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I say it to all my friends all the time - Amazon is a tech company that happens to do retail, not a retail company that does tech.

It's no coincidence that Amazon calls a unit of storage space in its FCs a "bin" and also happens to pseudo-randomly distribute products in the FC. I am convinced that Jeff Bezos' long term plan is to automate everything, and treat every problem like a CS problem so your CDN analogy is spot on. Pricing is automated, ordering is automated, and I'm pretty sure with Kiva storage positioning is dynamically optimized too. [0]

The thing is, the further invested Amazon is along this path, the cheaper and more profitable it becomes to continue. Moreover, the harder it becomes for new players to catch up.

Will be interesting what the plan is with these planes, I note Amazon also is investigating entering the shipping industry, a space pretty ripe for disruption[1][2]

[0] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBa9yVZBJM

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907163

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/amazon-is-...

Bin is a very, very common word in ecommerce that means storage unit.

You're partially correct in your overall assessment of Amazon, but they aren't a tech company first. They're a logistics company that was forced to become a tech company to support their retail efforts.

From the horse's mouth: “Amazon is a technology company. We just happen to do retail”

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/10/05/amazons-cto-amazon-...

That's nice. The proof is in how they actually operate.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but bin is a standard warehouse term.

Ah, that's disappointing - I did think that was unique to Amazon.

I don't suppose other companies call their product classifiers browse nodes and call their most granular classifiers leaf nodes...?

I doubt it!

I was actually thinking the etymology of the word bin in CS is probably from someone who worked in a warehouse. It can't be a coincidence.

I have always assumed both refer to the English word bin, which is a receptacle, box, etc. E.g. trash bin.

We just call them bins in the UK, not trash bins. Putting something in the bin idiomatically means throwing it away. Perhaps that's a modern usage. We do also have bread bins, which is about the only use meaning 'receptacle' I can think of outside of warehouse bins.

I think it is a UK phrase, or at least not US. A friend of mine from Taiwan, with excellent (US) English, had never heard of using the word 'bin' for trash before.

It's not common in the US, but you hear it now and again here. The most similar example I can think of is probably "lift." You'll hear someone call an elevator that every so often in the US, but it's mainly the UK term

In New Zealand they also have chilly bins.

...or it could simply be a short form of "binary".

It's a shame you are being downvoted considering that the first kind of computational storage was "binary files"/"binary data." Bin for short..

This is almost certainly where /usr/bin comes from, yes.

Amazon most probably does tons of backend optimization in all its activities.

What I have found more amazing is the selection of books in Amazon "brick-and-mortar" bookstore compared to Barnes & Noble (B&N) bookstore in same Seattle shopping complex previously. I typically visit that shopping complex few times a month. Every time, I have visited Amazon bookstore, I tend to pickup couple of books to browse that I find interesting. When I used to visit B&N in same complex previously, it was rare for me to pickup books to browse in repeat visits. Amazon is able to achieve in 1/4th of the one floor what B&N couldn't do with books on two floors, make me pick up books on repeat visits. Amazon seems to refresh books more often in its store. Amazon might also be using the browsing/purchasing habits of users living in the area to determine what books to stock at the store.

The amazon bookstore, while nice, has like a non-existent tech section.

Is anyone actually still buying dead wood tech books?

Much as I love my e-readers, paper tech books and other textbooks are really still the only way to go simply because you can't easily flip back and forth between pages to cross-reference things or find specific information by flipping to a chapter quickly.

For fiction and any other type of linear reading material though, e-readers have been a godsend.

I disagree. Navigation non-linearly through electronic versions of texts is much easier than having to fan through the pages to look for that one phrase or code snippet you saw 3 months ago. Search and bookmarks...I've seen this in PDFs for years though I don't have much experience working with the newer e-book specific formats.

You'd be amazed how quickly you can find something in a book (or in a few cases for me, a blueprint) when you can just hit F3 or ctrl-f and search for it.

If you know precisely what you're looking for, I would agree that direct search is great; heaven knows I've wished there was a way to grep a book often enough.

However, I often find myself in situations where I don't know precisely the term to search for and am simply browsing to see if there is some information applicable to the problem I'm attempting to solve. That's where the ability to flip rapidly back and forth shines.

I disagree, having my hand in two pages so I look back and forth is faster than ctrl-f.

You can open the same PDF twice...

Tech books are the only thing I read on paper. I love free tech books, but honestly I'd rather pay to get the physical copy, just for ease of reference. The only time I enjoy digital copies of technical books is when copy and paste works, which it doesn't on Kindle books.

I like the Kindle iOS app, which now allows you to 'flip' through pages by dragging a bar.

