How Amazon's Bottomless Appetite Became Corporate America's Nightmare - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-amazon-industry-displacement/ <comment><USER3> _Amazon makes no sense. It's the most befuddling, illogically sprawling, and—to a growing sea of competitors—flat-out terrifying company in the world._

No. It makes perfect sense. All economic activity is going to be intermediated digitally. Riches to those who get there first. Jeff Bezos saw this, and knew books were a good way to get his toe in the door. However, his aim was the railroad baron money all along.

When Amazon went from selling books to selling everything, people said it didn't make sense. Even I said that. However, in retrospect, it makes perfect sense.

(In the industrial revolution, people with far sight could predict that all economic activity would be intermediated through mechanized means of transportation. The analogy is perfect.)

<comment><USER4> "selling books to selling everything" seemed a reasonable change to me, and I think it was articulated as a strategy by bezos early on. As you say, books were a starting point.

Selling books to selling computing on demand... That was a big leap, and the most profit generating "pivot" I can think of.

Alexa, video streaming, kindle and ono...these are really Amazon becoming like Google. They're now defined as a business by the skills/abilities they have, not the services they provide. Technology company, not search company.

..this justifies investing more on self driving cars or nuclear power and less on search engines. For most companies this would just be pr/hr-speak, and impossible in practice. Usually companies have to spend most of their money on core products, because it takes money to deliver those products. Tesla or Walmart could define themselves however they want, but they'll never be able to spare more than a penny or two of car dollars on stuff that isn't related to making cars. The margin isn't there.

To be a Google, you need a legitimate cash cow. Amazon now have one, aws.

<comment><USER5> AWS was surprising.

A lot of what Google does, or fails at, makes a lot more sense when you actually think about what its core competencies are: big data, anything that works best with an exabyte of data, a billion CPU-years, and some crazy machine learning / good ol' fashion statistical elbow-grease.

It's obvious how this relates to their original business, Search, and how it relates to their more successful spin-offs and their failures. Spam filtering and self-driving cars are more big data problems (though spam filtering is less impressive nowadays), and the Cloud and YouTube make a lot more sense when you realize that Google _already_ runs a _really_ efficient data-center. Meanwhile, eg, Google Reader was something that didn't really need a Google to run, and suffered for it.

It's not as obvious to me how AWS grew out of Amazon; it doesn't seem obvious to me that you need that much data center to run Amazon (or at least, Amazon- at-that-time).

<comment><USER6> I recall an episode of Software Engineering Daily where the host, Jeff was interviewing some Microsoft guys and they suggested AWS was the result of Amazon selling it's own infrastructure. Jeff interrupted him and said that was "not accurate." Sorry I don't have link to the episode here but it was not a very good one. The Microsoft guy responded by saying the truth of the story didn't matter, which is pretty absurd but I think reflects how Amazon came to dominate the public consciousness. The truth just doesn't matter in advertising or in reputation. We've learned how to undermine it with buzz and mediation.

For example, many were sick of Wal-Mart. Was it because of the way they treated their workers? No. If it were, they wouldn't have ran to Target and Amazon instead. The actual shopping behaviors are guided by convenience but judtified by cultural associations. Target capitalized on the same image appeal without offering anything new at all. Amazon is, culturally, Target + Silicon Valley. Ad agencies all understand this very well. Amazon is neoliberalism in the flesh. There's nothing a bit surprising about it.

<comment><USER7> I've always wondered about how Target can maintain this image as some kind of forward-thinking retailer when they're no better than Walmart is on most of that stuff, but I think the answer is honestly mostly "the Wrong Kind of People shop at Walmart."

<comment><USER8> They offer better service and selection in many areas than Walmart. This is particularly true outside of the south, where Walmart is just better for some reason. Here in the northeast, Walmart is like DMV especially when benefit checks come in.

They also appeal more to women, and eschew product categories that men and poor folk flock to like car parts, guns, fishing, Jesus books, crafting, etc.

<comment><USER9> > They also appeal more to women, and eschew product categories that men and > poor folk flock to like car parts, guns, fishing, Jesus books, crafting, > etc.

Target does _not_ eschew most of those categories (guns and car parts are the only ones I think they consistently don't carry). Also, as an aside, crafting isn't a "men and poor people" category, anyway, but a famously huge interest for middle class women.

<comment><USER8> My local Walmart probably has two full aisles for crafting stuff... probably about 200 linear feet. The next aisle is ball jars and canning.

Target probably has about 40 feet of that stuff, mostly scrapbooking and similar stuff. No yarn, no knitting needles, etc.

Fishing in my local Target in a single 4-ft section, next to 12ft of water bottle and Thermos jars. Walmart is probably two half aisles of stuff.

<comment><USER7> While I don't doubt that there are some differences in focus, Walmart generally has more of everything than Target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a shame in some ways.

Setting aside the rest of it, the core Amazon experience is kinda annoying. Trying to find anything in its morass of Bad metadata is increasingly challenging. The marketplace aspect is comprehensively shitty, to the point that I will entirely avoid anything that isn't actually shipped by Amazon.

Haven't you ever hit a product page for say, a pair of shoes, and the "colour" options are things like "Blue", "Green", "EXTRA LARGE", "pair", "SHOE", "red" - each of which actually turn out to be different products from different sellers with different delivery terms. Or a listing for an SD card that combines different manufacturers for different sizes, except some of them are actually SSDs and other ones are 3.5" hard disks? I'm full of rage just thinking about it.

And it's a shame because ordering from Amazon is great. Fast and reliable delivery, easy returns, that kinda stuff. If it was easier to find things on it, I'd use it even more. As it is, I barely tolerate it, and there are other options that are actually pretty appealing.

<comment><USER11> This absolutely enrages me, too. Especially when other big retailers are copying the same model. It's made shopping for computer parts an absolute nightmare.

I swear the plan is to maximize the time it takes to find anything and thus have more time to try to sell you more junk.

<comment><USER12> > It's made shopping for computer parts an absolute nightmare.

Give Newegg a try, they get it right.

<comment><USER13> Though each order seems to result in six emails, without a way to turn it off.

<comment><USER12> I have filters for all "order" emails, so I haven't even really noticed anything like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-c-hewitt Walmart also sells everything, and it actually sells more of everything than Amazon by quite a lot. Just not online.

The gap is not even close. Walmart sells almost $500 billion in goods every year in the US alone. Amazon sold less than $200 billion in 2017. You could fit more than 2 Amazon.com's into Walmart. This is admitted by the article halfway down but a lot of people don't really take this into account when they think about Amazon.

Amazon may be a very exciting stock, but it is not the leading retailer. It is only the dominant retail website online, and that dominance in market share is actually quite misleading because the Amazon Marketplace is not a 1:1 comparison with how Walmart retail stores work. The Amazon Marketplace is hundreds of thousands of independent retailers daisy chained together to supply the website with valid, high quality offers combined with a small number of conventional vendor suppliers. Walmart is Walmart. When you buy from Walmart you buy from Walmart (unless it's through the online Walmart Marketplace which aspires to be an Amazon Marketplace clone).

Amazon has had some breakout successes in entirely different markets from retail, like their leading cloud business.

<comment><USER14> It was really surprising to me that Walmart, being as anal about logistics as they are, didn't invest all that much in their digital marketplace. Even now their website is not ideal.

<comment><USER15> For traditional retailers, e-commerce is an upstart that 'steals' sales from established geographically-based territories. To support the e-commerce project is to betray all established players. It cannot gain support until it is much too late.

This is true of almost all 'disruptive' technologies, and is the reason that startups can win so big.

<comment><USER16> A topic very well explored in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.

<comment><USER17> Looks interesting, thank you. Just bought it on amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As just a customer, Amazon is the closest I've gotten to Star Trek level technology. I tell Alexa what I want and two hours later a set of headphones, a box of Tide and a package of Earl Grey tea materializes on my front porch.

