What is Lab126, Amazon’s secretive research laboratory?

I interned at Lab126 in college. They advertised quite heavily, and weren't very secretive about their projects, except for the two new ones: the echo and the fire phone. Those were pretty heavily locked down.

I used to work there. I don't find it very mysterious. The only difference is our offices had an extra layer of security/access control, and we had to firm NDAs. The team sitting next to us worked on that robot, but I couldn't tell anyone until it was released.

Considering that it has a wikipedia article it's not much of a secret.

Amazon advertises its existence on its job site the and the office is listed on Google Maps.

It doesn't seem any more secretive than whatever else Amazon works on.

Cool, I actually work for Lab126 now. Lab126 is essentially Amazon's consumer hardware products arm. I would say it's "secretive" in the same way that a company like Apple would be secretive about their next iPhone release. For example, the new Amazon Astro robot had been in the works for a while before the official PR dropped for it. Astro pulls together a lot of different technical initiatives that had been concurrently in the works. If any of those initiatives were to leak, connecting the dots of potential products coming out would be pretty easy.

Refreshing to see original non-english newspaper articles in HN.

I never read el pais. In fact, would have bet heavily that they could not write original articles about SV and SF in general. And then, certainly not in english.

Its great to be wrong.

Bits of trivia: Some Kindle components are named after Mario characters. My Kindle Touch is built on the Yoshi platform (that is the only one I can find right now, but I remember there being more; boot logs contain "K76mcsd:def:skipping on non-Mario-based WW hardware").

My Kindle's root password is "fiona430" (Shrek?).

The Kindle Touch's system is a pretty normal Linux from around 2010. Upstart, D-Bus, Xorg, awesome WM. The shell is made with GTK 2 and lots of unobfuscated, commented (!!!) Javascript. It's a joy to explore. If the kernel wasn't ancient you could run modern Linux apps on it - on the newer models you can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcZiVo1z4Eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoPgXb-JNM

Maybe somebody from lab126 could comment on the culture that brought forth software internally so fun.

I worked there on the earlier days... it is not that secretive. The Kindle was developed there (and it was one of the first devices made by the lab). After it, it came a bunch of other devices.

This arm of Amazon has both hardware and software engineers, mostly on the device side.

Interned here while in university, was a pleasant experience but never felt like I was working in a high security lab or anything of the such. Interesting to see how things seem from the outside.

"revolutionary products like kindle or alexa" <-- This sounds like paid ads to me.

The end of the article is also odd and brings up taxes for some reason:

> ... There will be an assistant in each house, perhaps hanging on the wall or moving on the floor, and through it financial transactions will be carried out, we will control the lights in the house, select the music to be played or carry things from one place to another, he posits. Humanistic technology? Or an iridescent oxymoron?One of the richest men in the world is building prodigious hardware (in competition with Samsung, Apple, Google or LG), but what is his social involvement? Should Bezos pay a 90% tax rate, as the French economist Thomas Piketty argues? “I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer to your question,” notes Zehr. “I’m a successful farm-raised inventor and engineer, and I’m very involved with young people. However, as a species, we have to ask ourselves what world we want to live in.” That, perhaps, is the biggest secret of all.