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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

This is Amazon, the company which still offers to sell me more vacuum cleaners after I buy one.

The company which will completely ignore keywords like "6A" in a desperate attempt to show you anything but what you're looking for.

I'm not so worried!

Added: this is also the company which sells a popular line of home-security cameras, some of which are meant to be installed indoors. Worrying about your vacuum snitching on you makes good sci-fi but maybe this product isn't where regulators should be focusing.

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The reason after you make a purchase you still see offers for the same product is because you are still statistically more likely to purchase a vacuum than average. What if the vacuum doesn’t work well, it’s too heavy, the package doesn’t arrive? You’ll be turning around and buying another.

Would mainly make sense if I returned the original order, otherwise there must be much more efficient use of the recommendation space.

Well, no there isn't, and this company has the best data available on the planet to prove it.

There should be a corollary to Hanlon's Razor. Something like, "Don't attribute to genius that which is adequately explained by laziness."

Frankly, calling it Bezos's Razor would be very appropriate, because that's basically how the whole Amazon storefront works.

Not quite. ML algorithms that continuously crunch billions of data points don't need to be called "genius", they're simply way more exhaustive in their search of optimums than "a vague idea from a regular person on the Internet that the best reaction to such situation is to do x" (with absolutely zero evidence to show for it of course).

AIUI, recommendations can come from multiple providers. If very detailed recommendations that take into account the fact that you’ve already bought a vacuum timeout, then your recommendations come from a dumber provider that is based on recent searches.

By “provider”, do you mean internal Amazon recommendation services?

So your argument is Amazon is too dumb to be a threat? Even if we assume this is true for the present, seems very short-sighted to me.

Just because they are inept now doesn't mean we should allow them something that could turn into an unfair advantage once they figure out how to actually do it.

Yes but.... Amazon would be happy to sell your data to a company who knows how to abuse it!

vacuums need friends!

I have 4 and should probably buy that wet/dry shop vac I've been meaning to.

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