Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yomly | Hacker News Reader

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I say it to all my friends all the time - Amazon is a tech company that happens to do retail, not a retail company that does tech.

It's no coincidence that Amazon calls a unit of storage space in its FCs a "bin" and also happens to pseudo-randomly distribute products in the FC. I am convinced that Jeff Bezos' long term plan is to automate everything, and treat every problem like a CS problem so your CDN analogy is spot on. Pricing is automated, ordering is automated, and I'm pretty sure with Kiva storage positioning is dynamically optimized too. [0]

The thing is, the further invested Amazon is along this path, the cheaper and more profitable it becomes to continue. Moreover, the harder it becomes for new players to catch up.

Will be interesting what the plan is with these planes, I note Amazon also is investigating entering the shipping industry, a space pretty ripe for disruption[1][2]

[0] http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBa9yVZBJM

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10907163

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-09/amazon-is-...

Bin is a very, very common word in ecommerce that means storage unit.

You're partially correct in your overall assessment of Amazon, but they aren't a tech company first. They're a logistics company that was forced to become a tech company to support their retail efforts.

From the horse's mouth: “Amazon is a technology company. We just happen to do retail”

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/10/05/amazons-cto-amazon-...

That's nice. The proof is in how they actually operate.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but bin is a standard warehouse term.

Ah, that's disappointing - I did think that was unique to Amazon.

I don't suppose other companies call their product classifiers browse nodes and call their most granular classifiers leaf nodes...?

I doubt it!

I was actually thinking the etymology of the word bin in CS is probably from someone who worked in a warehouse. It can't be a coincidence.

...or it could simply be a short form of "binary".

It's a shame you are being downvoted considering that the first kind of computational storage was "binary files"/"binary data." Bin for short..

This is almost certainly where /usr/bin comes from, yes.

I have always assumed both refer to the English word bin, which is a receptacle, box, etc. E.g. trash bin.

We just call them bins in the UK, not trash bins. Putting something in the bin idiomatically means throwing it away. Perhaps that's a modern usage. We do also have bread bins, which is about the only use meaning 'receptacle' I can think of outside of warehouse bins.

In New Zealand they also have chilly bins.

I think it is a UK phrase, or at least not US. A friend of mine from Taiwan, with excellent (US) English, had never heard of using the word 'bin' for trash before.

It's not common in the US, but you hear it now and again here. The most similar example I can think of is probably "lift." You'll hear someone call an elevator that every so often in the US, but it's mainly the UK term

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