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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat surprising the manufacturers were still selling two different engines in 2004.

My pet peeve with Amazon is a similar "nice but not quite good enough feature" : their selling of fasteners. Nuts, bolts, etc fall into a clear if quite complex N-space of sizes and features. This can be represented nicely in a web site, for example : http://www.mcmaster.com/ however even though Amazon acquired a nuts-n-bolts retailer some years ago, their site is a horrible mess for this kind of item. I'm not sure if this is because there are no humans curating the catalog, or because Bezos doesn't do his own maker projects and vehicle maintenance...

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To add to the problem with fasteners or really anything that has sizes listed with fractions, the search is completely oblivious to the `/` character, so trying to find a 1/2-20 bolt will get you every bolt with a 1 2 or 20 somewhere in the description, without taking it's position/context into account at all. I usually end up using google to search amazon in those situations, which kinda sucks since you give up the ability to filter by prime or one day items.

Likewise, try to find some "ECC RAM" for your server on amazon.fr. They don't make the distinction between "ECC" and "non-ECC" in search, hence returning basically every kind of RAM. Because, for some weird reason, French retailers like to specify that their RAM is not ECC in the title of the item. (Surprisingly enough, this doesn't seem to be an issue on amazon.com.)

They were still doing it in 2008.

I had a 2008 Lancer and the owners manual constantly had to make distinctions between "California" and "non-California" versions for various procedures/features.

(I'm not even in North America, that's just global manufacturing for you)

Doing some quick searches suggests that this is an emissions-related issue.

It is, but California's emissions standards have been adopted by other states, and a lot of companies just make one model that is compliant in all 50 states. I'm not sure what the cost difference is these days, but I wonder if it's worth having to maintain two separate lines of inventory. It presents a problem to people who buy a new car, then move to California. If there aren't enough miles on the odometer, California will refuse to register the car because it doesn't meet their emissions standards.

Emissions standard says I don't have enough miles on the odometer, huh? I'll show them.

Completely agreed. I hate buying those kinds of parts from amazon for this reason.

Find the fitting you need but you found it in 3/4 instead of 1/2? You need to start over from scratch 90% of the time.

I'm a fan of supplyhouse.com but mcmaster.com looks good too!

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