Yep - as others have pointed out, good for flipping back and forth. Also, do pick up language/framework specific ones for initial learning, then head online to pick up on the changes/other aspects.

Surprisingly I've actually increased my spending in hardcover books since getting a Kindle. Kindle is for travel / free books / classics. Hardcover for sitting at home in a comfy chair. Regardless of what people say, physical paper is still easier on my eyes.

These are the only kind of physical books I buy. I can read a novel or most non-fiction on my Kindle just fine. But the Kindle sucks for quickly jumping through pages, or pages with images, charts, or equations. Also you can't lend the majority of Kindle books, and even then it's only to someone else's Kindle account. I love lending out my tech books to friends. I just lent my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions to someone in my office for like the tenth time.

Until I can find a decent reader that doesn't hurt my eyes[1] and does ePub and PDF, yep, I'm buying paper books. Having the ability to highlight, draw, and add post-it like notes would be a bonus since I do that with real books too.

1) the current Apple trend to get rid of all PDFs has made my Mac time a pain given I cannot get good print outs of documentation or use it on something other than an iPad.

There are some new e readers which do both ePub and PDF. A quick search turned up a few like the Nook GlowLight+, and a couple Kobos. Amazon's offerings don't do native ePub, but they (and others) make it trivial to email or upload an ePub and convert it to mobi and deliver to your device.

I can relate with the sentiment on paper books though. It's quite great being able to quickly flip back and forth to several places, or place notes throughout. I've had luck with the highlighting feature on my Kindle, which gives a decent interface for going back and looking at all the things I've highlighted; I've developed the habit of highlighting all the important parts in a book and going back and re-reading just the highlighted bits, which has helped tremendously. Unfortunately, highlighting across pages is rather aggravating.

I would have bought a Kobo but I keep hearing the PDF support is problematic. I keep hoping, but LCDs seem to be good enough for the majority.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon can probably help you there too. The Kindle is an excellent device for reading.

Last I check, ePub isn't a supported format.

If you email it to your Kindle, it often gets converted fine.

I was my understanding that anything with tables is problematic. Also, did Amazon stop charging for conversion?

I get dead wood for trickier tech books where I have to flip back and forth a bunch.

Fair enough!

Apologies if I seemed flippant -- things are changing so quickly nowawdays that apart from a few core texts on algorithms and programming languages, I've pretty much stopped expanding my library. It seems to be stackexchange and blog posts across the board now.

I suspect I'll pay for this choice sooner or later...

I avoid tech books on anything that's changing quickly - like frameworks. It's a waste of paper and ink, IMO. I get those in e-book format instead. I do however buy dead-tree versions of stuff that won't change fast or that I expect to flip back and forth.

You can build perfectly fine cpu out of wood nowadays

I think if it's a "concepts" book like SICP, a book explaining the patterns of the Erlang OTP framework, etc it's still worth a real purchase. If it's "Programming Framework version X", why bother unless it's really cheap? Though to be fair, a lot of projects have awful docs which make books necessary.

Yes, but only books that won't be out of date in a year, so no programming language or framework specific books.

I did buy a copy of The C Programming Language a couple of years back though, but that's just because I feel like it's just one of those books you must have.

I buy, on average, 3-4 books a month (from Amazon, of course) and I NEVER buy e-books.

Yes, and from amazon.com too

Since Amazon ranks kindle books separate from hard copy, you can see for yourself!

Yes, they do not require electricity to function.

You should try Elliot Bay

Say you, a SF resident, look at a book today on Amazon.com. Based on your past actions, Amazon knows very well how likely you are to purchase right away, or tomorrow, etc. [...] They'll ship the book to the warehouse in case you come back tomorrow to look at that book.

It's unlikely that it would be worth doing this if one person looks at a book; the return-and-buy-later rates wouldn't be high enough. But if ten people look at a book, it makes sense to move one or two copies to a closer warehouse -- and that's where Amazon's scale really wins. With O(N) customers and good historical data they can predict future purchases to within O(sqrt(N)) thanks to the central limit theorem.

> It's unlikely that it would be worth doing this if one person looks at a book

Yeah... But then again, if a truck is leaving soon from warehouse A to warehouse B, why not put that book on the truck, if no one near A has looked at it recently?

There IS a marginal cost to touching a book and to moving it, even if the truck is going ANYWAY, it might be pennies of fuel + pennies of labor to move it. This could eat into the margins.

Yeah, there is a small cost. There is also a small benefit.

With good data you can make the right small decisions.

