skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't mean to spoil the holidays with cynicism, but doesn't this seem more like a publicity stunt to get Amazon even more in the minds of Christmas shoppers than anything else? It would seem ludicrous if a UPS or FedEx truck were making a trip to deliver one single package and then returning to home base (with an empty truck on the way back) to make another special trip. The whole business of delivery is built on carrying many packages and, if possible, picking up as well as delivering.

I realize that little drones aren't the same thing as delivery trucks, but it seems strange that the economics would be that much different. I'll believe it when I see it.
...from another drone picking it up.
But: internet.
Or advances in the available technology driven by a great R&D team with a significant budget instead of hobbyists?

I don't want to knock hobbyists, because they often do great work. But if Amazon thinks this is the future of package delivery, they could bring an awful lot of resources to bear on the problem.
Worth re-posting here: http://www.suasnews.com/2013/11/25838/gimball-an-insect-like...
Not at all like the situation in China. In the U.S., if you're in a neighborhood with a large organized crime presence, passers-by will often refuse to testify, but what the parent is talking about in China today and the U.S. in this hypothetical future is different. In China, there is a recent history or at least public perception of victims falsely accusing good samaritan helpers of being the perpetrators in order to sue someone, even if they can't catch the perpetrator. The parent is saying that the U.S. could become the same way, except with would-be good samaritans/crime reporters not being afraid of the victims but of the police.
The real surprising thing is that Amazon is accelerating the post industrial age. The economy is growing but wages are stagnant. A demand for human labor is declining while corporations are making massive profits. These drones are an example where machines are replacing jobs that were once done by humans.

As we pull out of the recession in the US, the fastest growing job market is the low wage/retail jobs. Walmart will have to match the technologies of Amazon as they fight for market share. Leading to more and more automation of human tasks. During this past thanksgiving there were worker strikes in some Walmart stores for a living wage (~$15/hr). What happens to society when these jobs are not even available?

The most interesting part of the 60 minutes interview was not the drones but this:

Charlie Rose: Is Amazon ruthless in their pursuit of market share?

Jeff Bezos: The Internet is disrupting every media industry, Charlie, you know, people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling.
Surely it's better asked as two questions. Why are bums often crazy, and why are so many in SF? Answer to the first part is pretty obvious and supposedly part of the answer to the second comes down to climate and buck-passing by other states.
It's a food hack. C'mon, loosin' up, mate.
There absolutely is. You can't effectively spend bitcoin, except on the exchanges. You can't use bitcoin to buy anything. The only thing you can do is use USD to buy bitcoin and transfer the bitcoin, and have it transferred back into USD by the merchant.
Illegal drone-hunting drones sold on the black market out of China, with R&D sponsored by Russian gangsters…

Some of us grew up reading cyberpunk novels and ended up living in one. It feels… weird.
> not text, they are data

You can be both . . .

IMO, all the fields need to have a Printable and Readable trait (or whatever Rust's version of those are). If you want to do special things for certain fields to make them easier to work with, I think that's cool too. But if you force people not to treat headers as text, I think you're going to have a problem.
Drinking alcohol in public places has always been illegal in San Francisco.
Jeff Bezos owes my friend half his fortune and a trip to Vegas.
That email, unless pleasantries or enthusiasm count as bribes, would not be considered a bribe. It's just good practice to be polite to those who can help you. Perhaps we should legislate that prosecutors should be dour towards everyone they encounter, less a pleasant experience bias someone?

P.s. I realize that improper conduct by both parties is probable in this case, but the quoted email certainly does not cross the line.
> I like my blue silent sky. I recall scenes of sci-fi worlds like the 5th Element. I suggest we tax externalities. If you order by sky, you'll create visual and noise pollution to many people, and you should pay a tax for this, to be shared by the community as a whole.

HA! Good luck on that.
I love my new Retina MBP, however the most annoying thing I found was dealing with so many non-retina things that look hideously blurry lol. I don't have a problem with the screen though, but weirdly enough in the last year or so I've had real problems with iPads. Like if I read or use it for even a short while, I get that nauseous headache feeling. Apparently it might have to do with LED screens.
Bezos has access to massive R&D resources because he created massive value for consumers.

Now, those resources can be leveraged to generate even more value for consumers.
How right, so very very right you are.

Quoted from the thread you linked.

"Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...

Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...

Raise your hand if you have both ...

Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...

There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.

~LoudMusic
--
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!"
Cloud Computing Market in China - Growth and Regulations
Agreed. So far, I've seen nothing but specious fear-mongering and nonsensical "what-if" arguments against this thing.

I can understand why people doubt the feasibility of drone delivery, especially given the legal impediments to adoption. Frankly, I doubt that this type of service will be practical within four years. What I can't understand is why people openly reject the idea of drones.

