zlacker

I'm the same "Galactoise" quoted in the original story. I'm really happy to see the conversation that cropped up here, about the lack of value around trying to certify a mutable black box, and hopefully the power of HN is enough to get some action from the Alexa team.

I also wanted to pass along a blog post I threw together on the topic. http://www.derpgroup.com/blog/on-the-topic-of-certification

It's pretty long, but the tldr is as follows: We're all worked up about this idea of having to build switches into our code to meet arbitrary certification guidelines, only to turn them off the moment we are live in prod. It's worth noting, though, that Amazon pulls these sort of antics (bait-n-switches) on us regularly and without remorse, and that there's really no way we can even know it happened. This is arguably even more destructive to the quality of our products than trying to build for a set of capricious guidelines.