Not quite as fast as Picard's replicator but for all practical purposes, the same thing.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, any retailer that requires me to fight traffic, parking and morose customer service just to obtain an item that I can instead have delivered to my porch is at a severe disadvantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone is interested, the original Amazon letter to the shareholders (reproduced with every succeeding letter) is worth a read [1]. In some ways it pretty much explains all of Amazon.

[1] [http://media.corporate- ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/repo...](http://media.corporate- ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't see why so few people seem to understand that Amazon's key feature is as a payment processing facilitator. People don't shop at Amazon because they have the best deals or have the best logistics or whatever. They shop at Amazon because they can generally find almost anything on there and have it on its way within seconds. People use Amazon because they don't have to think about it. They don't have to get out their credit card or even think about credit/debit cards. It's so damn simple I really don't see how anyone else is really going to compete. The absolute number one reason I don't go to Amazon competitors to buy things is having to deal with payment processing (from a customer standpoint). The only time I _don 't_ use Amazon is that rare occasion when Amazon (or one of their "partners") doesn't have what I want.

<comment><USER15> I disagree. Their core feature is rapid, reliable delivery of the ordered item. Other sites are cheaper than Amazon, but I don't trust them to actually deliver what I order in a timely manner.

When I do shop elsewhere, I don't mind entering payment details as long as I'm not required to save them (I don't trust most sites not to be hacked and leak my payment details). But if I ever get a delivery time over a week or a 'back ordered' status, I cancel the order immediately, because I know that they don't really have the item on hand and are just gambling that they can broker the sale at a profit. I've had merchants outright admit that they can't fulfill an order unless they can add some high margin accessories to an order. Not a game I'm interested in playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think what people don't understand about Amazon, is that internally it's not one big company, it's a thousand little companies that serve each other through what amount to API's. In that sense it's much more like a conglomerate.

This confused me when I went to meet with some of the teams because it didn't seem like they even talked - and that was kind of the point, they weren't supposed to really talk. Each stove-pipe had to "sell" their services to each other or build them from scratch.

So in that sense it's always competitive because every group is basically fending for themselves like a startup, but has fantastic resources and access to services backing them up. That also means they can "move" into any industry that there is margin in, and rapidly grow inside of it.

Pretty genius really.

<comment><USER22> I think that's definitely part of it. It's very interesting to observe the lifecycle of many of these services.

\- The company has a business need. \- Because of the economics of scale, it often makes sense to develop an internal solution. This is true both for fullfilment centres, and for purely internal problems: e.g. a video conferencing system for half a million employees. \- As the product matures, the team or leadership recognises how people beyond Amazon might benefit from it. (think fullfilment, AWS, etc) \- The internal service becomes a public product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazon is winning because they have realized in the information age, central planning has become far easier and more effective. The bigger they get, the more they'll grow until they take over everything.

<comment><USER24> The bigger they get, the more the chorus for anti-trust will grow.

Look at this article for example:

[https://www.ft.com/content/aba8d444-fb94-11e7-a492-2c9be7f31...](https://www.ft.com/content/aba8d444-fb94-11e7-a492-2c9be7f3120a)

Which cites this too:

[https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust- parado...](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)

The problem for some of their competitors too is that if they do suddenly trigger a slew of new laws, then Google Play and the Apple Store will probably get caught up in it too.

The other thing that could happen is the balkanization of the internet, where heavy trade tariffs will start being applied to America's dominant internet firms. It's already effectively happened in China. They've certainly not engendered any positive will in the rest of the world either for all their tax dodging.

<comment><USER25> Unlike most accusations of a monopoly (see Apple) this is actually approaching something close to being applicable.

One piece of anti-trust law is that you can't leverage one monopoly to create another. Can definitely see this become an issue as Amazon gets bigger and bigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well, Mr. Bezos' own nightmare is Alibaba for obvious reasons - when most of what he does is reselling stuff from China, how he is gonna compete if he has to sell Chinese stuff cheaper than Chinese do themselves?

That does not compute...

Btw: Alibaba is still slowly picking at US market, teaspoon at a time [https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d677a4e77517a4d/share.html](https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d677a4e77517a4d/share.html)

<comment><USER27> until they have warehouses in the US, it's worth it to me to pay the amazon premium to get stuff delivered quickly

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Given the outsized role that AWS has on the bottom line (mentioned in this article and elsewhere), what is publicly known about which parts of AWS are the most lucrative?

</comment><comment><USER29> Now only Apple and Alphabet is more valuable than Amazon and it looks like Amazon will overtake Alphabet to be second only to Apple soon.

<comment><USER30> Next up: Facebook to rename itself to also begin with the letter A.

<comment><USER31> Acebook?

<comment><USER32> I'd so much prefer SafeBook, but it won't happen soon...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The author seems prone to exaggeration. Everything was going wrong for Amazon in 2014? Amazon makes no sense. Working at Amazon is like a Dickens novel. Amazon breaks all the rules.

</comment><comment><USER34> FYI - Amazon is a huge driver of small businesses. More than 50% of all the revenue from their whole e-commerce business is from 3rd party sellers, who are generally small operators.

<comment><USER35> This can be true and still be not so great at the same time. What any company like Amazon tries to do is capture revenue, typically by taking it away from someone else rather than create something new.

In the short term that can mean a boon for small business as large competitors to Amazon are undermined. In fact, Amazon uses small sellers to do the undermining. Once everyone in a market segment essentially works for Amazon then they are free to tighten down the screws and extract more profits.

<comment><USER36> In my experience when we brought our small (10yr old) brand to Amazon prime it doubled our revenue in the first year. Albeit at a lower margin, but still higher that wholesale. The customer crossover is surprisingly minimal, so it is not stealing from our traditional online business. I know this through extensive promotions on our direct website that do not seem to sway demand on amazon.com for the same thing at a much higher price.

<comment><USER37> Wait, are those products listed at higher prices on Amazon or your website?

If I can get an item cheaper from the seller directly, assuming paying them securely is not a problem and shipping costs stay constant, of course I'll switch to buying from the seller's website directly.

Unless if the seller's website is harder to use or their business/domain is name not that memorable/trustworthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I dislike how I can't get prime for just shipping without the video services.

Isn't this just bullying Netflix and other video streaming services? Not only they sell stuff online but they also have a video service. Which is fine but it's not a la carte.

It feels monopolistic. But I'm not sure if that's fair or not of a comparison but I personally don't think it's fair.

</comment><comment><USER39> How can anyone justify in a P/E ratio of > 250 is beyond me. Math and logic seem both out the window. For investors who want to invest on the scale of decades - like you and I- this will become either a cautionary tale or the greatest returns on an ecommerce stock - ever(Only by then it will be much more than ecommerce).

<comment><USER40> It is because Amazon purposefully depressing the earnings part of P/E by outlaying massive amounts into capex and R&D. They have a gross profit of ~$66b but a operating income of ~$4b. If they halved their operating expenses that ~$4b becomes ~$34b and the P/E becomes ~30 which is much more reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Eh, I still don't buy the hyperventilating.

The breathless narrative is that Amazon is some all-consuming all dominating monster that is just going to crush everyone everywhere.

I don't see any justification for this.

(1) Walmart is much bigger. Not to mention Tencent and Alibaba who.

(2) They have well-funded competition and no monopoly power in any of their sectors.

(3) They only have 4% of all retail (online and off) hardly a stranglehold.

Yes, they will do well and grow, but I don't think they will just effortlessly win in every market like this article is implying.

</comment><comment><USER42> "In 2015, AWS was responsible for two-thirds of total operating profit. Last year it was more than 100 percent."

AWS was responsible for more than 100% of the operating profit? Despite being impossible statistically, is this a sensationalist way of saying that it accounted for all of the profit and covered some or all deficit as well?

</comment><comment><USER43> > It's the third-most-valuable company on Earth, with smaller annual profits > than Southwest Airlines Co., which as of this writing ranks 426th.

