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Comment by tylerrooney | Hacker News Reader

I find it pretty obnoxious that someone leaked this. This is classic "ruining it for everyone".

That app, when I worked at Amazon, was open to any employee. It would totally suck if they had to restrict access because of some idiot. I always thought it was pretty awesome that I could randomly query all sorts of data at Amazon.

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If they're selling a Kindle at the rate of almost one a second, then the stock levels should act as a timestamp. I wonder if Amazon log employee access to report pages.

this doesn't seem like the sort of leak that anybody is going to be too angry about.

The cynic's money is on this "leak" being a PR stunt.

I usually don't go for the conspiracy theory. But my first thought after reading the stuff about the Fire was that I should probably get in my order for a second one soon if I want it to show up before the holidays.

Although leaking the other Kindle data doesn't seem as convenient.

Perhaps. But don't you think they can put out a press release that would be covered by every major newspaper, online and offline? Or Bezos could give an interview with the WSJ, NYT, or anyone he chooses. Why would they leak it CultofAndroid.com, a second or third tier niche tech blog?

> Why would they leak it CultofAndroid.com, a second or third tier niche tech blog?

I can't really answer that, but this article is currently #2 here. Can't argue with results, right?

I've never really known Amazon to be prone to that sort of thing

Considering how tight-lipped Amazon is about everything (including the fact that they've never divulged the number of Kindles sold) I'd imagine Jeff Bezos and Tom Szkutak might be less than happy.

Possibly they should be, this time, as the leaker has just given me (and every other Android developer) 2.5 million very good reasons to bother putting my app into the Amazon App store.

I applied for the Kindle Development Kit weeks ago and have yet to hear back.

Good luck.

That's the Kindle development thing. It seems to be a black hole. Perhaps because it's based on some kind of bastardized J2ME tech, from what I understand, whereas the Fire is just Android, so you probably won't need that much special stuff to develop for it.

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