Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)
michaeleisen.org
michaeleisen.org
A few days later his prof comes in, and said: "can you synthesize a bit more, the company we sometimes take assignment from has a customer who also needs it"....
> Before I answer that, let me return for the moment to Dewey Decimal 663: beverage technology. It turns out that in my very first professional job, as an intern thirty years ago, I had a colleague, a chemist, who had worked in beverage technology. The summer before he had been an intern and was given the task of figuring out if there was a particular chemical that gave whisky the distinctive taste of being aged in an oak cask. The company figured if they could isolate the chemical maybe they could just mix it in, and skip five or ten years of aging. So my friend went into the lab and isolated what he thought might be the right compound. He ordered a small vial from a chemical supply company (remember, this was before online shopping and email, so they had to actually write words on paper) and mixed up a batch. It tasted pretty good. (Why can't we computer scientists get research projects that involve consuming alcohol?) My friend was duly congratulated, and he wrote to the chemical supply company and asked for a 55 gallon drum of the stuff. They wrote back, saying "we regret that we can not fill your order because we are currently low on stock and, as I'm sure you know, to produce this chemical we need to age it in oak casks for five years."
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16247254
Couldn’t find the original listing.
The author is a member of Vulfpeck, pretty fun band.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...
https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/7/5690590/spotify-removes-si...
I love malicious compliance in the face of dictatorial companies.
If I buy sawdust from someone and they send me sawdust, and it's structured so that Amazon pays them some money for it, that's gaming the system, not fraud. Amazon can stop allowing them to do it (just like spotify did).
The validity of your point depends on whether you can demonstrate that people do pay spotify to listen to silence.
It is fraud, and although IANAL you'd lose in court.
Copyright infringement requires intentional copying without permission, and so if you independently produce the same thing without copying, that thing now has two distinct copyrights.
Patents may be what you're thinking of, as they require zero knowledge nor intent to infringe upon, but patents do not apply to artistic performances.
As a result of these extra plays, Vulpeck's stream rate increases, but Spotify gets virtually no extra revenue (especially since a user would have to be a premium subscriber to get a fully quiet experience listening to the album). Vulpeck gets paid a bit more, and everyone else gets paid a minuscule amount less.
For reference, here's one article that mentions this model of how Spotify pays its artists: https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
[How Many People Paid 1 Dollar To See How Many People Paid 1 Dollar](http://www.howmanypeoplepaid1dollartoseehowmanypeoplepaid1do...)
I've used them for so many higher end items and got great prices (watches, tools, cameras, etc). You just need a bit of patience is all.
I have a listing like this for some tiny screws that I seem to have lost, but might one day find.
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=20...
eBay seems to have a similar option with "Pause item sales":
https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/ebay-stores/manage-ebay-st...
If you search for “men’s shoes with green laces” you’ll see the real challenge, with a top 10 search result that’s not even shoes (it’s a pack of laces).
[apples to apples] -> frequently returns random "Apple" products, because when you dedupe, stem and remove stopwords from that query, you're left with "apple", and Apple products are big ticket items.
[shirt dress] -> frequently returns dress shirts, because many sites essentially ignore word order or the notion of compound words.
[fish swim vest] -> frequently returns fishing vests, partially because of overstemming (many POS stemmers will stem "fishing" -> "fish", but in a product search setting, it's usually the wrong thing to do).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best,_Netherlands
What's the [best city in europe]? Obviously "Best, Netherlands".
https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/refrigerator-repairing-...
For instance, nine out of ten 122" TVs might actually be 12.2" TVs that got misinterpreted or typo'd to 122", because small TVs are so much more common than large TVs that there can be more malformed small TVs than well formed large TVs, but you can't necessarily discard all of the 122" TVs as outliers, because there are actually valid TVs in that range as well.
Have you found many books that you wanted priced at $0?
gutenberg.org
You are right. :)
My point is that a bug that set book prices in Amazon to zero would be fixed quite fast.
Alternatively bordeebook may be focused on when the competing book sells out (these are used book listings on Amazon which are single units). Then they will be the only alternative, and at a 27% markup. Books also often get bought in bursts (group sales, class assignment, labs, book clubs), so this might be reasonable purchase pattern prediction.
I wasn't convinced it was a bot and not just someone paying close attention to their steam account until I realized they would under-list me every 5 minutes or so. Since there was no activity on that item, and no buy orders, I experimented by listing my item lower and lower, and they kept undercutting me, down to a floor. Their floor ended up being pretty low (around an 85% loss on what they originally bought at), and after I bought at the floor they then re-listed another for double that, before slowly declining again to under-cut me. For an item with no demand, I decided not to try to slowly buy out their entire inventory at the algo's floor.
I found other items that bot was also trading (after I bought them) and discovered that they also change their listing prices based on where people have buy orders set (a good indicator of some demand / market value), so their floor is higher on an item with any demand at all.
When I started talking about moving averages and trend related metrics, the person I was talking to commented that they where doing this in Excel or an Access database and wouldn't know how to handle that with say 250,000 books they might know or care about... then again maybe the downside of having one random crazy price is not even worth a cheap hack.
AFAIK, there have also been some safeguards added into the MWS API itself, which prevent too drastic price changes to be uploaded, which prevent those bugs from surfacing nowadays.
Anyway for repricing just have a hard max of 1k or so, and lower prices if it doesn't sell after six months and again after a year, two years, etc.
I got calls every few months for years afterwards trying to get me to try them again. They raised $30M+ and built out a strong sales team.
I don’t find Ferraris unfairly priced; I just don’t buy them because they are too high priced for my preferences.
Buy it as a normal user from the other company for $23 million. They buy your copy for $22 million. Wait until the end of the returns window (assuming Amazon enforce one) and return it for $23 million. They try to return it to you, but it's too late.
Probably the bookshop notices something is wrong on the $23 million item, but maybe you could make a few thousand this way.