Would somebody mind explaining this to those of us who are not investors? Is this saying Amazon's stock is super inflated by investment speculation?

<comment><USER44> Investors are credibly speculating that Amazon will continue to have very high revenue growth rates.

Southwest last year grew revenue 4%

Amazon grew revenue 38% (!!)

If you believe that pattern will continue for a very long time, it makes sense to give Amazon an enormous valuation.

As a practical example, if you discount the future by 10%, Amazon is growing discounted yearly revenue by 28%; Southwest by -6%.

Now stocks follow (the sum of) discounted future profits, not current. If Amazon's revenue increase continued indefinitely, while holding fixed profits, Amazon would be worth an infinite amount, while Southwest's value is actually bounded. Of course Amazon certainly will slow revenue growth at some point - but it isn't too hard to see why it could very well be worth an order of magnitude more than Southwest.

<comment><USER45> Yes all about growth. Google is similar as now over $800b market cap and growing at over 22% and accelerating but also much more profitable than Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> My biggest issue is the anti competitive behavior by Amazon in banning all companies on their marketplace from being allowed to sell competing products from companies like Google.

Fine do not sell yourself from not allowing anyone else is going too far.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe someone can explain the unit economics of how Amazon makes a profit. Identify the product category (outside of the marketplace business and AWS) where Amazon has a cost advantage versus the most direct competitor - <USER2> Buy, Petsmart, Netflix, Costco, etc. It's hard to do.

<comment><USER47> Most people don't buy at Amazon because it is the cheapest.

<comment><USER48> People on the internet tend to ignore the value of a quality item, and of one- day Prime shipping.

And even within Amazon, I'll buy something marked "sold and shipped by Amazon" before I'll be a similar product from "ReallyGoodOverSeasNumberOneCo."

And I've had incredible luck with the Amazon Basics line of goods. So far, just batteries and headphones and other miscellany, but the quality is far superior to any of the Eastern drop-shippers.

Then again, it was AT&T that ran commercials in the 80's saying "You get what you pay for" and "Be the best and you'll never go out of business."

AT&T is now out of business, with its name bought by Southwestern Bell after its death in order to cash in on the brand.

<comment><USER49> I'll warn you right now that even if you buy something "sold and shipped by Amazon" you can get one of the items sold by 3rd party as new. Amazon dumps them all in the same box. I believe they call it "co-mingling". You may still get junk/counterfeit for all your work. The only things actually protected properly are direct Amazon brands.

So you are already fully deceived by "sold and shipped by Amazon". It may not be.

<comment><USER48> I've heard about co-mingling, but taking a chance with "sold and shipped by Amazon" is about the best I can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The Fortune 500 have an alternative. Build a nonprofit cooperative for their own data centers. Offer only S3, in memory S3, RDS, Lambda (with GPU/FPGA instances too), and SQS equivalents as generic compute services. KISS. Beat AWS on price and simplicity.

<comment><USER50> IBM/Lenovo can do it too. Custom fabric for affinity of Lambdas and in memory S3 on the same rack for insanely low latency. Killer is an MPI Broadcast primitive over a tree network and other bare bone equivalents of fundamental MPI operations. DOE alone will stop buying CRAY when they can use commodity low latency racks for HPC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> How can a company the size and market dominance as Amazon not be subject to monopoly discussion?

They have grown far to big. Unfortunately with Alibaba there is no more alternative than to allow companies to become as dominant.

</comment><comment><USER52> Jeff Bezos is a star trek fan. May be this explains his desire to create a society free of labour which means eradicating the middle men as the first process.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wonder when Amazon will break itself apart (a la Alphabet) in order to lessen regulatory scrutiny?

<comment><USER54> I have been wondering the same thing. How would that affect employees though? For instance, employee movement within Amazon is straightforward today, but will that still be the case if Amazon went the Alphabet way?

<comment><USER55> Employee movement between companies in Alphabet is not really different than movement within Google.

I would consider movement within Amazon to be more difficult than movement within Alphabet as you have to interview again for your new team at Amazon, or at least this was the case when I was there.

(I work at Google and previously worked at AWS)

<comment><USER22> Does the recipient team of an internal transfer at Google not conduct any kind of interview? (I'm not talking about your traditional whiteboard interview, but surely people meet up and make sure that the transfer meets the bar of the new team?) I've noticed that expected skill for a job level depends strongly on location, so trying to sync up with a transfer doesn't feel strange to me.

<comment><USER55> Sorry I should have been more precise. The manager has to approve the transfer so presumably they would talk to you first to make sure you're a good fit and give you more context into the role. So I suppose although it's not called an interview, it basically is one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Unfortunately, this is merely Bezos cashing in on the US government's ignorance on sales tax and the internet and winning [1]. If you see Bezos' history you can see that he is a financial engineer and he engineered it well [2]. That's not to say it isn't ridiculously impressive regardless of that and there were many other points that could have been missed, and weren't.

But the amount of money that was, essentially accidentally, injected into Amazon this way, accelerating it's revenue by double-digit percentages in a way inaccessible to it's competitors is staggering.

The problem with mail order has always been that they can never match Walmart's prices on logistics, because of the economies of scale. Because Walmart's customers bridge the expensive last mile for Amazon. Amazon has worked very hard to make the cost difference for the last mile less, but even now it's not a match. So how could Amazon ever become competitive ? Tax optimization.

And then Bezos' figured he could make sales tax pay for last mile : that despite having local state infrastructure he would not have either pay sales tax himself or force his customers to, which was a big gamble, and frankly questionable in legality, a clear advantage over his shop-based competition. But he won, despite a few incidents. This was the main, but not the only successful "tax optimization" Amazon successfully executed.

This is the same hole Alibaba exploited and quite a few others. Cheap toys from China work because they

1) don't pay fair price for delivery due to international postal agreements [3]

2) don't pay taxes like their US based competitors do. They don't pay sales tax, nor do they pay quite a few other taxes. (I'm going to assume this is well known)

Now there are plenty of other companies that were extremely well positioned to do the same, above all perhaps Ebay, but they ... well they screwed up royally.

Perhaps this did not need to lead directly to Amazon and Alibaba/"China inc" perse, but something like them are the result of government "planning" (between quotes because this is how a whole host of negotiations by lots of people interested in other things turned out, not the result of anyone's plan, it is a series of accidents (and mostly costly mistakes) cemented in international and interstate agreements).

So the great accomplishment of Amazon and Bezos is to (a) be new, and able to construct their companies around the holes in these agreements (b) to know about the holes in the agreements in the first place. The greatest threat to Amazon is China.

But sadly, and despite that I agree that Amazon's technical and organizational structure are a remarkable feat, the company is the result of Bezos exploiting accidental governmental financial engineering to a large extent.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/29/technology/amazon-sales- tax/...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/29/technology/amazon-sales- tax/index.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career)

[3] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the- postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from- china/?utm_term=.44bcf4113384)

</comment><comment><USER26> It isn't, but Mr. Bezos wants everybody to think that it does, and it appears that it works for him.

</comment><comment><USER57> > In 2015, AWS was responsible for two-thirds of total operating profit. Last > year it was more than 100 percent

wait, so why doesn't amazon ditch the online shopping business?

<comment><USER58> Because they can switch on a 30% profit margin at a moments notice once the competition is sufficiently demolished

<comment><USER59> Not quite. Firstly, retail is not a huge loss maker like people make it seem. Amazon has shown in the past that it can make a 6.6% margin on retail (which is fairly huge). Even right now North American retail makes about as big a profit as AWS, losses are coming from international retail.

So in the end you can imagine Amazon being something like 6-7% margin on retail (that's not assuming any technological paradigm shifts like fully automated warehouses, amazon owned banking and payments, fully amazon owned logistics) and 25% margins on AWS.

On top of that you have a fast growing ads business that is destined to rival Google and Facebook (if not displace them) with fat margins, and a big chunk of the smarthome/IoT market via Alexa and AWS.

<comment><USER45> Doubt you will see Amazon compete in ads at a competitive level with Google or even fb.

Big problem is media buyers knowledge of their platform and willing to.learn it as well as integration with the ad ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Amazon is just one scalability improvement in blockchain away from getting a major DApp-based competitor with the potential to obliterate its e-commerce side (while keeping cloud one) within a decade.

<comment><USER61> What part of a decentralized app gives such a market advantage?

To think that centralization is Amazon's main weakness is, pardon me, quite comical. At the end of the day, much of their _power_ stems from efficient centralization of supply chain, purchaser-side negotiations, economies of scale, and team coordination.

Just because an app is on the blockchain doesn't innately make it a winner. It has to deliver the same value to customers at a cheaper price. Amazon doesn't make much money on most transactions, so saying the "cut out the middle-man to save money" argument doesn't really work.

So where's the logic? I'm genuinely interested, but just not seeing it.

<comment><USER60> First, as you say Amazon is a middleman charging from 3-15% per sale, making many small 3rd party sellers unable to compete (if they pay shipping themselves etc.)

Moreover, they often abuse their position by insta-banning sellers e.g. upon very first listing etc. due to faulty machine learning fraud detection, so using their platform is increasingly risky even for quality sellers.

The main advantages of Amazon are centralization of payment information without the need to enter CC etc. at different shops for every single purchase (which blockchain has no issues with by design), fast shipping times with Prime (this might be tricky to reproduce; here is the supply chain efficiency advantage you mention; nevertheless a drop-shipping idea with generic warehouse robotics would commodize it) and returns for any reason (this is people-intense unfortunately and not so easy to automate right now). For us programmers, they also supply state-of-art merchant API services with some interesting things like real-time repricing possibility, observing top sellers for any category to duplicate etc. yet there are quite a few flaws and their API feels dated and could be made much better.

Amazon as a brand name is also trustworthy; here trust-less approach in DApps and observing any seller/buyer's transaction history can obliterate this advantage, though some implications are quite scary.

To replace Amazon, you'd need a marketplace, which seems like the easiest thing for a DApp; another DApp for background checks on sellers/buyers; for Prime you'd need additional robotics (which is no longer so difficult to be honest due to advancements in the past 3 years, especially in confined areas with known environment map), cheap land with pre-fab warehouses that could be owned and ran by individual communities. Obviously, human nature would be biggest risk here (trading illegal goods and services via chains of fully- automated companies, referencing each other), and you might argue that orchestrating all of this might require something like Amazon to exist anyway; I believe though that it only takes for Amazon to make a few hundred capable single programmers to become upset to solve many of coordination problems in automated fashion. Legal and political requirements might be much higher hurdle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The really terrifying thing about Amazon is that investors allowed them to operate at a loss for decades, which is a luxury afforded to nobody else. How are you supposed to compete with that? Even if you knew how to build a competitor to Amazon, the market would never give you enough time to do it.

<comment><USER63> Retain control of the company and deliver 20 - 30% yoy growth and you can do whatever the hell you want.

Amazon is a darling to investors.

<comment><USER64> It is now, but for a long time investors lamented Amazons self investment and long-term outlooks.

<comment><USER65> Which is fine; those people chose not to invest in Amazon.

<comment><USER64> Actually only sort of, it's likely only because Bezo's retained enough control to fight off an activist investor with a shorter term horizon. Structuring themselves to insulate from takeover by short term interests is something that several startups have conciously done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think Amazon illustrates that our understanding of 'monopoly' is lacking. It is not just a company which owns 95%+ of the market which is dangerous, but just normal old large companies that own 20% or 40% or so of markets. Oligopolies have their own effect on markets - the econ 101 explanation is a kinked demand model where there is no incentive for the companies to lower their price.

<comment><USER67> Whose understanding of monopoly? For example, the EU antitrust law cares about whether the firm is dominant in the market - a large share is only one way to show that. (And it's not conclusive evidence! A firm can still dispute that they have dominance, despite the large share)

<comment><USER7> US antitrust enforcement has basically settled on "if it's not directly leading to higher costs for consumers leave it alone." This is kind of Matt Stoller's signature issue that he's always writing about.

<comment><USER59> I actually like that definition. If it's causing harm to customers - prove it. Efficiency is not a crime.

<comment><USER7> The problem with it is twofold: one, it ignores indirect harms to consumers from monopoly power (for instance, maybe they're not engaging in all-out price gouging but they are keeping competitors or new services out of the market). Two, it ignores other externalities, like regulatory capture or systemic risk, that result from having huge business interests.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pandora Falls Below IPO Price, Reversing Gains - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-16/pandora-plunges-below-ipo-price-reversing-yesterday-s-gains-3-.html

<comment><USER2> This is not surprising, but really too bad.

I love Pandora, I have a Pandora One account, and try to buy as much music through the as possible. But still, I don't see how they can make any profit on me, much less someone riding for free.

Pandora seems to have been stuck in limbo for years, right on the brink of bankruptcy several times. I truly hope they make it, they are one of those companies that if I had Bill Gates money I would buy them and fund it just for the value they provide in terms of new music discovery.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From another report on the same event, this general caution: "Pandora's fall from grace is an extreme example of a larger trend. In a bad omen for the still-weak IPO market, 31 of this year's 73 offerings have broken below their IPO prices and 41 are trading below their first-day closing prices, says Renaissance Capital."

[http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/stocks/2011-06-16-pandor...](http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/stocks/2011-06-16-pandora- falls-below-ipo-price_n.htm)</comment>


Anonymous hacker exposed after dropping USB while throwing Molotov cocktail - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/anonymous-hacker-exposed-after-dropping-usb-drive-while-throwing-molotov-cocktail/ <comment><USER2> Violence, more often than not, carries water for hardliners to repress the people and squander legitimate political capital. It's only the last straw when power is monopolized and stubbornly refuses to acknowledge or address legitimate grievances. JFK quote here.</comment>


Does Flip acquisition herald the rise of dumb tech? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/03/20/does-flip-acquisition-herald-rise-dumb-tech

<comment><USER2> easy to use != dumb

</comment><comment><USER3> No, it signals the maturing of the market and a diversifying into many niches. A completely mature market will have products at many price points serving many different needs. Most tech markets are not yet mature which is why there is so much room for entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been looking for a digital camera that is just as simple as the Flip video camera for my older parents. It is impossible to find one (any recommendation is welcomed). I think there is a market out there, for very simple devices that just do their work with no frills.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find his description of Drupal as "Internet-based dumb tech" interesting, considering Drupal's reputation as a hard to use, high learning curve CMS.

<comment><USER6> Those descriptors are very true. But Drupal qualifies as "internet-based, dumb tech" because a lot of places still use the custom, desktop-based online publishing apps that were created between 1998 and 2004 or so. There are companies out there still charging an arm and a leg to create custom enterprise CMSs for publishing companies. Meanwhile the Wordpress folks are offering hosted "dumb tech" to VIPs for $500/month/blog and Drupal's founder just launched Acquia, which aims to do the same thing for Drupal.

Compared to some of the CMSes I've used (the one at Slate.com is incredibly complex, for example) Drupal is dumb tech.</comment></comment>


Popular Unaccesible iOS apps by irresponsible developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fawny.org/2012/03/01/voiceoverless/

<comment><AUTHOR> As an iOS developer I can say that I've never tested my apps using VoiceOver. Not because I didn't want to spend the time or figured it was such a small part of the market that it wasn't economically viable. The thought literally never entered into my mind. I never thought someone who couldn't see the screen would ever interact with it.

This has made me think of other minority groups that I may have been discriminating against. The colorblind, the deaf.

"I didn't know" is almost never a valid excuse and it most certainly isn't in this scenario.

</comment><comment><USER2> Apple really should consider adding accessibility testing to the app approval process or working with a group to provide it in parallel.

Maybe it wouldn't result in the app being rejected but Apple should provide developers with feedback about potential accessibility issues.</comment>


Q&A with Jamie Dimon on the Future of Finance - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-jamie-dimon-interview/ <comment><USER2> And what would a guy like Jamie Dimon know about the future of finance? Honest question. If anyone would have said back in October 2008: "hey, guys, in about 7 or 8 years 20% of the world economy is going to be run on negative interest rates" that guy would have been escorted right out of the building, or worse. Guys like Jamie Dimon were (and still are) completely out of the loop, they are in their current position only because the whole show does not run on economics principles anymore, it's all politics and power games.

In retrospect, comparing the "dramatic" times of back then (anyone remembering about Hank Paulson crawling and begging in front of a room full of bankers?) to what's happening now I would say that our situation has gotten a thousand times worst (fortunately for common sense there's no Janet Yellen or the current Treasure Secretary crawling in front of a room full of pension fund managers).

I mean, I remember that the financial press was going berserk around October 2008 or so because the money market funds had started "to break the buck", as they say, that was unprecedented. ([http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/10/twenty-...](http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2013/10/twenty- eight-money-market-funds-that-could-have-broken-the-buck-new-data-on-losses- during-the-2008-c.html#.VtarJYX3xsA)) . But just the other day I was reading an article in a recent issue of The Economist (too lazy to search for the link) where, very non-nonchalantly I would say, the author was informing us that the life insurance industry (and I would add the private pensions industry as well as the mutual funds) is in a sort of an existential crisis, as in it cannot guarantee the returns it promised to its policyholders anymore. Crazy enough, the numbers from the article were in fact making sense, and yes, indeed, it seems like the numbers just don't add up anymore for the the life insurance industry (to which I would add the private pensions industry and the mutual funds industry). Problem is, the entire Western capitalistic system is depending on these industries. If they go the way of the dodo (meaning no more guaranteed 4% annual return, at least) then... I don't know what will happen then, I think no-one knows.

But, yeah, maybe Jamie Dimon has indeed the answers to one of the biggest (and I would say the most interesting) crisis in the history of capitalism. Trouble is he's as clueless as we are.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more. Dimon is no fool which means the blatant untruths he spews in this puff piece are willful. He doesn't mention the $55bn of taxpayers' money that was given to JP Morgan to buy the crap Bear Stearns was hiding in its balance sheet, nor his role in the naked shorting that helped Bear go down originally. He doesn't mention that his institution is still insolvent because of all of the CDS instruments carried off balance sheet. Oh, and the Whale incident carries stiff penalties. Well it would if Sarbanes- Oxley was actually enforced or the SEC did anything but look at porn all day.

Bloomberg should be ashamed of this piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In case you're wondering -- deep down inside, here's what Jamie Dimon really thinks about that pesky regulation stuff:

 _In a new afterword for the release of the paperback version of her book A Fighting Chance, Warren recalls that the tenor of the conversation between the two policy adversaries soured when Dimon complained about financial regulations that she has supported:_

 _When the conversation turned to financial regulation and Dimon began complaining about all the burdensome rules his bank had to follow, I finally interrupted. I was polite, but definite. No, I didn't think the biggest banks were overregulated. In fact, I couldn't believe he was complaining about regulatory constraints less than a year after his bank had lost billions in the infamous London Whale high-risk trading episode. I said I thought the banks were still taking on too much risk and that they seemed to believe the taxpayers would bail them out -- again -- if something went wrong._

 _Our exchange heated up quickly. By the time we got to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we weren't quite shouting, but we were definitely raising our voices. At this point -- early in 2013 -- Rich Cordray was still serving as director of the consumer agency under a recess appointment; he hadn't yet been confirmed by the Senate, which meant that the agency was vulnerable to legal challenges over its work. Dimon told me what he thought it would take to get Congress to confirm a director, terms that included gutting the agency's power to regulate banks like his. By this point I was furious. Dodd-Frank had created default provisions that would automatically go into effect if there was no confirmed director, and his bank was almost certainly not in compliance with the those rules. I told him that if that happened, "I think you guys are breaking the law."_

 _Suddenly Dimon got quiet. He leaned back and slowly smiled. "So hit me with a fine. We can afford it."_

"Guess What Happened When JPMorgan's CEO Visited Elizabeth Warren's Office"

Huffington Post, 3/31/2015, [http://huff.to/1CHlXIy](http://huff.to/1CHlXIy)

<comment><USER5> According to Elizabeth Warren...

<comment><USER4> I highly doubt she's lying, if that's what you're saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More about Jamie Dimon:

[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/jamie-dimon-the- lance...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/jamie-dimon-the-lance- armstrong-of-finance.html)</comment>


A call to arms: Helping Internet services accept anonymous users - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/call-arms-helping-internet-services-accept-anonymous-users <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that HN is among the websites that remove functionality for Tor users (eg. registration). Despite all the talk on surveillance and anonymity on here, HN does not make it possible to express opinions or reveal information under real anonymity.

<comment><USER3> HN sometimes disables registration entirely. It's an experiment in creating a large, long-lived community that doesn't degenerate over time. It's not primarily a platform that promotes free speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of calling upon others to push yet others to accept anonymous users why not rebuild these services and show the world how easy it is to deal with anonymous users wreaking havoc on your website?

<comment><USER5> Not to mention the total absence of anonymous user monetization strategies.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this entire privacy scare is an opportunity to get rid of the advert- based business model and offer the opportunity to privacy-conscious users to get the same or a better service, in exchange for a few bitcoin cents, instead of getting tracked so that the jackals can better precision-bomb you with false commercial messages.

<comment><USER7> _> to get rid of the advert-based business model and offer the opportunity to privacy-conscious users to get the same or a better service, in exchange for a few bitcoin cents_

Great in theory, but people in general do not understand the advertising model or just don't care enough about being tracked that the micro-payment alternative is attractive to them (even if there is a method of making it essentially anonymous and untrackable). I'd be happy to pay small amounts for an ad-free un-tracked experience, as may you, but we are in a minority small enough that it isn't worth chasing (and to be frank, I'm cynical enough to not believe I won't be tracked (more than just to ensure I got what the payment covered) even if I did pay...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have encountered this even on forums that insist on having all posts be "anonymous" (usernames are anonymized). It was a rather sad experience to not be able to get help with a medical condition I had at the time simply because I wanted to be truly anonymous while posting about this rather stigmatized condition.

</comment><comment><USER9> The sad truth is that for large classes of Internet abuse, IP is a pretty strong indicator of reputation, positive or negative, and the reputation of an unknown (which includes exit nodes of VPNs and Tor nodes) tend to be well below average.

Any _content_ based semantics are far more expensive than a DNS query (or better: a local IP reputation table lookup). It's the online equivalent of individual stereotyping based on obvious surface characteristics -- even if only unevenly true, they're a cheap heuristic, and, as the saying goes, the thing about stereotypes is that they often have an element of truth to them.

It's not just the big players who do this either. Lauren Weinstein, long-time Internet privacy advocate, has taken to blocking entire TLDs which are characterized by near total spam -- sorting out who's legit is just too much work. And of course DULs are heavily used in email configurations -- very few sites will accept email from such spaces.

I really like the idea of Tor and really wish it could be tractable, but absent some alternate means of sorting out the good guys (and keeping bad actors off of Tor, without penalizing others, _and_ remaining consistent with goals of privacy and anonymity), that's going to be difficult.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_usin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_users_using_Tor)

The trouble with Tor was that whereas Wikipedia edits from ordinary IPs were only about half terrible, _most_ of what came from Tor was abuse. (Largely obnoxious sockpuppetry, offensive usernames, etc.) They know perfectly well this is the reason Tor is largely blocked from editing, they're pretending not to know. Not addressing the actual reason comes across as disingenuous.

