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Comment by slownews45 | Hacker News Reader

The thing has been that historically even though Amazon would "depreciate" a service they kept it running and supported.

"Amazon SimpleDB (N. Virginia) Service is operating normally" is their current status page, but their marketing materials doesn't show any SDB stuff. So if you had some old workload ticking over - you could just leave it usually.

I actually used SimpleDB in a light use case wildly past the point at which it disappeared from all marketing. I kept on expecting an email like the EC2-classic one, but it never came even though simpleDB didn't show up anywhere really

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FYI, "depreciate" != "deprecate" — I also used to think it was the former once upon a time :)

My favorite similar mixup is ordinance vs ordnance. Though I suppose they're not mutually exclusive. I'm sure that printed copies of some bylaws are hefty enough to cause serious damage if you lob them at the enemy.

This was hilarious when I saw local businesses put up signs requiring masks due to local "ordnance". I had to wonder what kind of masks they expected us to have

insure vs ensure is another one I've commonly seen. As in "please insure that <some task> is complete".

Interestingly, I think this was correct or at least colloquially correct a few centuries ago. I've seen that spelling used in text from the 1700s and 1800s by educated people. Probably a holdover from before spelling got really standardized.

Glad there’s someone else pedantic here so I don’t have to do it…

One aspect of this mix-up that I enjoy is the fact that deprecating something causes its value to depreciate, by quite a lot!

not only can deprecate cause depreciation, it can be a synonym for depreciate (in the financial meaning). but depreciate can't be a synonym for deprecate (in the end-of-life meaning).

just one of those fun things that gets thrown in to make sure nobody ever fully understands the english language.

As a Swede reading OT comments on HN I can ensure you that deprecate and depreciate are not words I would mix up unless autocorrect gets me. They look similar after all.

Ordnance and ordinance I don't even know the difference between though.

I'm still using SimpleDB in production. I do have plans to migrate that workload, but as long as it keeps working there's really no rush...

We were SOL when Amazon simple payments was killed off with very short notice and then again with FlexPay.

Good example - and goes to show how miserable it is when these folks kill stuff off.

Sounds like a good reason to integrate with Authorize.net or another vendor that provides platform agnostic APIs that let you pick your own payment vendor (at much lower cost than Amazon's payment offerings).

It was never our primary payment method, but we had higher conversion rates with it. We had Authorize.net at the time, then added PayPal PayFlow and Stripe. I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority and fall back gracefully, avoiding double charges and even abstracting over payment status, refunds, etc.

> I actually authored a payment abstraction library that would try providers in order of priority

Were you storing PANs then?

No, the retry logic was in-tandem between the client and a separate server endpoint.

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