Even then if you really have data for everything, you can take into account, "are we overstaffed in warehouse A right now? what are the staffing costs in warehouse B when we arrive?", and do more or less physical work depending on that information

The bin pick labor is not (nearly) free.

The concept of what you are saying is true. The exact details and flags of what drives the proactive optimization is the secret sauce.

source: work in Supply Chain for Amazon

Probably the data is the main secret sauce.

Everyone has eggs, water, and flour. Not everyone makes incredible bread :)

Anyone can sell bread. Not everyone had metadata from a significant chunk of the population's bakery browsing and purchasing habits.

Nah, it's just thousand-island dressing.

It was a patent application:

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/

I find this hard to believe.

But there a again, I don't collect patterns about my behaviour so it could be true.

Sometimes I look at Amazon and then buy the product elsewhere, say if I spent 3 occasions over a few days looking at a product, does that breach some threshold somewhere for them to say "we have one on the hook, lets start moving this to a warehouse near him just in case"

I have no actual knowledge on the topic, but I presume it's not calculated on a purely individual level. If 100 people live within the range of the local distribution warehouse are interested in this book, and they say "this one is 87% likely to buy, this one is 43% likely to but..." they can work out a model that results in very few over-shippings.

But again, I know nothing, other than thinking about it a bit when the patent app became known.

Calculating it on an aggregate level over a number of consumers makes more sense to me.

As a result a book about Computer Science would be pre-emptively shipped to a warehouse near SV and investment book about economy and shipped near NY.

The patterns in this would be very exciting to know for people who are looking for their "tribe". It's actually something very hard to find out before moving somewhere thats not the Valley, what is the main intellectual focus of the region, is there none?

I missed a lot in my own childhood and upbringing to have people in my environment that we're or we're in contact with people at the top of their field, having deeper understanding of something instead of just struggling at their level.

We all talk about Google and Facebook's rich data source for human behaviour. We talk less about Amazon's rich data source on consumer behaviour. As Google themselves once said Amazon is a search engine for products/shopping.[0] They said this some 3~ years ago, Amazon has continued to expand since. It is fairly safe to assume Amazon is the single most largest consolidated reserve of consumer behaviour data on the world now.

Facebook can gauge the difference between different types of likes from how you read a page[1], Amazon does too from their harvested clickstream.

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29609472

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/01...

With a lot of data, the aggregate probabilities will become reasonably accurate. If they predict that there's a 60% chance you'll buy, that they'll make $2 from you if you do, and they'll lose $2 on wasted shipping if you don't, then on average they'll make money by prepositioning your prospective purchase.

For Prime orders I can see it making a huge difference. Two-day shipping gets really expensive compared to slower methods when shipping over large distances, but for short distances it can be done entirely on normal ground delivery trucks and is cheap. If prepositioning wastes a few bucks sometimes and saves a bunch of money on expensive two-day shipping other times, it could be a big win.

Its easy to believe if the marginal cost to ship the item approaches 0. For Amazon, this might actually be close enough to true to matter. Especially after this move.

It probably does approach 0. The truck is going anyway, most of the cost of a truck is wind resistance so adding more books up to the weight limit is close to zero.

Amazon is probably never shipping a single book, they are using analytics to decide if they should ship a case of books. If they think you are 90% likely to buy a book tomorrow but you are the only one who will it isn't worth the risk. If they decide 100 people are 50% likely to buy a book, sending a box of 100 books is a good investment - if 50 people buy tomorrow that implies 40 will buy the next day and 30 the day after and then 45 the next day and so on for a few weeks/months as sales slowly drop to zero.

Most of the time you won't realise this behaviour.

I worked NA logistics back when I was with Amazon, and was with the team behind the LA fresh and the team which works with intermediate FCs (they don't stock goods, but do store-and-forward at crucial locations in the logistics pipeline). And you are right, Amazon does an incredible amount of stuff when it comes to logistics. There is an entire building that houses trans & metrics team, and the hyderabad center in India is mostly just the transportation team.

Amazon is way ahead in the logistics game, even further than some of your flagship logistics companies.

I was formerly a customs broker for Amazon in the past and found their orders to usually be pretty typical, usually based around volume/time of year. They definitely rotate vendors based off time of year + what would be seasonally important but I think it's mostly just based off what sells. I don't think their algorithm is quite as complex but I don't think it's any bit weak, honestly. But as I was their broker and didn't work internally, I can't comment to specifics, really.

Very interesting. "A CDN, but for the real world" is a great way of summarizing it, too.

They don't even give me the right recommendations, how can they estimate what I will buy?!

> They'll ship the book to the warehouse in case you come back tomorrow to look at that book.

That sounds cool, but I doubt it actually happens. At least not for one person.