In the Works – AWS Region in Milan, Italy | Hacker News Reader

In the Works – AWS Region in Milan, Italy

aws.amazon.com

126 pointskaboro61 comments

I couldn’t help but recall this joke:

Heaven is where the police are British, the cooks are French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it's all organised by the Swiss.

Hell is where the chefs are British, the mechanics French, the lover's Swiss, the police German and it's all organised by the Italians.

Subtle variation:

Heaven is where the food is Italian and the engineering is German.

Hell is where the food is German and the engineering is Italian.

Please allow me to show a little bit of national pride (the parent comment it's a joke, I know...).

While absolutely terrible at organizing (on a _fractal_ scale: from the smallest details to the big picture), and affected by a less than optimal state of the economy, we have a pretty good engineering tradition. I have met astonishing engineers in Italy (and in Germany as well, and Russia, and USA, and so on...) with deep theoretical knowledge and a strong hands on experience.

Edit: clarified, not to be taken too seriously

Schools were good and the hands-on experience was made from very young age locally before than abroad as adults. Such depth is going lost, though. In that sense, this new AWS region in Milan should bring some operational jobs which will hopefully go to local workforce to keep this tradition going.

The parent is a joke based on stereotypes that I think excels partially because it pokes fun at all nationalities involved. I wouldn't take it too seriously. :)

Italian engineering is truly incredible, producing some of the most cutting edge advances the world has seen... until they catch fire.

Only if it's a public bus in the center of the capital :)

We do actually have top notch engineers; too bad they're often forced to work abroad, particularly researchers. That joke about Italy just doesn't split the problem in two as it should by taking into account the ignorant leading class which does its best to hinder most technical and cultural development in this country. The (in)famous "Gelmini Tunnel" as it was later called to ridicule our then science minister is just an example.

https://www.businessinsider.com/mariastella-gelmini-italy-ug...

I was being tongue-in-cheek. I'm also a car guy and was mostly taking the piss out of the fact Ferraris are known to catch fire quite often and without much prodding, despite being also some of the most amazing cutting edge machines ever built.

I thought catching fire was a prerogative of F35 from Lockheed Martin

ho ho ho... since when Italian Engineering is less than excellent? I can think of Arduino, mp3, the Pendolino... all Italian or with significant Italian contributions.

The curse of the country is its managerial class, which will suppress whatever innovation with enthusiastic zeal, only to parrot similar solutions a generation later.

They're hell bent in preserving the status quo and gently weaving their relations network rather than do anything else...

I think they have a couple of well known car brands, too... if memory serves ;-)

And don't forget the motorcycles

And motorbikes. And some very relevant players in the military and space industries.

Cars? Used to... it's mostly all gone, sold and off-shored.

(and considering what a burden on the public purse had FIAT become it's perhaps good news)

> the Pendolino

Much of which is technology bought from British Rail with their failed Advanced Passenger Train. Failed because the government of the time (Wilson, I think) pressured them to demo before it was ready. That led to a publicly embarrassing demo where many felt sick because the lean wasn't quite perfected, which they had been warned would happen.

After which, rather than providing funds to finish the debugging and releasing, it was taken as yet more objective proof nationalised rail didn't work and funds were limited. Despite this it was completed, and prototypes quietly run successfully in passenger service. The government (by this time Thatcher) would not approve production versions, so the patents and drawings were sold to Fiat.

Twenty odd years later Virgin would buy them as Pendolinos.

A very typical British technology story really.

thanks for mentioning Arduino (which is only partially Italian) :)

The usual cliche about Italians. I would like to remember HN's audience that Italy is the 2nd manifacturing nation in EU and that a big share of our GDP depends on engineering products and services: https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/ita/. Package medicaments, pumps, iron based products, cars, trucks, chemicals are not products that can be improvised without any organization. And in general Italian engineers are good.

P.S: I am both Italian and an engineer.

It's a joke, it's not intended to be analyzed or countered.

I may as well point out that Britain has the third-most Michelin-starred restaurants of any country.

But their cooks are French?

According to Forbes (2017) UK is far from be top country https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/11/23/the-to...

