Can someone please explain the fix in practice? Is it as simple as upgrading glibc (and eglibc?) on all servers? Or is there a network change I should immediately change?
All of the benefits sound the same as MongoDB, which also does sharding and JavaScript queries, including arbitrary code in "callbacks" in map-reduce or $where clauses (though it's slow).
Can someone explain the benefit of RethinkDB over MongoDB?
RethinkDB is based on a fundamentally different architecture from MongoDB. Instead of polling for changes, the developer can tell RethinkDB to continuously push updated query results in realtime -- check out http://rethinkdb.com/faq/ for more details on this.
Just FYI, Rethink does sharding and JavaScript queries (including callbacks) -- http://rethinkdb.com/api/javascript/js/. The `js` command interops with every other command in RethinkDB and works really well.
It's best practices, not new practices, and a very clear concise write up at that. I wish if read this 6 months ago, rather than learning it the hard way.
Amazingly ambitious move by Amazon, which I have to respect. Yes, it will be extremely hard to take market share from Samsung and Apple, but there also hasn't been much innovation in the smart phone market recently, so the opportunity exists if Amazon takes a novel approach. Or maybe they just compete on price, as they have so many times before.
The funny thing is, they're not competing on price. Sans contract, this phone is a hefty $649.
When I heard Amazon would have a phone, I thought for sure it would be very cheap, possibly even free with Prime membership. That would be a game-changing move.
Now, it's just another Android phone, albeit with a couple extra bells and whistles. But with an inferior app store.
Agreed. Complaining that you are spammed with potential job offers is like complaining about how expensive it is to replace the high-performance tires on your Porsche. Please don't forget that there is still high unemployment across the US and abroad.
Funny, my friends built this company two years ago (and called it lifeswap). It was well received, but the challenge was high turnover amongst mentors due to the work involved--it's much harder to mentor someone than just rent your spare room on airbnb, and probably pays worse. In the end they discovered that the only way it would work is as a headhunting firm for tech companies, and decided to build a new company instead.
The article is short on details, but I'm not clear why Amazon is obligated to sell a publisher's books, much less at the publisher's desired prices. Wal-mart is famous for using its size to lean on suppliers ensuring "everyday low prices." Why is publishing different?
I sympathize with authors that are hurt by this battle, but it just shows that Amazon's marketplace is becoming more important to their sales than their publisher is.
> but I'm not clear why Amazon is obligated to sell a publisher's books, much less at the publisher's desired prices.
No one has said that they are. Likewise, the affected publisher, and the news media, are not obligated to fail to inform the public of Amazon's tactics so that they are aware that Amazon having smaller-than-usual discounts, "not available" notices, and long shipping times may well be a sign not of any issue with the availability of the book, but of Amazon's disputes with the publisher, and that therefore if they are encountered when looking for a particular book, a consumer would be well advised to look at other online retailers, who, while their usual discounts may be lower, may have better discounts for the book at issue or have it available when Amazon says its unavailable, or have it with a more reasonable shipping time when Amazon does not.
Amazon is essentially leveraging the trust that consumers have in them as presenting a seemingly comprehensive catalog and best terms in the online book retailing business to selectively pressure publishers, and its completely fair to inform consumers that, in the particular case of these kinds of disputes, that trust may, however well earned it was previously, not be warranted -- and what the particular symptoms are that such a dispute is affecting the book you are looking for.
If Amazon can significantly hurt a publisher in this manner, it is suggestive that they may have a monopoly power that they are abusing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Law
(General note: Please at least somewhat carefully read over that before arguing. First, I'm only saying that it's suggestive, not proof, and secondly, there's a lot of misconceptions about what exactly is forbidden w.r.t. monopolies.)
The thing is, they don't. Amazon is like Walmart or Google. The reason everyone uses them isn't that there are no other options. There are. The reason is that they're better at it. A monopoly is, for example, Comcast, because there is no reasonable alternative provider for the same service.
Talking about "hurt a publisher" is broadening the scope too far of what a monopoly is. A large retailer taking your products off of its shelves will hurt you in the sense that you'll make fewer sales, but that doesn't mean they have monopoly power. All it means is they have non-zero negotiating leverage with you. If you don't like it, go sell your books on Barnes and Noble or eBay or direct to customers on your own website.
Think for a moment about why we hear all this wailing about Amazon in the book market but not in the market for e.g. AWS, even though Amazon has a large market share there as well. It's because in the book market the publishers are also Amazon's competitors and they're the ones wailing. Because Amazon wants everybody to buy eBooks, the vibrant success of which gives authors significant leverage over publishers once it becomes viable to forgo a print edition entirely unless publishers provide sufficiently attractive terms.
That puts the squeeze on print publishers from both ends. Amazon is demanding lower prices from them and authors are given leverage to demand higher royalties. That's the natural state of the market when your product requires you to operate an industrial scale printing facility and have a significant unit reproduction cost for your product and competitors are providing similar customer value by copying bits. The print publishers are screwed and they're trying to figure out how not to be, but they're already dead and they just haven't hit the ground yet.
There are markets with no real viable alternative to Walmart, because Walmart used their scale to crush competition, and no has made it uneconomical to start a rival business, since they'll temporarily lower prices below sustainable (using their scale), then raise them again when the other store dies.
If Walmart has enough local monopolies, this is a self-reinforcing strategy, since it's unlikely all of the monopolies will be challenged at once, and Walmart can thus have a few of them with unusually low prices while the rest sustain that one during the conflict (since they're guaranteed to have business, being the only store in town).
So the thing about a monopoly is it's totally squishy. There isn't a clear line you cross to become one because there is no clean way to define a market. Every customer places a different value on the product itself, the search and transportation cost of buying from alternative retailers, etc.
So take Walmart. Do they have a local monopoly? First, question, on what? If you want to buy a television then they almost certainly don't, because they have strong competition from Amazon and six dozen other Internet retailers, and on top of that customers tend to be willing to drive out of town to save real money on a big ticket item.
But what about, say, groceries? That pretty much puts the Internet out of the running, because you can't ship a single gallon of milk in a refrigerated truck for anything resembling a competitive price. So then the question is, how far away is the nearest local competitor? If it's only a five minute drive, maybe that's enough competition. If Walmart's prices get out of hand people will start to make the drive. But what if it's 15 minutes? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? What if a substantial portion of the local population doesn't own a vehicle and that "15 minute" drive is a two hour walk? So maybe some Walmart stores have a local monopoly on groceries.
But wait, there's more. If Walmart's local prices start to get out of hand, how hard is it for a competitor to open up? It turns out the answer is, not very hard. A small grocery store is a one person operation. Low barrier to entry. If new competitors spring up six hours after Walmart raises their prices, they can't actually raise their prices very much no matter how far away the nearest existing competitor is. Which is why, even in towns with only that one Walmart, it still doesn't cost $20 for a gallon of milk.
I think there's a second element to why a gallon of milk isn't $20: Walmart relies on not upsetting too many people, who collectively wield enough local political power to harm Walmart locally.
It would only take a local wage initiative, for instance, to likely bother the closest Walmart. So there's an inherent incentive not to let prices rise so much that people are angry enough to get the government involved because they can no longer buy milk (or food).
That's true to an extent but I don't really buy it as the primary reason. Look at Comcast. Customers angry because your service is expensive and terrible? Hire an army of lobbyists, problem solved.
See, this is why I really strongly suggested that you read the link I provided. Monopolies are not, strictly speaking, about "not having any other options". I phrased my point carefully... the fact that Amazon can incur great pain on someone like this, combined with the fact that they have, strongly suggests something that may be actionable under monopoly law, regardless of what other definitions may or may not also be something you could choose to apply, but I did not.
If customers in practice had easy and significant choices, they'd just go elsewhere easily and the publisher would feel no pain.
> Monopolies are not, strictly speaking, about "not having any other options".
They kind of are. You can get into the whole bit where it's an antitrust violation for a group of companies that should be competing to instead get together and collude with each other, but that doesn't have any relevance to Amazon. Nobody is accusing them of colluding with anybody.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the Wikipedia article. Are you reading the list of conduct which is prohibited for monopolies (and cartels) as something you expect to be prohibited in general?
> If customers in practice had easy and significant choices, they'd just go elsewhere easily and the publisher would feel no pain.
That's not how it works. If Macy's stops carrying your clothing line, you're going to lose a nontrivial amount of sales even though they have a hundred other competitors. All profitable companies have a little bit of market power or customers and suppliers would squeeze their margins to zero and put them out of business.
> > Monopolies are not, strictly speaking, about "not having any other options".
> They kind of are.
Not in US antitrust law, where market power and monopoly power are mostly defined in relation to empirically demonstrated effective power to raise prices or exclude competitors. [1] The existence of effective competition would deny these abilities (by definition), but actually having other competitors exist in the market at issue doesn't. So, the statement that they are not strictly about "not having any other options" is precisely correct.
> Not in US antitrust law, where market power and monopoly power are mostly defined in relation to empirically demonstrated effective power to raise prices or exclude competitors.
There is a difference between what something is and what you can use as evidence of it. There is this whole issue in antitrust law about how you define the market. For example, is MacOS in the same "market" as Windows? The accused monopolist always wants to paint the market as broad. Microsoft says it doesn't have a monopoly because Apple is competing with it. If Microsoft claims the market is that broad, but they can still do all the things you would expect a monopolist to be able to do and customers don't abandon them, it's evidence that the supposedly competing company isn't actually providing competition and they do actually have a monopoly.
> The existence of effective competition would deny these abilities (by definition), but actually having other competitors exist in the market at issue doesn't.
That's just a language trick. Effective competition comes from having competitors. If you don't have effective competition it's because your "competitors" aren't actually competing with you, either because they're cooperating or because they're not actually offering the same product in the same market (i.e. in either case they aren't actually competitors).
Perhaps, but the particular tactic Amazon is employing here relies on their ability to raise price in a market in which they are dominant (physical book retailing) to acheive an advantage in negotiations related to another market (e-book retailing). It may be that their goal is to drive down prices in the e-book market, but that's orthogonal to whether the action relies on monopoly power in the physical book retail market.
