History of Amazon Updated 2025-07-16
I wonder where the spray painted sign went: twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1229952158667288576/photo/1. As mentioned at officechai.com/startups/amazon-first-office/ and elsewhere, Jeff did all he could to save money, e.g. he made the desks himself from pieces of wood. Mentioned e.g. at youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=345 from Video 4. "Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)".
Jeff Bezos interview by Chuck Films (1997)
Source. On the street, with a lot of car noise. CC BY-SA, nice.Order from Bulgaria by Jeff Bezos (2002)
Source. Full video: Video 4. "Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)"Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)
Source. Good talk:- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=220 why Seattle: tech talent, and nearest to the largest book warehouse in Roseburg Oregon
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=232 first hire, VP of Engineering, Shel Kaphan
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=267 screenshot of the first version. Can't find any working version from before 2000 on web.archive.org/web/19990601000000*/amazon.com unfortunately.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=303 kadabra/cadaver
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=345 Shel, how tall do you want your desk to be?
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=610 order from Bulgaria: Video 3. "Order from Bulgaria by Jeff Bezos (2002)"
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=733 customers don't really know what they want. One is reminded of Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1010 item merging in a single package from warehouse
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1187 and other points mentions repeatedly how much effort they've put into result personalization. But of course, that also means tracking everything people do. Including users that are not logged in. Would not fly well in 2020's increasing privacy concerns!
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1251 A/B testing
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1314 passes word to employee Robert Frederick, MIT alumni, black dude, AWS manager
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1517 demos something in AWS
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2171 Jeff's back
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2312 similarity searches on some somewhat perverted for-male books. Golden. 2020's political correctness would never allow that in a presentation. A bit further ahead mentions they've optimized to run it in "small machines" with only 2GB RAM, still likely large for the time. Also mentions that if you do it naively, then you're going to say "also bought Harry Potter" for everyone (hugely popular book at the time). You've got to work harder to do better non obvious recommendations.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2409 warehouse uses a technique called random stow, which store items randomly.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2563 OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner. The reviews must be fake, but Jeff doesn't recognize it. Priceless. Still on sale: www.amazon.co.uk/OXO-Good-Grips-Salad-Spinner/dp/B009KCFHAW
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2599 decentralized pub/sub pattern, cache warming
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2685 "you've bought this previously feature" that reduces sales: people forget they bought things and buy them a second time!
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2938 vote fraud after someone from crowd mentions. God reviewed the Bible.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=3253 hiring slide with contact jeff@amazon.com Send your CV, today!
cosine by Jeff Bezos (2018)
Source. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake: twitter.com/yasantha62/status/1042052665893511168.
Bibliography:
- archive.ph/ucSHN This is what it was like to work at Amazon 20 years ago (2015). Good annecdotes from the first offices.
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Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/reaching-climbing/: don't be a pussyOne is also reminded of Gwern Branwen. Sandy is also into self-improvement stuff, so even more like Gwern. This is a point Ciro diverges on. Ciro works actively on self-worsening.
Last Friday was my final day at work. According to my facebook profile, I am now "happily retired." As of today, I don't plan to do another day of "traditional work" in my life. That's not to say that I'll be sitting idle playing tiddly winks. I want to build things, to dedicate my life to independent study, and to get really, really good with building communities. I don't have time for any of this "work" stuff that somehow pervades our entire culture, choking our inspiration and sapping our energy away from the things we'd rather be doing.
- he thinks university is useless:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/where-uni-fails/ Where University Fails (2018), mostly talking about backward design
- sandymaguire.me/blog/gatekept/ rejected from Imperial College PhD program due to grade being slightly too low for their stupid requirements, even though he had a referral already, and an amazing CV
- he likes jazz: sandymaguire.me/blog/too-smart/
Other interesting points:
- sandymaguire.me/blog/sandy-runback/ he changed his own name to Sandy because he didn't like it, he was born Alexander
- algebradriven.design/ closed source books though, ouch. At least they seem to have been made with leanpub though, could be worse.
Scientific Autobiography by Max Planck translated by Frank Gaynor (1949) Updated 2025-07-16
Published as Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers by Max Planck translated by Frank Gaynor (1949) which also contained other papers.
This section refers just to the translation of Scientific autobiography by Max Planck (1948).
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How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Overview of the experiment Updated 2025-07-16
For those that know biology and just want to do the thing, see: Section "Protocols used".
The PuntSeq team uses an Oxford Nanopore MinION DNA sequencer made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies to sequence the 16S region of bacterial DNA, which is about 1500 nucleotides long.
This kind of "decode everything from the sample to see what species are present approach" is called "metagenomics".
This is how the MinION looks like: Figure 1. "Oxford Nanopore MinION top".
Oxford Nanopore MinION top open
. Source. 
Before sequencing the DNA, we will do a PCR with primers that fit just before and just after the 16S DNA, in well conserved regions expected to be present in all bacteria.
The PCR replicates only the DNA region between our two selected primers a gazillion times so that only those regions will actually get picked up by the sequencing step in practice.
Eukaryotes also have an analogous ribosome part, the 18S region, but the PCR primers are selected for targets around the 16S region which are only present in prokaryotes.
This way, we amplify only the 16S region of bacteria, excluding other parts of bacterial genome, and excluding eukaryotes entirely.
Despite coding such a fundamental piece of RNA, there is still surprisingly variability in the 16S region across different bacteria, and it is those differences will allow us to identify which bacteria are present in the river.
The variability exists because certain base pairs are not fundamental for the function of the 16S region. This variability happens mostly on RNA loops as opposed to stems, i.e. parts of the RNA that don't base pair with other RNA in the RNA secondary structure as shown at: Code 1. "RNA stem-loop structure".
This is how the 16S RNA secondary structure looks like in its full glory: Figure 5. "16S RNA secondary structure".
Since loops don't base pair, they are less crucial in the determination of the secondary structure of the RNA.
The variability is such that it is possible to identify individual species apart if full sequences are known with certainty.
With the experimental limitations of experiment however, we would only be able to obtain family or genus level breakdowns.
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