Aside from that, and I'm sorry is totally tangential, but I live in UK and I find the luck of food culture here disturbing. Sure there are a lot good restaurant, but most of the people are not able to appreciate and cook good food, while in France, Spain, Italy I find the level much higher.

Btw for HN audience may be interesting to know that both the Intel 4004 and the Zilog Z80 were designed by an Italian.

I would say - empirically - that the biggest problem in South Europe is not the lack of talent of creators/makers but the lack of talent of managers.

Why do I say this? Our creators/makers are sucessful abroad. Our managers not so.

Not even that IMHO, but Italy lacks business "system" in terms of different components all trying to create the platform for creating sustainable businesses at scale.

Similarly. For the British it’s allowed so long as it’s not forbidden. For Germans it’s forbidden unless it’s allowed. For Italians it’s allowed especially if it’s forbidden.

The front-and-center 'voiced by AWS Polly' dogfooding is great but it sure does sound like crap. Ironically it struggles to pronounce the word Milan.

I am happy to share feedback with the Polly team! Can you be more specific about what you believe sounds bad?

for what it's worth I thought it sounds fine. Maybe Milan sounds wrong to an Italian, but it sounds like how most Americans say Milan to me

Yeah, I think you're right. I suspect the Italian pronunciation is like 'me-lan' rather than 'mil-an'. As for the general sound, I thought it was pretty good. I was impressed that Polly even adds in inhaling of breath. Subtle, yet effective.

Italian pronunciation for Milano is here: https://www.comesipronuncia.it/pronuncia/milano-10397 . That said, Italians generally mean the UK’s received pronunciation when studying and listening to English language, so heavy American accents are way too large and quite difficult to us.

Imho it speaks way too fast.

It is not too bad, but is not 'Maelan' but 'Meelan'.

Well the English word "Milan" is already mangled compared to the Italian "Milano" - taking the italian pronunciation for the English word would be ... odd. I'm pretty confident that in the anglosphere "Mee-lan" would be the minority pronunciation compared to "Mih-lan".

Milan Kundera pronunciation comes neat though https://www.pronounceitright.com/pronunciation/milan-kundera... , that’s how we are used over here.

Maybe it's because the name is Czech and we never anglicised his name? I honestly don't know with that one though. English is wildly unpredictable, if we drilled down deep enough we'd find plenty of counter examples that contradicted my reason for how we pronounce pan Kundera's first name :-)

However for the city, think of it this way (sorry I'm gonna use some awful phonetic spelling here!) you and all the other Italians use the 100% correct pronunciation of Meelano. Somewhere back in History it became normal to call it "Milan" in English. Calling it Meelan is not only still wrong in Italian, it's also wrong (or nearly unused) in English.

It's the same way you have your own word for our city with its own pronunciation - Edimboorgo. If I say "well, that 'u' in the original 'Edinburgh' is pronounced uh so you should call it Edimbuhrgo" then you're now pronouncing it wrong in both Italian and English.

For what it's worth I'd prefer it if English kept the original names - Milano, Torino, Roma, Napoli, Firenze, etc :D

Edit I realised after typing this that I've heard wealthier Americans pronouncing some of these names even stranger still. Milan becoming Milawwn and Prague becoming Prawwwg which is like nails on a chalkboard to me, so maybe I can identify with you a little bit :-)

Ehehe, I see you well: let’s agree Mee-lah-n would be the best and neatest compared to received pronunciation and move on happily.

Why not :D

In defense of the software, Italian is quite difficult to pronounce. I wouldn't be too hard on it for now.

Disclaimers: I am Italian, and I used to work at AWS.

I'm surprised, how is Italian difficult to pronounce? I'm Italian too. I understand if you mean difficult for somebody who has 0 knowledge (this is true for any language). But besides very few exceptions Italian pretty wysiwyPronounce, no? I feel like I'm blinded by being too close to it :)

As an Italian expat: accent positions are very, very different; and English people associate different "default" sounds to vowels in isolation (e.g. "a").

Even educated persons will struggle if their only source is paper, because a lot of the Latin words that Italian is rooted on, actually have very different pronounciations in English.

