John Carmack and Amazon's $30 1TB thumb drives | Hacker News Reader

John Carmack and Amazon's $30 1TB thumb drives

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79 pointsturrini29 comments

For better or worse, Target and Walmart have both been able to keep a much higher level of quality control over the merchandise and who is selling it. Amazon charges a fee to sell on their marketplace each month: $39.99, in addition to transaction fees. Their incentives are this: maximize the number of sellers to increase fee revenue and give users the largest selection. That is in stark contrast with how retailers work with suppliers, whereas both Walmart and Target have rigorous human screening and management of every supplier and marketplace seller.

https://corporate.target.com/about/products-services/supplie...

It really makes Amazon look and feel like the world's flea market.

I think that's a slight on flea markets. The flea market charges for a booth. The flea market doesn't take a percentage of sales. The flea market doesn't recommend items. The flea market doesn't show different items at different prices to different people. It also doesn't charge buyers a membership fee.

> The flea market doesn't show different items at different prices to different people.

Does Amazon really do that?

> It also doesn't charge buyers a membership fee.

Neither does Amazon.

The industry term is "dynamic pricing." This article from 2014 links (near the top) to Amazon's admission to the practice. https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/...

> > It also doesn't charge buyers a membership fee.

> Neither does Amazon.

Yeah, I think that's exactly what Amazon Prime is...

And for me, personally, it is losing value quickly because of the fuckery Amazon is pulling with all their different stores (it's fucking difficult to buy shit from Amazon and avoid Pantry or whatever the other fuckery is called so you actually get your "free" [not actually free] shipping).

One of the comments says that he did not expect Carmack would fall for that: I had that same feeling. This does, in fact, sound too good to be true which would be the reason I would not buy it. If it were true, as it is around 1/10th of the real price, this would be on every tech frontpage and everyone would be buying them, boxes at a time. If one of the smartest minds in tech falls for something that does not even require tech to research for the 'too good to be true' factor, how are total noobs protected? There really needs to be far better protection for this; sending it back is still work and annoyance.

Outside letting everything go via Amazon's warehouses and having items randomly inspected by qualified staff, I cannot really see a solution though. Apparently reviews do not work either; I bought crap as well that had top reviews and was just crap. I find Aliexpress more reliable, it least it was last time I ordered from it which is over a year ago; it is pretty clear what is crap and what is not. I have gotten very crappy products there but I paid 0.50$-few $ for them, so you know that it will be bad (and actually sometimes it is not! Like some tester phones I had for development; they were very cheap but they work reliable for years). On Amazon sometimes you pay a lot more and it has good reviews; turns out to be a $3 Aliexpress item with a fake brand. Sure I will send it back and get my money back, but still, seems a lot of sellers stay in existence even though that happens. Are other people (Carmack?) not sending this back and leaving a 1* review?

What is a good site to order storage in the EU? I now just go to shops and by them there; sure it costs more but I know what I get.

The solution is that it is already illegal to defraud customers by explicitly and knowingly claiming what you're selling is not what it is in most (if not all) states and the proprietor should just be appropriately punished.

What's bizarre is that people are OK with this and believe it is the buyer's responsibility to somehow investigate the provenance of an item they're trying to purchase.

The problem is that Amazon claims not to be the seller of things that they are selling. The "real" seller is some rando in China who is untouchable by US law.

I suppose it's ok to empower criminal enterprise as long as you call myself a "platform".

Probably when you get to Carmack's wealth, you stop filling your brain with the expected prices of random items and you become more susceptible to things like this.

In the UK politicians sometimes get asked what a pint of milk costs or a loaf of bread, to prove they are in touch with the common man. Because many aren't.

I’m on a tech salary with the savings to match, and I couldn’t tell you what a load of bread costs +\-$1, nor a pint of milk. I don’t think you have to go very far to the wealth ladder to no longer be price-concious about stuff like bread. You need it, you buy it. And I drive a fifteen year old Toyota, not a McLaren. Speaking of which, couldn’t tell you what a gallon of gas costs WA state, either.

Point is, I always found such questions silly. When’s the last time you think a president or prime minister bought a gallon of milk? And would you fault them for having staff do that? Would this really be news to the public?

In very high offices it's fine I guess, since you want to absolutely maximize the time and energy they can spend on the work.

For more less ultra important offices it'a absolutely a problem, because they're not aware of common problems. You see this a lot in US governance pretty well, along the lines of "huh? I can afford health care just fine, so why are people complaining?", while it's a gigantic issue for many.

Well, I looked it up (and ofcourse I get local results) which give me a range from 150-300 euro for a 1TB stick from companies I trust.

Right now it's actually only about a third of the normal price.

It looks like John Carmack knew it was a gamble and wanted to write software to find out what the trick actually was.

I simply don't buy new from Amazon anymore.

Second hand books is all I buy from there; everything else I ever buy online I need to be able to rely on, and I just can't rely on Amazon anymore. I can return it? I don't want to return it, I don't want to be the unpaid police of the Amazon clusterfuck, I want to receive what I ordered. I remember the last two things I bought from there, which were even marked as being sold by the actual manufacturer, came in boxes with spelling errors on. Must be that commingled inventory they maintain.

Fine. Nothing new from Amazon for me anymore. Just second hand books. Their new books are occasionally counterfeit, and often not actually cheaper than a more reliable supplier.

For second hand books you should be using thrift and abe. Better selection and better prices. For music use discogs.

Sometimes true. Sometimes not. When I decide to buy a book, I check prices on:

    Amazon (UK,US and sometimes others too)
    Thriftbooks
    Abebooks
    Alibris
    Wordery
    Ebay
    BookDepository
    BooksPlease

At various times, each of these has proven to be carrying the cheapest available copy (including the ones that don't even sell second hand). There have been times when ignoring amazon would have cost me money.

Let's check the current prices I am offered this very second on the very last book I bought second hand, "Game Engine Gems II":

    Amazon UK - GBP 23.97
    Amazon US - USD 36.93
    Thriftbooks - Out of stock
    Abebooks UK - 23.98
    Abebooks US - USD 56.43
    Alibris UK - 37.65
    Wordery - 63.99 (new)
    Ebay UK - 26.67
    BookDepository - 42.70 (new)
    BooksPlease - 58.12 (new)

Amazon UK is the cheapest I see (by a penny!), and all those prices are higher than what I paid for it on Amazon UK in the past few weeks. To stick with just Thrift and Abe is to cost oneself money.

I do tend to identify, though, the cheapest ever second hand price on Amazon through one of the services that watch for such things, and set an alert when it drifts that low again. With a hundred or so such watches currently active, a couple of times a month I am alerted to a ridiculously low-ball offer on Amazon's second-hand market.

AbeBooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008.

Wait so they own Goodreads and AbeBooks, that is not right.

>> I should have bought a $45 1TB hard drive.

He should be careful about hard drives too. Reminds me of this: https://www.jitbit.com/alexblog/198-chinese-magical-hard-dri...

Great, thanks, I simply love the two nuts to give the thingy some weight.

On that topic, a tool named f3 exists to test the capacity of that flash drive/card you just bought from Amazon.

https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3/

It appears to use hardwired PRNG. Admittedly it's a stretch to imagine flash manufacturers adding f3 defeat feature to firmware, but it's possible. I prefer using bulletproof AES data like:

     1. yes | openssl aes-256-cbc -e -out /media/drive/testfile
     2. eject /media/drive
     3. physically reconnect and mount the drive
     4. openssl aes-256-cbc -d -in /media/drive/testfile | grep -q '[^y]'

Why use pseudorandom or encrypted data? Why not just write the sector number to each sector? For example, in sector 0, write an int64(0). Then read back and check.

Many drives use compression already :)

Zero surprise. Amazon is basically all knock offs when it comes to SD cards as well. Friends don’t let friends buy memory cards on Amazon.

If 1TB were really $30 I would have fitted my NAS with 5TB of those along with a 5TB 2.5" HDD as Redundancy.

Unfortunately NAND price is expected to rise to previous level soon.

I have better luck buying from aliexpress than Amazon. I've taken some really sketchy bets on some SSDs from brands I've never heard of and they have all worked out so far.

Oh man I know that pain he describes in his tweet. I could not afford a hard drive for my IIgs either.

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