skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a riot. The manager on duty tells him that he can't wear Glass in the restaurant so he storms out.

Why would he not take the manager at their word that the policy had changed? Why does it have to be written down somewhere that you can't wear Glass while dining?

> I would love an explanation, apology, clarification, and if the staff member was in the wrong and lost the owner money last night and also future income as well, that this income be deducted from her pay or her termination.

He actually called for the business to dock the employee's pay or fire them, how embarrassing!
Bezos, in the interview, intimated 2015 was the targeted year to get the regulations approved.
My mother was one of those "crazy bums". She spent the last 3 years of her life on the streets there.

She lived in the East Bay before, so when she finally lost it it was natural to migrate to the nearest large city where she could "live in peace" on the streets.

I think a key problem is not just that the mental institutions are closed, but that it's now impossible to detain them unless they are an immediate threat to themselves or to anybody else. So you can be very sick but if you aren't lying in a pool of your own blood or waving a knife or gun then you are free to do your own thing.

The way I would like to address this would be to build micro communities out in the sticks, fashioned as quasi-monasteries. The energy of the city is not healthy for these people and the programs eat up a lot of cash. My understanding is that SF spends ~$200M/year on homeless services.
The author has quite a "Grapes of Wrath" style of writing.

[edit: Grammar. Oh, the irony.]
The drones would be autonomous. According to the 60 Minutes piece, it sounds like it is five years out. With a 10 mile radius, this could be an interesting proposition.
That sounds quite loud. Are you sure it's not gas?
The cost for parking will of course be limited as otherwise you could simply send the car out to drive around the block until you're ready to leave. That may not provide a restrictive limitation but it will be a limit in some way.

I'm now imagining huge traffic jams caused on purpose to enable electric vehicles to crawl around the city for several hours to avoid paying massive parking costs.
In the 60 Minutes interview said it's electric.
Several of my friends spent years overseas doing just that. They obtained working visas (or the equivalent) in the countries they visited, and traveled the world doing IT work interspersed with hiking, hitchhiking, camping, and whatever else took their fancy.

If you have a knack for writing, you could run a travel blog, write for a publisher like Lonely Planet, etc.

There are many, many ways to achieve those goals that don't involve joining the military.
I tried learning Clojure, I really did, and I have to agree, the syntax is simpler, but I can't really read Clojure or code in Clojure the way I do in Scala, I don't know why.
Whenever I read articles about Scala, I keep finding it amusing, prehaps this is because I had experience with Java, but for me Scala is a life saver, can't go back to Java after this. And I won't go back to Ruby, Python or JavaScript. So I can't really understand what these articles try to achieve, it's like the "don't buy bitcoin" articles, not sure what is the goal. If you don't like Scala, thanks for sharing, but I don't see how it affects me, I will still continue using it as my go to language until I find something better (there are contenders, Kotlin, Ceylon, Dart, TypeScript, and my favorite now - Nimrod, but there is still a big gap for me to fully switch)

So for someone like me who wants a statically typed language (there goes Ruby, Python JavaScript, Clojure), who thinks Haskell is too academic to be really productive (I have to think too much to get things done with it) and who don't get what is all the rage about Go (perhaps because I'm not a system programmer, in any case I still don't get it, sorry)
This leaves me with no other options (except C#, which I would probably use if it was really portable)

Scala is not perfect, but I feel more productive with it than with any other language, if anyone who never used Scala will decide not to even try it because of this article, I wish them luck, but I doubt this will be the case. for those who use it, they will still continue.

So I really don't think I understand what is the point of such an article. Try the language for yourself, if you like it use it, if not, and you have a choice, don't.

p.s. for all those poor bastards who are forced to use Java at work, Scala is by far a gift from the Gods, so it helps to keep things in proportions, one man's source for a rant article, is other's source of means to finish work at 5pm and go back to the SO and kids. (they would go back at 1pm but their Sun Certified Java EE team lead brain will explode if they will use Clojure, with Scala your EJBs or Spring code can still look recognizable, perhaps a bit more pretty)
p.s. did I forgot to say I love Scala?
I read about this in the mailing list, but never having relied on linked failure in the past I wasn't sure what the implications were. Could someone give an example of when this would've been used before and how you might accomplish the same in its absence?
UAV quadcopters are kinda amazing and getting amazing-er by the year. (I spent too long looking over http://www.helipal.com this weekend.)

