Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Maybe I am not fully awake yet, but where is the joke?


I'm not sure either. Maybe hilarious in its frankness? Maybe the magnitude of the mistake is hilarious?

Notwithstanding that Collectorz made a bad mistake in basing part of their service on something Amazon explicitly doesn't allow, I thought it was a pretty good sorry message. He should have been more apologetic about making the mistake in the first place, but it's generally a very open and frank message.


Totally disagree. Classic case of oversharing. Even if yer inept, you don't let your custies know it at this level of detail. There's frank and there's pathetic sounding.


"Yer inept [...] custies"? There's frank, there's pathetic-sounding and there's turning every day into talk-like-a-pirate day.


That's good snark lather, but if you actually look at the collectorz.com forums, you find that yes, the email WAS as bad as all that: http://www.collectorz.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15...


Oh I read it in the original post (not sure what gave you the idea I hadn't). It's does drag on although I don't find it notably horrible - the field is highly competitive. At the same time, it's hard to take 'right way to talk to ur customers' [linked post] and 'arr, yer custies' as anything other than snark fodder, especially given the topic.


Definitely oversharing, but that's sad, not funny. YMMV of course :-)


From the developer's perspective, he's got Amazon about to take down a major feature of his apps. He has to tell customers something when their apps suddenly stop working.

I'm coming around to the idea that he probably shouldn't have included the message from Amazon, but a serious, honest mea culpa is certainly in order.


Well, as a customer I would definitly feel very well informed. Well enough, to know that I can sue (then again, who would do that because of a cheap iPhone app that is no more working).


Maybe it's this line:

"That's it for now. I really apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but I hope you understand that this is fully beyond our control."

...because I've never written an Amazon API app, but even I know they have restrictions on usage wrt mobile apps.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: