Amazon's Sentiment Analysis of Product Reviews was one of the very first forays into ML that the company had. They just keep wanting to re-use it everywhere.
HTML tools are a good name. I called them something like "a local html file"
One problem I solved with this was a packer needed to scan a few (10-40) ids into his barcode scanner. It was not enough where pulling up their bulk-id-uploader program but also too tedious to go to some "number to barcode" website.
Turns out, barcodes can be made from a google font!
You can just display a number using that font. Then hooked up a for-loop that's progressed by pressing the space bar: paste in IDs, scan first, space, scan next, repeat.
> Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.
> Among these thousands of failed inspections, some of the biggest flops include a 76% error rate in October 2022 at a Dollar General in Hamilton, Ohio; a 68% error rate in February 2023 at a Family Dollar in Bound Brook, New Jersey; and a 58% error rate three months ago at a Family Dollar in Lorain, Ohio.
> Many of the stores that failed state or local government checks were repeat violators. A Family Dollar in Provo, Utah, flunked 28 inspections in a row – failures that included a 48% overcharge rate in May 2024 and a 12% overcharge rate in October 2025.
> The Guardian’s examination of inspection failures by the two chains was based on record requests to 45 states and more than 140 counties and cities in New York, Ohio and California, along with court documents and public databases.
> Dollar General said it was “committed to providing customers with accurate prices on items purchased in our stores, and we are disappointed any time we fail to deliver on this commitment”. In one court case in Ohio, Dollar General’s lawyers argued that “it is virtually impossible for a retailer to match shelf pricing and scanned pricing 100% of the time for all items. Perfection in this regard is neither plausible nor expected under the law.”
LOVE LOVE putting what their PR says right next to what their lawyers say in court.
We absolutely need this more in this kind of reporting of late-stage capitalism.
Given the absurd amount startups I see lately that have the words "healthcare" and "AI", I'm actually incredibly concerned that in just a couple of months we're going to have an multiple, enormous HIPAA-data disasters
Staff engineer with 14+ years experience building high-scale backend systems (Java, Kotlin, Python, AWS, Kafka, DynamoDB) and full-stack products in React + TypeScript used by millions at Amazon, AWS, and Indeed. Looking for roles where I can own architecture, ship quickly, and work across frontend + backend to deliver real product impact (AI experience included, but not the only thing I bring).
Amazon's Sentiment Analysis of Product Reviews was one of the very first forays into ML that the company had. They just keep wanting to re-use it everywhere.