You can buy one for under $400 with auto-hover, GPS return-to-home, and built in cameras (or a gopro gimble attachment). Sadly, they only get about 5 to 10 minutes of flight time.
What's more compelling to me than any particular use of drones for delivery is the idea of drone delivery infrastructure ("dronenet" or "dronet") with well-defined protocols: TCP/IP for physical objects.
According to the FAQ below the video, Amazon thinks it could be up and operational "sometime in 2015": http://amzn.to/1jZz62w
If this ever actually happens, delivery theft will be rampant.
If a human is spending the time to pilot the package back and forth would this really provide much of a benefit?
"We hope the FAA's rules will be in place as early as sometime in 2015. We will be ready at that time." ...
> She'll never work in that capacity again

How do you know? Getting rehired is routine for misbehaving cops.
I think it's fair to say that between self driving cars and self guided quadracopters, it is entirely possible to have a fully or nearly autonomous end-to-end logistics system in the next 10-15 years. A lot of the problems with longer distance quadracopters could be overcome with a self driving delivery van, similar to an aircraft carrier with fighter jets.
Actually I think he said the "earliest" we could expect them was 2015 because that was as soon as the FAA could approve them, thats jut a year or two away.
Good job on finding that URL. This is really cool to share with my Facebook friends, and I have to like the tone of the ad copy that Amazon is preparing on this page, which is still in testing, as it would appear.
Off-topic but thanks for the noscript message.
Why park it. You'd surely want it to earn it's keep ferrying your "friends" to work [depending how restrictive laws are on temporary rental of autonomous vehicles], dropping-off the kids, popping to the drive-thru to get your lunch, picking up your washing, getting your supermarket shopping and such.
10 mile radius? Where are you getting that figure? Also, I thought the distribution centers were usually a bit farther out than most metro areas, making that less practical?
Cool tech, but I question the practicality of it. This seems fraught with problems that a human on a bike wouldn't have. They're also entirely unsuitable for urban areas.
China launches its first moon rover mission
Truth matters in discussions as well as the news. If we can't bring fact and reason to discourse, what's the point? Also, I'd hope the Hacker News community has at least a slightly higher standard for itself than 4Chan.
OK. He should solve the meta-puzzle first. "What is this likely to be, and in what proportion of possible worlds is the outcome of knowing the answer to that question good for me."
What about about the customs form you get when flying from the USA to another country?
You should always allow the user to get the raw HTTP request. Sometimes things just get funky and you need to drop down to that level. Abstraction is nice except when it isn't, if you understand my meaning.
> My belief though is that there is some peace of mind that comes from the
> idea of what you might call "page composition" -- that this piece of data
> sits in this template, that it rides on top of this simple model, that it
> is in ORM from database. There is a huge amount of linearity and convention
> throughout the stack and because of the dynamic nature of Ruby lots of gems
> can be sprinkled throughout without one really understanding what they do.

Actually, the problem with OO and my experience with Rails is this linearity quickly becomes a web where deriving the sequence of events encompasses more and more of your time as the project grows.

Objects call objects across the system and change the state of each other without care. Making a trivial change involves unrolling this web every time.

And that's why I think you have this backwards:

> Now, I'm certain this level of abstraction and functional/mixin kindof stuff can be
> achieved in a Clojure framework but I think it is generally perceived as being a bit
> more non-linear and DIY (libraries not necessarily playing nicely together). As in
> "yes I can get all of these pieces together but then if down the line I have to change
> this piece, how will I accomplish it without breaking everything".

`require`ing a Ruby gem is as non-linear as you can get. It's global with no entry-point. A gem's presence and effects are not obvious. They're often configured with some mutation like:

MyGem.config do |c|
c.key = "secret"
end

Meanwhile, it's obvious when a namespace of Clojure functions is included. And since they're just functions, they're trivial to compose. Completely different experience from what I was used to in Ruby.
"How does the package get from the self driving car to your porch?"
The potential for centralized surveillance and control which exists in all digital systems will become a more and more important issue as these devices progressively become ubiquitous.

The same applies to driverless cars as to smartphones, electronic medical records, reading of news articles, social media, etc, etc.
Greed?

Or possibly just that an initial-membership-fee model risks not covering costs long term and so looks like a potentially unstable proposition?
Bezos mentioned this in his 60 Minutes interview.
NFW does this not run into all sorts of regulatory hurdles.
Fuck this, simplicity is the key to many criminal behavioral procedures. Why else avoid a simple license to use a weapon? Lazy.

So don't talk about every potential criminal using 2048 strong encryption unless you have something to show for it.

This is even disregarding that court cases show lowest hanging fruit caught.
I didn't believe it was real until I saw this other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6830583
stuff the package, I'm stealing the drone....
>>I had to seriously check to see it wasn't April 1st.
It isn't.

Honestly; I'm still not sure if this is a joke or not. This totally fits the kind of stuff Google likes to do on April 1st.