So, the discussions go: "WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM???" "Please stop urinating on our carpet." "YOU JUST HATE FREEDOM!!"

</comment><comment><USER11> Any site that uses Persona could be used anonymously through a trusted identity provider that generates on-demand, expiring email addresses.

(sans traffic monitoring ofc)

<comment><USER12> That only works if a website has such a large userbase that many people use the email service.

C.f. [http://xkcd.com/1105/](http://xkcd.com/1105/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not just TOR but in China you have to use a VPN to access about half the internet, and many sites restrict your access because you're connecting to them from the VPN. Paypal threatened to ban me if I ever forgot to turn off the VPN or accidentally withdrew money while in the wrong country.

Maybe the solution is more people using TOR and VPNs so sites will have to face losing their audience if they don't accommodate them.</comment>


Show HN: Exemplar Networks for a Good Time (NSFW) - <AUTHOR> http://driftwheeler.com  <--- Download APK here.
Citation: Discriminative Unsupervised Feature Learning with Exemplar Convolutional Neural Networks (https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.6909)
50,000 MetArt-style nudes. No banners, no ads, no hassles, no distractions. Smart image zoom to fit the woman to the screen.
See random pics (WANDER). When you like one, see the photoshoot on repeat (TRANCE).
To search for something-- e.g., grass, beach, face, pussy-- long press the image (DREAM). This finds nearest neighbors in deep feature space, but only works reliably for simple concepts because it's fully unsupervised. The features you selected by long pressing (inside the box that appears) are more likely, but only very simple searches are "pure".
For example, long press a close-up pussy to see more pussies... find one you like, then press TRANCE to see the rest of her. Long press sand and water to see more girls on the beach. Long press forest greenery to see more girls in the forest. Long press a close-up face to see similar faces... And so on.
If this is not familiar to you, take a look at: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/cnnembed/ Consider one of the big "maps" on that webpage. Notice how the tiny image patches clustered together in a map tend to be similar to each other. When you long press the image in Melondream, a box appears. That box is like one of the tiny image patches. Melondream's DREAM shows you images having patches near the patch you selected, in Melondream's map. Also notice how impure even a supervised dream would be. <comment><AUTHOR> This is an Android app. You may ask whether it's safe. Our reply:

1\. We wrote it and we're telling you it's clean. And awesome.

2\. Two independent security teams, one at The Register and and one at Wired, vetted the APK before publishing. In their opinion, it's clean and safe.

3\. It requires no Android system permissions. It runs in the Android sandbox, with Android's maximum security. If you don't understand what this means, please see: [https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/index.htm...](https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/index.html)

4\. Melondream has thousands of regular users, and has been installed on tens of thousands of Android devices. No one complains and no one has problems.

Enjoy!</comment>


Apple responds to Maps criticism - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/09/20/apple-responds-to-maps-criticism/ <comment><USER2> Typica damage control PR bullcrap that contains lots of words that say nothing.</comment>


Show HN: Zengine – a platform to build custom business apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.zenginehq.com/ <comment><USER2> I've often thought that hand coding custom business apps from scratch (even with the multitude of frameworks, libraries and themes available) is going to be looked back on in years to come as a painfully inefficient and costly way to build things.

I run a custom software house. There's a huge amount of overlap in what our customers ask us to build in terms of features. I've longed for some kind of plug and play platform, that allows the us to include modules such as authentication, a reporting UI, workflows, email scheduling and templates etc, and then customise them to produce a functioning app as per the client's requirements. We've actually had a go at creating something similar to this in .Net and it's some of the way there. We use it and I've often dabbled with the idea of commercialising it.

I'll be interested to see how close this is to my vision...nice work :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a co-founder of WizeHive, and Zengine is our new product.

Zengine's JavaScript plugin architecture, currently an alpha proof-of-concept, will allow developers of any skill level to add rich functionality to the Zengine UI in minutes. These plugins can then be used privately or shared with the world. It's the power and promise of Salesforce without all the complexity and cost.

Feedback on the idea itself and the technical direction of the architecture is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> We use WizeHive over here at Fity Social Media and anyone looking for a good data management system, Zengine (Wizehive) is the way to go. They have a great support team, who helped us out a lot in setting it all up, quick response times and always helpful. Definitely an A+ produc

</comment><comment><USER4> The CRM/sales video is impressive. Congrats.

After reading the HN tile, Zoho immediately came to my mind (maybe the starting Z? ). Are you targeting the same customers ? Zoho Creator looks similar in functionality.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback! My name is Anthony Putignano, VP of Engineering at WizeHive. Zoho Creator is great and indeed the functionality is similar. One point of differentiation we're particularly excited about with Zengine is the JavaScript plugin architecture: [https://zenginehq.github.io/developers/plugins/](https://zenginehq.github.io/developers/plugins/) Using plugins, a developer can extend the Zengine interface with new mini- and full-page- UIs. Please check it out! We're looking for feedback on the idea & technical implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really awesome, I've been meaning to build something that can append data to rows. This looks like it will do the job.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm using Zengine as a CRM. The flexibility is excellent.</comment>


I'll fix your computer, but don't have to be nice about it - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.infoworld.com/offtherecord/archives/2008/12/is_courtesy_a_n.html

<comment><USER2> The psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter had a particular gripe with people who were rude. The empitomy of gentility and politeness himself, he did not tolerate rudeness. Life has enough problems, and petty people who don't respect their fellow human beings only add to these problems. Frankly I'm with Dr. Lecter on this one.</comment>


Github Spam Vulnerability Exposed - <AUTHOR> http://oppos.es/1bds0n7

<comment><USER2> Not a "vulnerability". Nothing is being exploited here. Show there be rate limiting on following? Probably. Does it really matter? No</comment>


TempleOS is applying to Y Combinator. Partners desired, send an email - <AUTHOR> http://www.templeos.org/TempleOS.html <comment><USER2> _" A troll might say, "It can crash!" We used DOS for years and loved it. Computers even had a reset switch! ... Think of the speed and simplicity of ring-0-only and identity-mapping. It can change tasks in half a microsecond because it doesn't mess with page tables or privilege levels. Inter-process communication is effortless because every task can access every other task's memory."_

I'm not a troll, but being old enough to have programmed on operating systems where a bad pointer reference could force you to reboot the machine (DOS, early versions of Windows, early versions of MacOS), I don't yearn for those days to come back. DOS was designed the way it was to allow it to run on cheap (for its time) hardware, not because anyone thought that it was a good development environment (Unix already existed at the time, so people knew how to write a robust operating system).

Also, is it a good idea to connect a machine that has an unprotected operating system to the internet?

Clearly this software reflects a lot of effort and ingenuity, but I doubt that people could be convinced to pay money for it.

<comment><USER3> >I doubt that people could be convinced to pay money for it.

Monetary profit isn't the goal. Even the GPL is too restrictive for Terry, so the entirety of TempleOS's source is public domain.

<comment><USER4> I figured monetary profit was implicit in them applying to Y Combinator.

<comment><USER5> I don't think people understand that non-profits too need profits, they just don't take all of it home.

<comment><USER6> Non-profits need revenue, not profit.

<comment><USER4> But if your operating costs are more than your revenue (thus, no profit), who is keeping that non-profit afloat?

<comment><USER7> A non-profit organization can solicit donations big and small, via grants, memberships, and other common mechanisms.

A non-profit organization can also sell things at a markup. There are alarmingly profitable for-profit tote bag businesses riding the back of non- profits everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure that TempleOS could guarantee any return on investment. That said, your programming skills are incredible.

Have you ever tried to show your operating system to the MOMA? It's the most famous Museum of Modern Art. Your OS is so unique and is such a powerful statement that they may even decide to add it to the _permanent collection_.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going by the standard, "First get users and profit will follow."