The flaw in your argument is that they can't raise the price of that publisher's books in a market, they can only raise the price they charge on their own website. When Amazon raises their price for a particular book, that doesn't change the price it sells for anywhere else the book is available, and they aren't colluding with any of the other retailers to fix prices.
What they're doing is actually a demonstration of their lack of monopoly power. When they raise the price they charge for a book, any customers doing comparison shopping who want that book in particular will get it from a different retailer. If Amazon had monopoly power you would instead expect substantially all customers to either pay the higher price to Amazon or not buy the book from anyone.
The market characteristic that Amazon is taking advantage of is that if they raise the price for books from one publisher, it shifts impulse purchases from that publisher to another for customers looking through Amazon's website to find a new book to read. It's essentially the same strategy as putting the product of the publisher you don't like at the back of the store, or replacing mention of it in your promotional materials with mention of a competing product you also sell. The publisher cares a lot more than Amazon about which publisher's books Amazon sells more of, which provides Amazon with negotiating leverage against the publisher. All retailers have that leverage over their suppliers. It doesn't require monopoly power. Obviously being bigger gives you more leverage, but being big and having a monopoly are not the same thing.
I think this is backwards: it was the book publishers (and Apple) that were sued for colluding to raise e-Book prices and had to settle -- which is what anti-trust laws are meant to protect consumers against. Amazon using its size and some questionable tactics just doesn't fall into that category.
The book publishers have done a great job painting this as a David vs. Goliath story, but it's really two Goliaths battling over a shift in publishing and distribution.
Just because it was illegal for book publishers to collude with Apple to fix prices in the ebook market to their advantage doesn't make it any less illegal than it otherwise would be for Amazon to leverage any monopoly power it may have -- as that is legally defined, which doesn't require a complete absence of competition -- in the online physical book retail market to acheive market power in the ebook market.
I think this reveals Amazon's key weakness -- they don't make any money.
Amazon's big cachet was always "Earth's biggest selection". If they are going to behave like cable companies and refuse to sell books from major customers, they are really failing their customers.
If I want to buy a book, I shouldn't need to know or care about who publishes it, and whether or not they are in a pissing match with Amazon. The first time I run into that situation will be the last time I use Amazon.
They make plenty of money, but that is then invested back into expanding the business, so it's more accurate to say that they don't make much profit at this time.
If that were true they would not be slowly making the service worse to try to eek out some money. "Add On Items" Removing items from being next day eligible with Prime etc.. As someone who orders from Amazon all the time (daily) I have seen a drastic downgrade in the service from what it used to be. Feels more like Walmart then Amazon these days.
I haven't looked at Amazon's numbers, so I don't know the actual values involved, but "profit" includes money that is then "invested back into expanding the business".
Agreed, the author is using "disruption" to mean "compete with". Microsoft did not really disrupt IBM, it just changed the competitive landscape.
The Innovator's Dilemma has a much more nuanced view of disruption: an inferior product that ends up beating the entrenched player because of a side-benefit. It's pretty relevant if you want to take on eBay, LinkedIn, or Google: you're not going to build a better search engine than Google, but you can build one that respects privacy, runs without ads, etc. if that's what users really care about.
Crossing the Chasm also talks about this: it's very, very difficult to beat an established company at their own game. You're more likely to do so by attacking a niche they are not interested in, or are weak in, and growing from there.
Establishing a beach-head is a very slow road but it has a good chance of success. What I'm getting at in the post is that there are some game-changing circumstances at play since those companies were founded and they all appear to have huge, not so easy to fix blind spots. That creates opportunities. Compare ebay or Google with Amazon and Zappos. I definitely do not see Amazon and Zappos as vulnerable when it comes to their core, Google is at its core not a search engine anymore but an advertising company and exactly there they are left wanting. Ebay is hurting badly right now, someone that moves fast might be able to inflict serious damage before the window of opportunity closes again.
Naturally, none of this is going to be easy. But I think it just might be doable.
As articles like this attest, there is a deep resentment on HN with the idea that success requires long hours and slavish commitment to work. But then every article about a successful company bolsters the sense that success requires exactly that kind of sacrifice. As Michael Bloomberg put it in his autobiography, Bloomberg succeeded "because we worked harder."
It's nice to read about the exception like 37Signals, but Apple, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, etc. are not known as places where work-life balance is a priority (and they have done more than anyone technologically to make work ubiquitous). Those mega-successful companies are also the entire reason the VC model (including YC) works, which can be an uncomfortable truth if you work at a venture-backed startup.
Worker productivity has been steadily rising over the last half century, and yet people aren't working less, as originally predicted. You can view that as an indictment of American consumer culture, or you can view it as evidence that we're motivated by something else.
Perhaps it's evidence that -- at least at many companies I've worked for -- time in office is used as a proxy for productivity. And in some it matters more!
You're reading the poem too literally if you think it endorses the idea of sacrificing parenting for your startup. The power of the piece is how viscerally it captures the price of that sacrifice without being preachy or whiny like so many blog posts on the subject.