If this became real, I'd go out of my way to order things just to see that show up at my door. And I'm sure it won't be long until people plan on catching the device when it shows up. Even I probably couldn't resist the temptation of catching it and I'll probably have to pay a penalty, but it'd be worth it.
It was on NBC or whatever, and they stated a "less than 5lbs" limit, which covers ~84% of their product base.
I'm really having trouble imagining how flying drones departing a central depot, delivering packages one at a time and then returning for the next one is more economical than a truck full of packages on a well-planned route.

Not to mention the fun the neighborhood kids will have shooting them down.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry Website Compromised
The uncanny thing about this kind of ever-increasing animosity and mutual antagonism between the public and law enforcement ( of all kinds - local, federal and the miscellaneous) is that there has to be someone benefiting from this state of affairs.

It simply cannot be that neither side - groups pushing for stronger prosecution of crime and ones pushing for decriminalization of petty crimes [4][5][6] - likes it , yet does nothing to ease tensions and head towards less contentious state of affairs.

I suspect the groups who stand to benefit from this state of morass have cozy relations between them and are likely :

a) the private prison lobby like CCA [1]

b) the police unions [2] and

c) the prison guard lobby like CCPOA [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O...

[4] http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about...

[5] http://dyn.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.r...

[6] http://www.salon.com/2013/11/22/humans_shipped_across_the_co...

Edit: Corrections
No, they're not entirely unsuitable for urban areas. Instead, their (relatively) short range means that they're unsuitable for anything except urban areas.

If designed poorly, they would be very unsafe, but there are plenty of ways to increase the safety. For example, notice that the drones have more than 4 rotors. This gives a bit of redundancy so that a motor can fail without causing the drone to crash.
I read this and dashed to the kitchen to make myself a midnight snack.

It was actually remarkably good. Had much of the crunch of a fish finger sandwich (an old favourite of mine).

It got to be a trifle dull towards the end but I think that could be down to my attempt to be moderately frugal with butter (a small concession to the fact that I'd already had a dinner this evening).

I'm not sure it is quite on par with a crisp sandwich (I just checked Wikipedia to remind myself that the majority of HN readers probably know them as 'potato chips sandwiches').

With salad cream of course.
The vast majority of the US isn't in an urban area, where these would thrive (presuming they could get the distance thing down).

Edit: maybe not (see below).
most impressive stat to me: 1.07 billion colors

my how far we've come from the good ol' days of CRT
> Good job on finding that URL.

http://www.amazon.com/primeair
This is one of those things where I check the calendar and the URL three times each, then still don't really believe it. I think I'll check the calendar again.
I propose taking a beach holiday and getting absolutely hammered on pina-coladas. Will anyone second this motion?
So you don't think this really happened, but agree that it could plausibly happen, and give advice similar to the OP.. doesn't that make the question wether this actually happened a bit moot?

IMHO it's not stupid to go to the cops with evidence of wrongdoing, at worst it's being naive and trusting... at best it's simply doing the correct thing without delay. How would anyone know otherwise, without such "rabble rousing" anecdotes, or first-hand experience?

What really is stupid are such reactions of police. We shouldn't seek to teach people to mistrust the police, that is just a crappy short-term workaround; we should teach the police to be worthy of trust. Don't ask me how, it's just when I'm roused I get these big ideas :)
It's not easy to say she is evil; it requires consideration of what is evil, what is an evil person, her particular situation and how it might apply to the definitions.

Concluding a person is evil does not preclude looking at any other angles on the case. So, I don't think it is lazy to consider it.
Shameless plug: I'm creating a course about building your own bitcoin arbitrage bot.

https://uludum.org/funds/2
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-unveils-futuristic-plan-d...
So guess this just aired, didn't realize.. Here is link to cbs 60 minutes.. Doesn't give much better info than amazons site though.
If we say facts are irrelevant and we're just going to go with our "gut" or our initial opinion, then what's the point of having a discussion?
what if someone shoots downs these drones for invasion of privacy/trespassing/target shooting etc ?
… but is he? If you could define a "drone altitude zone" where only drones are allowed to operate, you could easily automate it all out.
Urban areas but don't you have to exclude apartments too.
Brick-and-mortar stores are doomed. I can only see a few types of products remaining in brick-and-mortars: Clothes that you want to try for size, fruits and vegetables that you want to sample, and restaurants... any others?
haha will the package they put it in be mine or should i return it if so how?
Seems better than leaving the package sitting in front of the door for several hours.
Next Level Almost All Dug Out
> universities usually are not funding that conversion

Yes, they are. Universities are essentially a combination of a hackerspace with a startup accelerator, they have just grown to the point that you don't recognize them as such. The services they provide are essential to starting companies requiring more infrastructure than a laptop computer. They provide the multi-million dollar cleanrooms required to do nanoscale fabrication, the multi-million dollar spectrometers and chromatography setups required for chemical and biological engineering, seats on even the most expensive mathematical and physical simulation software, and mechanical prototyping facilities. They house a collection of experts, technicians, and cheap skilled labor (grad students) the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else or bought for less than a small fortune. They have industry connections that span many different market sectors and they have respect from society at large that gives them special dispensation to perform certain kinds of risky experiments (medical trials, chemical synthesis with reagents that could be re-purposed to produce drugs/explosives/nerve gas, and nuclear reactions). They even provide small stipends for their tinkerers.