I don't see how Prime Air is any less safe or efficient than sending thousands of five-ton metal boxes barreling down residential streets. I don't see why a five-pound piece of plastic falling from the sky poses an appreciably greater risk than a branch falling on you. I don't see how people can draw parallels between small, low-altitude consumer drones and military UAVs. The level of fear surrounding this announcement makes no sense.

The response to Prime Air goes far beyond skepticism. It's incoherent, fanatical pessimism, and it's really dissapointing.
Why not: Buy $8 DVD and a "free drone" using a stolen credit card? That works today and even from outside the us, right?
Agreed. If it works or if it doesn't, its something new and very different.
A unicycle drone would have to navigate the streets and avoid people. This thing won't need to have as-complicated navigation.
The last mile, the landing, might one day be a combination of a drone and a vehicle. It can fly but land and drive up to prevent injury, and use driveable tech as well as drone tech. It would advance both fields and maybe get us to flying cars one day, of course we'll probably never fly them ourselves, just computers. Autonomous drones and delivery vehicles would be awesome.
I'm not sure why this keeps being mentioned. Seems easy enough to build a common landing zone for pickups. Roof, open grass area, etc. If you were an apartment owner, is there no way you could think of solving that issue?
The blanket statement “Never talk to the police” is obviously either not very well-thought-out or not meant to be precise. What if you're the victim of a crime? A more honest title for this video would be “Talking to the police will only make you more likely to be convicted of a crime”. An infinitely-selfish person might interpret that as “Never talk to the police” (although even that interpretation has its weaknesses), but a reasonable, respectable person should consider the positive consequences of talking to the police and weigh them with the possibility that they will end up being wrongly convicted of a crime.

If you're innocent and have information that could potentially help stop a criminal from committing more crimes (as in OP's case, assuming his story is true), I think that in most cases it's totally reasonable to talk to the police, since the benefit to society would almost always outweigh the small possibility of being wrongly convicted of a crime. If you know that you're suspected of a crime, or that the police are likely to suspect you of a crime after you give them information (as OP potentially could have foreseen), then the question gets harder. Even when you know that you're suspected of a crime, I still think "Never talk to the police" is often overly-selfish, depending on the circumstances.
Why's that? I picked up a QHD+ Samsung a few weeks ago and have been loving it for development work. All of the development tools I've needed so far have respected Windows' DPI scaling (which came set at 200% on the Samsung, making it easy to spot when a program failed to scale correctly).

The only major culprit so far has been Dropbox, which is infuriatingly frustrating to use at HiDPI. So bad it makes me want to move everything to SkyDrive or Google Drive.
No worries, your information is super straight-forward. Really enjoyed your post.
Since the payload is 5 pounds, it would have to weigh significantly more.
... except for the N56U. The only one NOT supported by the popular firmware alternatives. Guess who bought one :-)

There is code.google.com/p/rt-n56u/‎ but it's nowhere as good as my old Tomato.
For me and many it seems file this under hard to believe!

It begs me to wonder....

1. Won't theft of packages run rampant or Amazon only will deploy drones to customers currently home?

2. Wouldn't the drones be subject to be shot or brought down?

3. Will this only fly in good weather?

4. The sky is going to be littered with these things flying around?

5. Will there be a service where you can rent a drone to spy on your mate? Divorce lawyers could sell it.
30hz is not to me usable; nor is 39", and I'm used to Apple's build and picture quality, so I guess I should've prefaced my post with "IMHO."
I didn't expect so much traffic on my blog! :)

Well: I think that things will normalize now. (at least I hope!)
It's a white collar crime and she's an educated person who isn't black or hispanic. That's not every factor behind the sentence, but it's an uncomfortably large subset of those factors.
> How is it that someone can't work near an onramp to a major expressway and the nearest coffee house be at the next exit or just across a toll bridge?

Solve it the way Houston does: frontage roads.
> Ah, only 100mbit and 802.11B/G.

Ubiquiti does have newer 802.11n / 5GHz APs too.

> is it possible to prevent your whole network being slowed to 100mbit while still using this device?

If you wire it into a gigabit switch, only that port on the switch should operate at 10/100.
I'm shorting UPS, FDX!
We've had armed drones for a lot longer than delivery drones. "Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply. You are in direct violation of Amazon and Federal Penal Code 1.13, Section 9."
If you go deep enough, some chemical reactions managed her thoughts and behaviors, and negotiated your reaction, as well.

At some point people have to be held accountable and called names like evil. The idea that she can talk herself into believing otherwise is a travesty, mostly because it allowed it to continue.

I think the word evil was invented to describe people exactly like this woman.
How I get all my students to be good at math
Makes you wonder if Satoshi isn't simply the NSA.

