Live data from Hacker News

“This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

github.com

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#91

I know it doesn't solve all the aspects of how broken this documentation is: but here's a pull request that somewhat tries to address it. The Pull Request: https://github.com/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs/pull/209 The Deployed Docs: https://docs.contour.so/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs Lots of bugs still to fix but hopefully it's helpful to anyone. Super open to any feedback! ---- Edit: To make it clear, the docs are…

that website breaks my browser back button

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#92
post #90

I know it doesn't solve all the aspects of how broken this documentation is: but here's a pull request that somewhat tries to address it. The Pull Request: https://github.com/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs/pull/209 The Deployed Docs: https://docs.contour.so/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs Lots of bugs still to fix but hopefully it's helpful to anyone. Super open to any feedback! ---- Edit: To make it clear, the docs are…

All you've done is deploy the existing documentation on your own service and change the links on the GitHub repository to point to your service rather than the GitHub documentation (with no indication of how one would keep this in sync with updates). Sure, it makes navigating this version of the docs slightly easier, but this doesn't seem to be a good-faith attempt at actually improving the documentation so much as p…

Holding my two hands up--I saw this post on HN and wanted to help, and using a web app that I've built seemed to be the logical step.

But yeah, I could definitely see how it would come across this way, and I'll revert the links back to the PR! Hope that helps.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#93
post #15
post #7

I won't touch any of amazon's products with a 10ft pole because of the way they treat their warehouse workers. Making their warehouse employees pee in bottles to make their metrics or risk being fired, that's just on a whole new level of extracting every joule of work out of a human being.

fair but wildly off-topic.

Off-topic I'll give you, but wildly?

That strikes me as wildly hyperbolic.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#94
My first job out of college was working on Fulfillment by Amazon, which was part of sellers central. The place was a huge mess technically, with like three different authoritative databases, and services constantly trying to second guess each other. Everything was in Java and there was no clear central direction. I think this is probably the main drawback to Bezos' cloud of services mandate.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#95

I know it doesn't solve all the aspects of how broken this documentation is: but here's a pull request that somewhat tries to address it. The Pull Request: https://github.com/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs/pull/209 The Deployed Docs: https://docs.contour.so/amzn/selling-partner-api-docs Lots of bugs still to fix but hopefully it's helpful to anyone. Super open to any feedback! ---- Edit: To make it clear, the docs are…

that website breaks my browser back button

that's one way to improve your bounce rate

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#96
See, the issue is that most probably this person is not Amazon's customer. Their employer is.

In which case either Amazon is or isn't important to them. If it is, they can just tell the person to get over it and do their job. If it isn't then they aren't an important customer for Amazon either.

In neither case is there any incentive for Amazon to improve.

Such is life with a lot of enterprise software in my experience.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#97
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was the only one! When I look around at the code examples using openCV it is clear that nobody knows how to use it. God help you trying to get your GPU working on Python.

Matplotlib...

matplotlib is esoteric ( if you didn’t already have psychic scars from matlab experience and thus already speak their esolang), but at least it documents kwargs and links out to source and doesn’t just give you out of date snippets in broken english.

OpenCV can’t be assed to link out to source, and also won’t even bother telling you what the function signatures are, what the names of all the methods are, or anything else useful.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#98
post #7

I won't touch any of amazon's products with a 10ft pole because of the way they treat their warehouse workers. Making their warehouse employees pee in bottles to make their metrics or risk being fired, that's just on a whole new level of extracting every joule of work out of a human being.

I agree with you but that's not unique to Amazon and nor is it a modern problem. More than 20 years ago, I was pissing in empty bottles next to trucks to make my quotas when throwing boxes for FedEx when I was in university. Ditto when I threw boxes at an Abercrombie & Fitch / Hollister distribution warehouse in university. Same story when I worked construction jobs. Same story when I was a teenager, picking corn and beans by hand in the fields near where I grew up. In fact, of the over a dozen manual labor jobs I've had in my life, the only one where I had convenient and frequent access to a restroom facility was a Thomson Consumer Electronics glass factory.

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#99
Well, Amazon solved this problem - by censoring expression of developer dissatisfaction with the abomination. Way to solve a real problem plaguing your client base, Amazon.

"@amzn amzn locked as too heated and limited conversation to collaborators 3 hours ago

@seanevan seanevan closed this 3 hours ago"

Re: “This is the worst documentation I have ever seen in my life”

#100
post #3

~13 years ago (!) I worked with the Amazon Seller API and left this comment in my own source code: // the XML returned from this request is *mind-bogglingly* bad. Terrifyingly bad. // a completed batch looks like this: // batchid=363777811 status=Done dateandtime=09/18/2007 09:53:10 PDT activateditems=335 numberofwarnings=0 itemsnotacivated=17 // and an incomplete batch like: // batchid=363778361 status=In Progress /…

That looks like putting " " and " " around a legacy text format and call it a day, to report that your service/API "supports XML" lol. Actually, SGML has mechanisms (shortrefs and "data tags") to parse strings like that as markup and could even infer " " tags (but it still won't work satisfactorily with your example data).

I mean, Bezos did say people who didn't expose services as APIs would be fired...
Post reply on HN