Hacker News Reader

Comment by helixfelix | Hacker News Reader

What is ironic is that there is an annual Award given to an AWS employee called the Cliff Stoll Award: For those individuals who see something suspicious, not working as expected, show ownership and drive it to resolution. As Cliff did to find a KGB spy, and documented in "The Cuckoo's Egg".

I wonder what would happen if someone at Amazon pulled on this thread and not only solved Cliff's problem but also the root cause that enables this kind of product hijacking.

View on HN

If there really is a Cliff Stoll award, I'd be happy to contribute a Klein bottle for its continuation. (seriously!)

Amazon can afford to buy one from your listing... although the recipient might be in for a nasty surprise!

Ha!

Unless they have a real blackhead problem I guess!

I've won one in the past. It's no longer being awarded to the best of my knowledge. But the recipients did get copies of your book (it was my second copy!).

Apparently this individual works on AWS and won a Amazon's Cliff Stoll Award:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/srwilliams

Plot twist: the root cause is greed

Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior. Keeping 3rd sellers happy will result in less returns, happier resellers, and greater platform usage.

The root cause here is organizational failure from disempowered employees. At one point Amazon had great customer service with empowered represenatives. That's not Amazon today.

> Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior

It can be if that's the side effect of a system designed to make selling as frictionless (and therefore lucrative) as possible. Thence, greed could be the root cause, if not the proximate cause.

> Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior

Depends entirely on how much the sellers are selling. It’s entirely possible they like the idea of making a ton of sales for a bit. It’s not their reputation that gets destroyed.

It is if you make more money from the hijackers, and/or from marginalizing your 'difficult' employees.

I posit that it's not greed. It's laziness. Why do a great job, when "good enough" is good enough for 90% of the people? That's how business works today.

You could be right, Occam's razor and all that, but I think 'good enough' is a carefully chosen strategy tuned to maximise a bottom line rather than an accident.

The root cause is oxygen.

Anyone expecting any other behavior from utility maximizing entities is naive?

I would counter that by saying anyone ascribing that mindset automatically to all humans is cynical ;-)

Disagree. It’s possible to start with that assumption and then design systems with that in mind.

Agreed, but I guess we're talking about slightly different things (and perhaps I missed the point of the 'oxygen' remark) - I was saying, Amazon's system is designed that way because Amazon are greedy (that's the root cause), and that it's cynical to say that it's just because they're human (and therefore implicitly greedy). Vaguely worded statements on my part though, I should've been clearer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com