Gotcha. I think this might be where Protobuf falls short because you have to "source" the tooling for all its different outputs, but support for OpenAPI 3.0 spec generation has existed for over a year.
Amazon is great at a lot of things, but AI and Machine Learning aren't it. From what I saw when I worked there, they don't have the talent to produce their own models (which is, I think, what we all expected to see), but the surprising thing is that they haven't partnered yet.
There's an HN post that takes first place on my bookmarks bar, which is an Ask HN about the best paper people read in 2020 [^1]. Every once in a while I'll open it and browse through a ton of amazing papers and research and try to learn something new. Hasn't let me down yet.
Normal and acceptable are two very different things. Another post from earlier mentioned other shady practices from them, so I wanted to bring this up too.
I got tired of getting pings from Netflix, so I finally opened the app and tried looking for the setting to disable them. Apparently they opt you in to these by default, and the only way to disable them, according to the help article, is through the OS’ settings directly.
HN is a whole other beast. A notification server would have to keep track of any replies to any of your comments / submissions in order to determine what to notify you about, purely because they don’t have a notification model.
All the comments in this thread are right. This specific scenario was about providing a consistent experience. All the work that this backend does could be done using iOS’ background updates, but:
1. Those aren’t consistently scheduled
2. They have an extremely tight deadline (and sometimes Reddit can be a bit slow)
Making it server side means we controlled that experience better.
Theoretically it could do it all from the app, but it would have to resort to background updates, which are scheduled at iOS’ discretion. Christian was aiming for consistency, which is why this exists.