These things cost money, yet many of them are advantageous or essential for starting a company, depending on the field (do you really think you can develop a next-gen neural interface, MEMS sensor, or drug delivery mechanism in your garage?). The arrangement is simple: a spun-out company can repurpose research done using these facilities if they promise to give the university IP revenue (the specifics of which are negotiated on a case-by-case basis). The nice thing about using patents to carry out this process is that they can be negotiated retroactively. Startup accelerators require equity up front, but that's not a workable arrangement if you won't know how commercializable your product will be until after you have spent your research budget.

I would hate to see this side of patent law disappear. Such "reformation" might just succeed in turning the university into the sterile ivory tower of arcane, pointless tinkering you seem to think it is. We need to fix patent law, not eliminate it.
Actually, 80% of US citizens are in "urban areas." http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/2010_census...
Here is a TED talk which discusses this technology, its cost, and how it is already being used in Africa.

http://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_raptopoulos_no_roads_there_...
Hold on a second, what happens when some birds, winds, or malicious citizens damage the drones? Does Amazon keep sending new ones?

How do the drones deliver to apartment buildings or any address that does not have a lawn?

Would return service work the same way?

I love the product, but a little disappointed by the limited FAQ section.
Watch out for problems with the monitor. New ultra-high-def monitors often have problems such as lag or poor color accuracy.

Before buying this, you need to wait until a professional with a colorimeter and a lagmeter evaluates this monitor if you remotely care about color accuracy or gaming. Resolution isn't the only consideration when buying a new monitor.
Just watched the 60 minutes segment: Bezos say they won't be ready until 2015 at the earliest, likely 2016. (Edit: as the commenter below pointed out, I misheard the timeframe: is is 4-5 years out)

He said the range is 10 miles, which is good enough for most residential areas. They are aiming for delivery in 30 minutes. The drones are autonomous: you plug in the GPS coordinates and away they go.

The biggest challenge (again, according to Bezos) is the redundancy, "making sure it doesn't land on people's heads."

My question is: why announce this now, 2 to 3 (or more) years out? Are they gearing up to get governmental regulations?
I've been checking them out too. Really cool tech. I spent a couple hours watching people's Phantom2 drones get lost/damaged on YouTube today. Convinced me when I eventually decide to get one, it won't be that model unless they've fixed its tendency to attempt a get-away.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=phantom+2+flies...
It's a R&D project and the video footage shown on 60 Minutes was a combination rendering and marketing video, so we shouldn't really assume that this future is already written. You're seeing mockups.

I think it's safe to assume that Amazon is publicizing this now to help get the public on their side in any future regulatory disputes.

As a society we are going to have to figure out a lot of rules regarding drones, safety and privacy very quickly. I hope we are up to that task.
Landing on roofs? Balconies? Amazon mini-helipad mounted outside your window? :-). buildings built to accommodate drone delivery (usable by usps/fedex/ups/drugstores/pizza, food delivery?)
I guess there's just not enough $3,000 studio apartments in the Mission to go around.
Lots of ways to knock out a drone out of the sky.
Vernor Vinge described a similar rocket-based delivery system in his short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High", which eventually became the novel Rainbows End. Crazy to see this actually happening in the real world.
They are just javascript programmers who realized the truth sooner than others ...
"but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world."

Hah. Like religion? Like philosophy? The non-empirical world does and always has had a bigger impact on the material world than anything else.

Science itself--the methodology as a concept--is a non-empirical metaphysics that draws conclusions about truth concepts.

I think I only come to HN so I can feel smug when 20 year old millionaire entrepreneurs (this is my imagination talking) say dumb shit. Yes, the tech sector is destroying the world and making millions while I slog away in some underpaid ivory tower... but at least I know the first thing about science! (This is what I tell myself to avoid crying)
I feel like this is the definition of "having too much money."
Dibs on Drone-Santa-Claus-as-a-service startup.
I look at her and I think "I would never do anything like that!"

But is that really true or am I just rationalising with the benefit of hindsight?

There was an article on HN about a man running a family business who started defrauding money. It needed the cooperation of other people. Rather than creating any elaborate lies he simply told them, and asked them for help. (I can't remember any more about it, which is making search tricky!). But they all went along. He was a nice guy, and they were helping him, and no-one was really being hurt. Except they were all committing serious criminal offences.
If it's not a joke, the city of the future just got quite a bit noisier.
Drone?