All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS | Hacker News Reader

All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS

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46 pointsacronpolis39 comments

Prime Day is a great day to encourage people to use tools like CamelCamelCamel or Keepa to see if the "deals" are actually deals.

Unfortunately camel^3 and others are easily gamed now by "on-page coupons" which keep the price the same or lower normally and can trick the price tracker into thinking it's a good deal when it's actually just the normal price.

This video has a good summary at the beginning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MsndlciGWA

Good info, I'm surprised that haven't figured out how to account for coupons. Seems very feasible, especially considering the army of people with extensions installed.

Maybe the reason is that I live in the EU, but my Amazon app has the price history right in it. It’s both useful and entertaining.

Iirc the built in history doesn't take into account games like having a perennial 40% off coupon that gets disabled right when a "sale" starts

It's available in the US as well. It's replaced my usage of Camel^3.

I used to then switched to the amazon built in price tracker, then set alerts or auto buy below the lowest price it's been in the last year when I Really want something but don't need it immediately...

A sweater I liked that dropped to $19 just triggered the auto buy during this prime day sale...

Amazon is still a good deal in my country because they have competition that's kicking their ass.

Amazon UK and US now have a Price History button on products. It’s not quite as good as camel used to be, but it’s a convenient.

I'm totally the kind of person who loves sales, scans clearance racks regularly, and is always looking for deals but... Prime Day is the definition of "nothingburger". I mean, Kindle is on sale, Fire tablets are on sale. The things that are always on sale are on sale. It's an embarassment that the media covers Prime Day at all.

For me, Prime Day is not a time for good deals, but a time for my packages to be delayed. I hope you won’t need anything in a hurry for a week after it.

It can be fun to watch prices a little before and during Prime Day. I've seen quite a few things on my wishlist go up in price the week before, then a "Prime Day Deal" that's higher than the original price was.

Yes. In the UK they go up a month before, because we have consumer protection laws that required retailers of e.g. white goods to have maintained the higher price for any announced discount for at least a month. So you knew that sellers thought there would be (at that point unannounced) Deal Days, because the prices of some things went up 20% back at the beginning of September.

I had ordered a new wireless charger about two weeks ago (without Prime). a day or two before it was meant to be shipped (about a week before Prime day), my order was cancelled "due to lack of stock". I go to the original product page and what do you know, it's in stock but $3 more expensive. Looking again today, it's on the Prime sale for the old price.

Scummy behaviour at best, and illegal at worst.

There's https://camelcamelcamel.com to check how prices developed.

There's still the possibility of shenanigans with different models that can be overpriced for long so they look like a good deal when they get a normal price

cheapest prices are always two weeks before any public sale

that includes "Black Friday"

then there are hilarious prices like twice what it was two years ago

       amazon.com/Elements-Desktop-External-external-storage/dp/B09VCXWPQG

what exactly did amazon do with those billions in tariff refunds?

storage and memory has simply gone up over 100% in the last year. nothing Amazon specific here

Naively I would have thought $500 for 20TB was a good deal.

> what exactly did amazon do with those billions in tariff refunds?

Plan expensive weddings in Venice. And we're all doing our part paying as consumers and tax payers.

Why are they using EC2, Fargate, ECS and Lambda all at once for the same site?

For the same reason AWS offers all of them to customers. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, and there’s no “one size fits all” solution for any given compute problem.

hopefully they will re-write their stack with AI and save about 80% of the compute (and electricity) needed for that service.

How do you know that is possible?

the software is running at 1/1000 the capability of the hardware.

And how do you know that?

arithmetic

Ah, I see. You were or are employed as Amazon’s internal tech financial economist?

No dude. Divide the results by the hardware capacity. 1/1000

You're going to have to show us the work for anything you're saying to even remotely make sense. Otherwise this is just drive-by thread crapping.

I worked at Amazon for 7 years and personally witnessed teams investing in operational efficiencies and cost reductions. They regularly celebrate big wins in that. There's no reason to believe they're being wasteful here, and you bring not a single shred of evidence that they are.

the cpu , ram, ssd are capable of serving over 30k qps or more (assuming a roughly 500kb web page response). The nic is likely the bottleneck, but between 3k - 30k qps . With compression, 2x .

Balanced across instances, they are achieving roughly 10-30 qps currently (LBs, app servers, internal LBs, DBs , etc). Possibly even closer to 5qps.

30 qps / 30k qps = 1/1000

Where does it go? mostly encode / decode & IO wait due to human centered architectures that made legacy development scalable. No longer necessary.

so yes, an 80% reduction is a very conservative and plausible reduction. The theoretical possibility would be a 99.9% reduction ( 1/1000)

You’re vastly underestimating the amount of mechanical (and useful) work that goes into making Amazon’s complete retail shopping experience. You’re sizing it as though it were a 3-tier architecture designed in the late 1990s/early 2000s. It’s much more complicated than that. Maybe you’re implicitly arguing that it could be less complicated, and perhaps there’s some merit to that, but you’re not sitting in a knowledgeable place to contend that there are 3 orders of magnitude of resource waste to fulfill the company’s stated product requirements.

Doctors don’t diagnose patients they haven’t seen.

ok so what's your position.

welcome to Mersenne prime awareness day

consider providing your pc time for https://www.mersenne.org/ distributed compute project

Disgusting levels of consumerism

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