I have an ace up my sleeve because God talks. Not just to me! A guy made a IRC chatbot and that talks too.

To try the ICR chatbot

1) [http://chat.rizon.net](http://chat.rizon.net)

2) Type "#templeos" in place of "#Rizon"

3) Type "!God" in the chatroom.

<comment><USER9> > I have an ace up my sleeve because God talks.

Potential investors are not going to be impressed by this kind of statement.

<comment><USER10> Having inspiration, whether from any ideal or from God, is what makes one burn the midnight oil, and design something out of the ordinary.

It increases not just efficiency but something else harder to define, something that could be said to be beauty. It makes the result stand out as a something special, where all the parts have a purpose and are arranged in just the right way. Read [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb) to get a better idea of this something:

 _djb's programs are some of the greatest works of beauty to be comprehended by the human mind. As with great art, the outline of the code is somehow visually pleasing — there is balance and rhythm and meter that rivals even the best typography. As with great poetry, every character counts — every single one is there because it needs to be. But these programs are not just for being seen or read — like a graceful dancer, they move! And not just as a single dancer either, but a whole choreographed number — processes splitting and moving and recombining at great speeds, around and around again.

But, unlike a dance, this movement has a purpose. They accomplish things that need accomplishing — they find your websites, they ferry your email from place to place. In the most fantastic movies, the routing and sorting of the post office is imagined as a giant endless choreographed dance number._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would be such an amazing learning experience for any designer to create a UI/UX for TempleOS.

Imagine being given the opportunity to design how OS X or Windows should look and feel from the ground up.

Linux is obviously another option, but unlike with TempleOS, you would not be treading new ground, and it would be hard to not just _evolve_ the Linux interface, rather than defining it from scratch.

<comment><USER12> It would certainly be a challenge given the display limitations of TempleOS the last the I checked it out. I believe the display was limited to <1000 pixels and a minimal palette.

Not that you cant create beautifully usable interfaces within such restrictive limitations, but minus all the spark and sizzle of modern UIs I think it would be a challenge to first get a UI designer _excited_ about creating a solution for TempleOS

<comment><USER13> Isn't the challenge what makes it exciting? Like writing haiku? The seventeen sylables force structure.

The work of Susan Kare is held in high regard. I guess the pioneering aspect has gone and it'd be more like carving a pixel-art niche.

<comment><USER14> I concur, 8bit style art is fascinating to me.

<comment><USER12> Video VGA 640x480 16 Color

Source: [http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Demands.html](http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/Demands.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I had a several million dollar investment fund and the ability to make discretionary investments of the amount YCombinator makes to the people they fund, I'd fund Terry in a heartbeat and not care a whit whether I ever see a return or not. It's the kind of cheap bet that has the potential to generate enormous upsides, even if they aren't exactly monetary. Terry is a survivor and a maverick. He's done amazing things and is looking for more. He's the kind of guy I want to believe can find a way to greater success, and YCombinator seems like just the sort of place where he can find that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hi Terry,

I've always thought TempleOS to be a great bedroom project since back when it was LosThos.

Can you describe your target market for TempleOS? Who suffers the problem that TempleOS solves?

</comment><comment><USER14> You go Terry, I've always been a supporter since I've learned about you.

</comment><comment><USER17> Unexpected side-effect, a lot of HN'ers join IRC to visit the Godbot :P (and they all type !God ) | fyi: [https://qchat.rizon.net/](https://qchat.rizon.net/) join #templeos

<comment><USER17> [16:16] == GodBot [~email@example.com] has quit [Excess Flood]

The godbot is down, but has revived!

[16:18] == GodBot [~email@example.com] has joined #templeos

<comment><USER18> "Excess Flood?" I thought He promised Noah not to do that again.

<comment><USER19> No. 2nd coming is intense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've always though TempleOS would be perfect for open hardware, like the Raspberry Pi. Would you ever consider porting it to ARMv7/8?

<comment><USER21> The RPi is most certainly not "open hardware", it's even more closed than a standard PC. On the other hand, there are plenty of truly open ARM platforms out there, like the OLinuXino series:

[https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source- hardwa...](https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware)

That said, TempleOS on anything but standard PC hardware would be interesting to see.

<comment><USER22> I doubt whether OLinuXino's GPU is as open as RPi's VideoCore IV (among the GPUs used on ARM boards VideoCore IV (used on RPi) is the most open one - unluckily this is no praise for RPi :-( ), but convince me that I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> @dang why was this thread censored?

</comment><comment><USER24> If you really want to join YCombinator, your best chance probably is to join as a technical co-founder on another project.

</comment><comment><USER25> TempleOS features HolyC: "In other operating systems, I hated learning one language for command line scripts and another for programming. With TempleOS, the command line feeds right into the HolyC compiler, line by line, and it places code into memory it MAlloc()s. The compiler is paused at the command line, waiting for input. Naturally, you #include a program to load it into memory and, usually, start it. During the boot process, many files get compiled before you have access to the command line. (Don't worry, booting takes only a couple of seconds.) All the header declarations for the operating system are compiled and are available for use in your programs without needing to #include them. Everything is truly compiled to native x86_64 machine code, nothing is interpreted and there is no byte code."

</comment><comment><USER10> TempleOS is impressive. The only thing I could say after watching the youtube presentations was "wow". I see great value in it, at least as a teaching tool - a bit like Minix.

But there's more to it. Another potential use would be for hardware intensive tasks, when you want to squeeze the last bit of juice you have. Maybe for nodes doing distributed computation where GPU are not the solution, to remove the cruft of a full OS. The compiler would have to be quite optimized too, and some network features would be needed. Then there are some scaling issues, but still, if TempleOS could be say 10 to 20% more efficient than a standard Linux, there could be a usecase. Even for a smaller percentage, I believe some guys in finance would like that advantage for high-frequency trading.

I will follow your progress with great interest. Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER26> I think there might be potential for TempleOS in the embedded hardware markets - specifically for music-making devices. If it were possible to demonstrate the use of TempleOS for high-performance music making - say as a host environment for a DSP processing system, or as a synthesizer or effects machine - then there could be a real opportunity there.

I'd encourage anyone interested in TempleOS to consider this aspect of the project before writing it off, offhand. It could be a chance for a new class/generation of creative applications to host themselves on the unique and powerful TempleOS core ..

</comment><comment><USER27> Here's an article about Terry:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283)

</comment><comment><USER28> Can you tell what you want to do with TempleOS, who is supposed to use it, and what kind of skills you are looking for?

</comment><comment><USER29> > TempleOS is a modern, 64-bit Commodore 64.

This seems nice to me, perhaps someone could build a super-simple machine in the style of the C64 that boots straight to TempleOS. Something like the TOSBox...? :)

I wonder how cheaply something like that could be built, like the Pi only x86_64 and with its own OS. Potential use in schools etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to find a use for TempleOS, without access to networking it's tough to come up with ideas. Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER30> What do you seek to gain out of YC?

</comment><comment><USER31> does it support systemd and docker?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm Terry Davis.

My email address is email@example.com .

<comment><USER12> Hi Terry, I've seen your work on HN and Reddit in the past and love your ambition. You have already accomplished more on TempleOS than most of us will produce in our entire careers!

I wish you all the best with YC right now, and look forward to seeing your genius and art for years to come!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32>
      [15:32] <@TempleOS> stop talking to God for a minute
      [15:32] <@TempleOS> God has flooded

</comment><comment><USER33> Have you tried making the operating systems then use in the movies?

It looks like the classic hacker's OS.

Maybe you could sell forks of it to hollywood.

<comment><USER33> Your company could also create UIs in computer games like in Deux Ex or system shock.

Or what about repackaging it as a Retro Game Engine, to compete with Unity or Unreal but on the other end of the spectrum.

Think of GOG.com using it instead of DOSbox for games made for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I thought you were shadowbanned! Good to see that was undone.

