421–430 of 628 posts
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AliExpress can be pretty brutal. I went looking for a lithium power pack and it was clear that almost all the listings were the same crap with differently inflated capacities that were physically impossible.
You are brave buying a high energy chemistry experiment from Alibaba. I’d stick to regular retail for that!
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I went cold turkey on Amazon a few months back; the only thing I've kept is the TV subscription. What I realised is that it was just a dependency because it was so easy to search for and buy stuff. Nowadays I'll buy from a smaller shop if I need something, but it's more likely that I think "do I actually need this?" and say "no."
For me their killer feature is ease and certainty of returns. If I am buying online I need to option to return items that are not as they appear, and Amazon offers that quite readily. So I think the major hurdle for other businesses is getting a reputation for prompt and free return acceptance if they want to sell things sight unseen.
For international returns they don't have labels, you need to pay for shipping, and they supposedly reimburse up to $20 shipping fees but I have found no evidence of an actual process in place to claim it.
(I had to return a book because they sent me a hardcover loosely packed in a box, from the US to Canada. Of course it was damaged in transport. For a place that started out as a book store this is really dumb. I re-ordered it from Chapters, who packed it properly.)
They're still in denial that they have a problem. Just read the thread on the previous occasion where listings got hijacked on their own fora [0] - its sad to see the sellers so powerless, helpless and just left to themselves. You really have to wonder why they even bother... Edit: also, reading that thread you can also get a feel why big brands have completely left AMZN as a platform (like Adidas, Birkenstock are a…
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There’s a Cliff Stoll Ted Talk!?? I’ve read the book and watched the complimentary PBS side piece, but wasn’t aware of a ted talk, thanks!
Sigh - sends me back 15 years or so. I'd prepared a 1 hour talk. When I was about to go on stage, they told me that I had only 15 minutes. So, well, I remembered one of the few things I learned in grad school: talk fast and don't give 'em a standing target. Covered my points and finished in, yep, 18 minutes.
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Welcome to the other side. I haven't renewed Amazon Prime in quite a while. It's not that bad because you can still shop on Amazon with free shipping as long as you hit the minimum amount. I may keep things in the cart and sometimes it becomes a reminder for me to grab those items at the local shop. The only time I get an 'itch' to get back on Prime when I'm at Whole Foods. Other than that, goodbye free shipping!
I am thinking about canceling as well but I am a nomad and need to be able to have things shipped to Amazon lockers. Do they still allow that without a Prime subscription?
To me “foreign seller” implies Amazon sellers/buyers has some sort of national context?
Note: I do feel bad hijacking happens in Amazon.
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While this would probably work , it seems insane to me that this would be the only thing to protect his listing from a completely different category of product being merged with another.
You're not wrong. Because Amazon's system is insane unless you realize it's designed only for the benefit of the corporation, not for any kind of fairness or quality.
Guess I'd better say a few things. First, I deeply appreciate that so many on Hacker News have come out for this. Enough to awaken me from a sound sleep on a Tuesday evening! I don't really care that much about selling Klein bottles over Amazon - it's mainly to reach parents over the holidays. But I do wish that Amazon would do something about this kind of thing. Finally, I"m very low on stocks of glass Klein bottles…
Hi Cliff, I'm an independent amazon consultant. Your Amazon problems would be solved with a regular USPTO trademark. They don't recognize common-law trademarks because they are heavily arguable in litigation. USPTO is a database of trademarks already scrutinized by trademark attorneys and government. It's not perfect, but it is a collection that Amazon recognizes. You can do this for $2000-ish and never think about i…
Until about 5-6 years ago the changes Amazon made almost universally made their service better and more pro-user convenience/efficiency. Since then it's really become a nightmare. I realize they are being abused by scammers who are scheming every way to subvert the system but as a technologist familiar with web tech and distribution, it's clear there are some anti-consumer experience issues which Amazon could fix but is choosing not to.
For example, allowing vendors to list alternate "versions" which aren't really the same product at all. It makes it harder to tell what the star rating averages are for the version I actually want (and I have to sort reviews by version which is only accessible on a subpage. Frankly, I'd rather they just go back to one listing per product. Yes it's less useful for a hundred different sized machine screws but it seems like a major source of these issues.
Then there's the nightmare of letting different sellers sell on the "same" product listing. Crap clone products flit in and out contaminating the integrity of reviews because a shoddy version slips in but only from one seller out of six or seven.
As someone who deals with them everyday, do you think they are NOT doing some of the things they could to stop these issues due to strong incentives (Amazon makes more $$$ allowing users to be frustrated), or do you think they are sincerely doing what they can (within reasonable costs) to solve these chronic issues? They used to understand that accuracy and transparency ultimately yield more sales (even if lower for an individual product). I'd like to believe Amazon didn't change their ethos from the early days, but...
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Yes. I was annoyed when Bank of America discontinued the feature that allowed me to create a single-used credit card number and fund it with a limited amount of money. That was a good solution to the bogus charges problem. But it was so hidden on the BofA site that few used it. I'd like to have that service back.
Privacy.com has been awesome for this and integrates with 1Password.
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Wait, your web server is a Raspberry PI, and its holding up while being on the HN front page. Do you have a caching service in front maybe?
From personal experience, any cheap vps that can serve static pages will stand the front of HN. The blogs that go down here typically back every request by MySQL (ahem, WordPress) which is totally unnecessary and often actively harmful since MySQL has very low default total connections allowed. The point being: don't serve requests backed by a database unless the results are likely to change very dynamically!
WordPress is not my favorite thing and some of the available plug-ins do terrible things with MySQL, but the problem is not too low default connections; it's too many PHP workers. WordPress is generally focused enough that most of the wall time is spent in waiting for the database, so you want to optimize for throughput; one or two workers per cpu thread is plenty for that. More concurrency than execution available reduces throughput, so it's better to queue requests in your http layer than to process multiple at once.
Large numbers of MySQL connections are more appropriate when the web pages do a mix of things, but more/mostly idle DB wise; in that case, you might still want persistent connections to reduce round trips before a query, but are less likely to have a query backlog large enough where task switching overhead becomes significant.