.

The relentless march of consumerism will completely disrupt how things are consumed, but I am not sure making "getting stuff" so painlessly easy is great for humanity.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#227

Post by srdev » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

fl0wenol wrote: post #155

[deleted] wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Those kind of drones are not the kind of drone that can deliver a package, unless that package can survive a ballistic delivery to the ground. Sure, by shaping the drone into a winged vehicle you can get the payload capacity up and make it move quickly as it goes from waypoint to waypoint on a "delivery route", even in windy conditions. But now you can't deliver the package itself neatly onto the ground adjacent to o…

Not sure what the deleted post is referencing, but Google is using a fixed-wing design. To deliver the package, you tilt the entire drone up to do VTOL. At this point you can lower the package. In theory, it will work and have higher efficiency than a multicopter design. I'm not sure whether or not Google has had any success with it.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#228

Post by ank_net » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

Amazon is a company which has no clear vision...

Re: Amazon Home Services

#229

Post by thaumaturgy » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 7:01 PM UTC

MCRed wrote: post #2

Remember Amazon Menus? (Scanned menus of local restaurants) Remember Amazon Movie Listings? Remember the "drone delivery"? (It makes no sense on the face of it, and will never happen. But it was a big press release.) Remember Amazon scanned catalogs (eg: Mail order catalogs selling things in competition with Amazon, that you could search) Remember A9? (Amazon's answer to google, biggest mainstream mention was being u…

The drone delivery at least seems to still be a major ongoing effort on Amazon's part:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/30/amazon-tes...

Amazon's been making a lot of press lately leaning hard on the FAA to shorten up their paperwork lifecycle for outdoor testing in the US, as well as eliminating the regulatory requirement for line-of-sight flight.

If drone delivery is a dead project, Amazon doesn't know it yet.

Re: Amazon Home Services

#230

Post by Devthrowaway80 » Mon, Mar 30, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

jeffmorrisjr wrote: post #166

MCRed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people…

You sound like a bitter ex-employee. Why would you ever waste your energy on trashing a former employer? Go build something else - it's a much better use of your time.

Because he doesn't want other people to waste part of their lives at Amazon?

His experiences there mirror mine. I've warned people away from going there for exactly the same reason. Amazon treats their employees like shit.