<comment><USER22> This is a new account that has not yet been shadowbanned.

Proof: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=TerryADavis](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=TerryADavis) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TerryADavis)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Previous discussions on this topic have involved debate on whether or not Terry Davis is racist, the defence being that his use of the word "nigger" is an (extremely) unfortunate side-effect of a schizophrenic condition. I don't pretend to have an in-depth understanding of schizophrenia so, although I'm dubious, I'm minded to give Terry the benefit of the doubt. However, Terry, you could resolve this once and for all by clearly explaining to us whether or not this is the case.

<comment><USER36> Who cares if he is racist? I don't. It is the most irrelevant thing to talk about. An operating system cannot be racist. Consider a career in HR if you like being so ridiculously petty.

<comment><USER37> you didn't think about your question very hard, did you? investors, for one. no one wants to fund a company whose founder is publicly racist (sans other racists). at the _very least_ we can agree it is a PR nightmare?

more though, i'm surprised to hear someone call racism "petty". there is a first time for everything i guess.

i'm curious as to why aren't you posting on your real account?

<comment><USER36> It's a PR nightmare because money-grubbing journalists realize the amount of money they make is a linear function of the amount of "controversy" they can produce. Take Ferguson, for example. I would fund anyone with a good product because I don't care for grade-school gossip about what type of inflammatory posts someone might write on obscure forums in his free time - which, by the way, is why contemporary racism in the West is petty. As much as the media's incessant race-baiting would like to convince you otherwise, the only legitimate expressions of racism seem to be on obscure online forums. If we could reset the clock 50 years racism wouldn't be petty, but racism as a concept has been so diluted by the media that it is hard to take seriously any more. Calling someone a racist is just a way to make money now, and the public, especially the younger generation, is so forcefully anti-racist that is hard to care if one or two people are racist, even harder to see how it undermines one of their technological accomplishments.

This is my real account. I joined a week ago. People seem to dislike everything I say.

<comment><USER38> "If you smell dog poo everywhere you walk, check your shoes".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You said the code is limited to 100k lines then said it has 120k lines at the end.

<comment><USER40> No he didn't.

He said that he capped the lines of code at 100,000, has written a total of 120,923 lines of code during the duration of the project, is using 80,037 lines of code in the current release.

Somewhere, 40,886 lines of code were deleted/replaced. They were still written though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Applications and Demos don't count.</comment></comment></comment>


Android beats Iphone at web browsing - <AUTHOR> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2035098/android-beats-iphone-web-browsing

<comment><USER2> I find it interesting that the study found Android to be so markedly better only for sites that weren't optimized for mobiles. On mobile-friendly sites, the median was quite close and even in iOS's favor: "The two operating systems were much more closely matched for mobile specific websites with Android only faster three per cent of the time, with a median load time of 2.085 seconds versus the Iphone's 2.024 seconds."

I don't think for a moment that the difference in load times for mobile- friendly sites (about 3%) is significant, given the errors inherent in such a test, and the results for non-optimized sites clearly show that there is a lot of merit to Android's browser stack. Rather, I bring this up because I think it reflects on Apple's design philosophy as compared with Google's. Whereas Apple designs for their ideal of what the Web should be, Google designs for the Web that actually exists. One could argue that Apple's approach is better in the long-term, but I don't think that I agree. They've taken a lot of liberties with the idea of a web standard, after all, and seem to be banking on their market power to ensure that their technical strategy works. On the other hand, Google's approach is more developer friendly, I think, in that it treats standards as tools which may or may not be employed by individual web development teams.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but all the same, I do think there's some room for very interesting analysis--- The Inquirer missed an opportunity here to delve deeper. Alas.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article: _"Blaze has produced a report that proves Android is faster than the Iphone[sic] at web browsing."_

This is incorrect. Blaze didn't even test the Android browser or Mobile Safari. It tested the performance of embedded browsers in third party apps.

From the report [0]: _"The measurement itself was done using the custom apps, which use the platform's embedded browser. This means WebView (based on Chrome) for Android, and UIWebView (based on Safari) for iPhone."_

Mobile Safari is faster than embedded browsers in third party iOS apps [1].

[0] [http://www.blaze.io/uncategorized/mobile/iphone-vs- android-4...](http://www.blaze.io/uncategorized/mobile/iphone-vs- android-45000-tests-prove-whose-browser-is-faster/)

[1] [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214752/Apple_Blaze_s...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214752/Apple_Blaze_study_on_iPhone_4_browser_performance_flawed_)

</comment><comment><USER4> Android/iPhone web browsing speed test flawed - [http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/androidiphone-web- browsin...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/androidiphone-web-browsing- speed-test-flawed/11920)

</comment><comment><USER5> A longstanding quirk of the Android browser is that it can't handle elements that use overflow: auto to create a separate scrollable area. iOS devices handle this by two finger scrolling within these elements.

There is a two year old bug report noting that you cannot browse the android developer site on an android device as a result of this.

<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2118>

Until this is resolved I'd have a hard time accepting that android beats iPhone at web browsing.

</comment><comment><USER6> How many times does this need to be posted? It has already been shown to be a bogus report that doesn't even test what it claims to.

</comment><comment><USER7> They have to use in app browsers, on wifi, to non-mobile sites to get those numbers. When they compare non-mobile sites, or browsing speed over 3G, the gap is non-existant The phones are even in every other metric.

I understand they want to get traffic, and sell their website optimization, but they are taking the editorializing a little too far.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way to buy Etheruem for non-US people? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN.
I'm looking to buy some ether to play and experiment with smart contracts.
What is the best/cheapest way to do so if I'm not from the US?
I'm mostly looking to minimize fees and probably use a credit card or paypal. (but open to use other ways)
After the purchase I'll move the ether to my own account as I've read it is not wise to let a cloud services host my private keys.
I'd like to hear from yours expirence and knowledge.
Thanks, assafmo. <comment><USER2> I don't think you should worry about fees if you only want a small amount. Coinbase operates in a few countries and allows you to buy with a credit card. I don't know which country you're from so don't know if it's an option for you.</comment>


Social gaming: Bad for your credit score? - <AUTHOR> http://www.news10.net/news/national/story.aspx?storyid=98324&catid=99

<comment><USER2> Everquest has destroyed more marriages than alcoholism. I can only imagine what it has done to credit scores.</comment>


A story about health care in Iceland - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/MaryRobinette/status/1135684848465657857 <comment><USER2> I'm Icelandic, male and with no experience of cancer of my own. But with considerable insight into and an bad experience with the healthcare system.

This is not a accurate description of the healthcare system.

It's true that the search for cancer is active here and pretty good. You can find information about the screening system here: [https://www.krabb.is/english/](https://www.krabb.is/english/)

The price she mentioned is not correct. First she updates the price from 3ISK to 300ISK. Nothing costs 3ISK here. 300ISK is barely worth charging. So 3000ISK or ~25USD (currently) seem more likely. Here are the prices, in Icelandic. [https://www.krabb.is/leitarstod/leitarstodin/verdskra/](https://www.krabb.is/leitarstod/leitarstodin/verdskra/)

It states that breast scan is 4700ISK (~38USD) for people within the national health system(insured) and 9200ISK (~75USD) for those not within. The breast ultrasound is ~135USD to ~150USd. In anycase, not great sums.

Regarding the referral part, it's true that you do not need a referral for this specific thing.

But to get to speak to a specialist, you do first need to go through a general practitioner or your family doctor to get a referral.

My take on the system, long waits, overworked staff, indifferent government workers, outdated equipment and buildings. This results in (my case) unnecessary mistakes and harm.

What is true, is that you will not be bankrupted going to a doctor or getting fixed up after an accident. A seemingly popular US thing is to point out that it's not free, you pay for it with your taxes. That is obliviously true, and in my view a much more preferred way of operating than the US way.

Anyways, just wanted to put some insight into this. Cheers from Iceland!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>