Also: GL, GH, GN, CH, CE/CI vs CA/CO/CU, double-consonants reinforcing the sound, etc etc...

Most Italian words pretty much match their IPA representation, minus the pretty regular exceptions like Q, C, G, Z and H and the rare irregularity.

It may be difficult to an anglophone, but I'd argue that the phonetic irregularities of English are much more of a problem to a learner. "though/tough/through" never happens in Italian.

The biggest problem with reading Italian is knowing where the accent goes if it's not mandatory to write, in which case you need to know from context, as in the words at the end of http://www.italianlanguageguide.com/pronunciation/stress-acc...

agreed, the accent location (stressed syllabe) comes down to knowing the word, but only a few cases of wrong accent give you a different word... in english you can change the word by mispronouncing the lenght of the first vowel in words like sheet, beach... both long vowel, different way to write it... although I'm sure I'm being imprecise on "long vowel" (don't know anything about phonetics), but I can't think of an example of non-accent based, italian equivalent

on the accent, fair enough, that is not straightforward.

On the default sounds: I think it's harder in english where the correct sound is not strictly connected to the letters you write the word with. I don't think it's a coincidence that spelling bees are a thing for the english language, but I never heard of one in Italy...

Sure, if you have no source to determine the pronunciation of a word, it's hard (as for any language), but once you learn the building blocks you don't strictly need to know the word to know the pronunciation (apart from the accent)

It's one of the simplest language to pronounce, along with Spanish

It pronounces Milan perfectly to my British ear. It would be pronounced much the same here minus the accent. Certainly not Meelan.

I was talking about the italian pronuntiation.

Other than the "milan" pronunciation issue that others have outlined: the same word is pronounced in exactly the same way every time, which sounds wrong especially in long words such as "availability". The speed is too uniform; Polly handles commas (and full stops) brilliantly but there are other occasions in which a huan speaker pauses ever so slightly, for example to take a breath. Humans don't pronounce every single word fully, which contribute to make speech sounds fluid, this seems to be lacking completely from Polly.

For me constantly gasp before sentences sound bit weird. It would be better if this occurs only after long sentences, would sound more natural.

Nevertheless sounds really good!

I thought the same. It would probably sound more realistic without the gasping. Most human speakers wouldn't gasp that audibly and at different parts of the text.

When humans read aloud, they usually sound pretty bad. We tend to read sentences word-by-word instead of breaking it down into parts. I have no idea how Polly actually works, but it sounds to me like it is reading word-by-word like many humans do.

I'm (probably overly) conscious about how I read things aloud. If I can't read a sentence quietly before I read it out loud, I try to diagram it as I go. For instance, if I identify what I'm reading as a prepositional phrase, I give it less vocal emphasis. Subjects and predicates usually get the most emphasis.

Of course, what I described is much easier said than done. I wouldn't be surprised if you were already doing it.

Good luck with Polly moving forward and thanks for being so willing to take user feedback!

After going back and forth between the article and the comments, I just realized that you're the author / Chief Evangelist at AWS.

So on a sort of meta-note, I think it's pretty cool that AWS is still interacting with developers at this level.

It would be really great if the general intonation can be improved to be nearer to Wavenet level. Also a lot of continental Germanic words e.g. Swedish, Dutch, Deutsch etc. and Français-derived words embedded in an English text won't be pronounced properly regardless of context.

Source: I run an ebook to audiobook converter https://auditus.cc

Can anyone provide any insights into specifically why Milan, Italy? I see that AWS already has 3 regions in Europe.

It's relatively well connected to both Southern and Northern Europe?

Yeah, There is a huge internet exchange in Milan and a lot of submarine cables to Middle East, India etc go through Italy.

On the other hand, Italian courts were the most wiretap-happy in Europe a while ago (and not very tech-savvy), so perhaps I'd think twice before running anything there. I bet/hope Amazon got good lawyers to handle that.

If you are going to come out in a Middle-Eastern country, that's the least of your worries.

The network latency from Frankfurt to Italy is often unstable and does cause problems for video games I know. It's odd, but it's measurable, no idea why however.

Anyone who knows when EU-North-1 (Stockholm region) will open? Supposed to open by the end of the year.

Very soon.

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