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Comment by wlabs | Hacker News Reader

Walmart has an awesome research and development labs known as Walmart Labs in Bangalore. Flipkart has its development headquarters in Bangalore too. They have awesome engineers too.

Both Walmart Labs and Flipkart hire the best computer scientists and software engineering talent from across the country. They pay as much as and sometimes more than what Google Bangalore pays its engineers.

With Walmart now acquiring a majority stake in Flipkart, I can see the two strong and highly skilled engineering centers coming together and forming a formidable team to give a tough competition to Amazon.

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Thank you "wlabs" for your impartial insights and opinions about "Walmart Labs"... (at least they didn't use a throwaway account).

This almost looks like a job posting from a recruiter. :)

show me one good thing that came from Walmart Labs.

Their wikipedia shows:

Kosmix is a search engine that allows users to perform advanced searches via multiple filters.

MeeHive delivers news to your iPhone and iPod touch that reflects your interests. But for a service so focused on the reader's interests

Right health which is a health focused kosmix?

TweetBeat - a twitter client with filtering?

I mean, not exactly xerox/PARC

Here's two: hapiJS and lacinia

For those wondering what these projects are, here are the direct URLs to their project pages:

- https://hapijs.com/

- http://lacinia.readthedocs.io/

Here are a couple of other interesting Walmart Labs projects I came across:

- https://www.electrode.io/

- https://github.com/walmartlabs/thorax

- http://oneops.com/

Their GitHub page is also worth looking at: https://github.com/walmartlabs

How many nice things have Amazon open sourced?

> How many nice things have Amazon open sourced?

Good research need not always be open sourced. That is irrelevant to it's quality.

Amazon has built a giant business on top of open source technologies. Don't you think it is natural for the open source community to expect that Amazon give something back to them out of courtesy?

The GP asked for a good thing that came out of Walmart Labs hinting at the idea that good things come out from Amazon but not Walmart Labs. Then a few commenters pointed out a few links showing the good things that came out of Walmart Labs. All of these good things happen to be open source. So it is quite natural to ask what good things Amazon bothered to open source after having built a billion dollar business on top of open source.

Again, all this is irrelevant to me as a programmer looking for challenging work. I'll chose good work over "is it going to be open source"?

A delightful thing I notice in their GitHub page is that Clojure seems to be the second most used language in Walmart Labs.

Seriously, Walmart and Clojure? Who would have imagined! I always thought of Walmart as a boring and traditional company that sells cheap goods. So when I heard about Walmart Labs, I thought all their coding must be in C++ or Java or even Cobol (who knows!).

But to see them using a dialect of Lisp like Clojure and Go more than Java and C++ warms my heart. :-)

https://github.com/awslabs https://github.com/amzn

Are you serious about these links as examples of nice things that Amazon has open sourced? Most of the projects there are development kits to work with Amazon products only.

Check out S2N, Ion, DSSTNE, Carbonado, Guzzle, git-secrets and others.

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