Yeah, something's weird. BTC went up, not down, when Silk Road was busted. BTC went up, not down, when Congress started holding hearings on the subject.
I didn't suggest that they were wrong. I suggested that their environment isn't conducive to fostering trust of 'outsiders'. I don't know if that's good or bad, nor do I know especially if it's better or worse to trust someone who just happens to live near you.

My thought is that a healthy distrust is perhaps the way to go, but that's a judgement on values, and shouldn't be relied upon as advice.
It's a self-executing sandwich...
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Send an email to tj at pillpack.com if you're interested or want to find out more about us / what we're looking for.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote is fine. We're based out of Columbus, Ohio. This would be a fairly short-term project (a few weeks to a month)

We're a small startup building a Rails app and a core piece of it is generating a fairly complex PDF document from an existing template. Ruby doesn't have the greatest PDF tooling, so I could be convinced to use something else for this piece, but sticking with ruby would be ideal.

Would love to find someone with relevant experience generating complex PDF's.

You can read more about us here: http://nextchapterbk.com

If you're interested, you can email me at adam [at] nextchapterbk.com
SEEKING FREELANCER -- remote

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Here's to hoping that Amazon learns from Google' mistake and doesn't decide to add 'additional features' once this is already deployed. (I'm referring to Google's Wifi AP scanning debacle w/ Google StreetView trucks)
The Scylla and Charybdis of innovation.

Open your mind too far and you accept too many wacky ideas. Close it to much and you'll never see what's possible.
From the wikipedia article:

"Mouthfeel is the great attraction of the toast sandwich. Given the diversity of textures and flavours of all kinds of bread, many variations can be easily devised and tested in order to enrich the experience of the consumer."

In other words, it's a sandwich made out of bread- that is, a "hack" of the sandwich. Totally at home on HN :)
A driver and a truck is a lot larger and completely different from a smaller autonomous device.

And apparently they do occasionally:
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/11/25/search-underway-af...
http://www.wjla.com/articles/2013/01/ups-driver-robbed-polic...
http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/2013/10/20/3091049/
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/delco/Cops-UPS-driver-kid...

This just makes the robbings easier, as you don't have to deal with a human driver. Much less risk involved, and lower prison sentences when you're not threatening a human and just stealing property.
Haskell has two Ls. Are you actually using the languages mentioned?
mirror: https://archive.installgentoo.net/g/thread/38432928
There's a great south park on that subject.
How can we build a real-time interactive map using D3
Hey!
I am working to plot points from a huge data set in map. Something like : http://bikes.oobrien.com/chicago/
The JSon file that I am aggregating from looks like:
[
{
"event":'share',
"lat":41.92866814708094,
"long":-87.70242605646864},
{
"event":'rapheal',
"lat":34.03,
"long":23.01},
{
"event":'share',
"lat":41.92866814708094,
"long":-87.70242605646864},
..
]

Can anyone show steps to do using D3.JS ?
Can you recommend any practical tutorials or github project of someone who built something similar ?
It's interesting to me because it appears to offer fairly low-level control over memory, but is still memory-safe. That is unique among languages targeting the mainstream.

It also seems to have a good mix of other features that I like, which others have already listed.

Basically, rust has the potential be an actual C++ replacement; a real one that actually gives you control over memory.
I'd be more concerned with other folks taking the drone. Giving Amazon my address and then damaging the drone would be foolish.
Why Are Bad Words Bad?
Birds.

I can imagine FAA approval subject to a register of drone flightpaths and locations, but if something takes a knock from a bird (or malicious interception, as you suggested), I assume that Amazon would schedule a manual pick-up and replacement, wearing the cost in the process.
The real-time nature of knowing that would allow them to turn on/off air delivery based on conditions or backup. I think the perfect world would be a combination of air and land autonomous vehicles. Maybe even the vehicles take it the last mile and it is flown in more robust air delivery drones more weather proof. Over time I am sure this will happen in some way.
Thanks. One of these days I'll take a stab at using PhantomJS and trying to pull this data for more sites.
On (1), it's 30-minute delivery, so I assume you would only order while you were at home.

On (5) for enough money you could probably already do this. Paparazzi photographers have already started using drones in the EU and US.
I think it's far more sensible than imprisoning innocents.

I think all these cases should be worked within a very brief period or the convictions should be suspended until they are.
Cool. Speaking of sandwiches, have any of y'all been to the local deli recently? The variety of meats available these days is astounding, and their prices are very low. A lot cheaper than going to Subway or your corner store, if you've got the time to make you meal at home (and it doesn't take much).
It will happen but it will also know its location and maybe video. So just like stealing on the street probably, still theft and a more risky option possibly.
Want frugal? My parents always tell me how they were so poor growing up, they put lard on a piece of bread and sprinkled with some sugar.
This times 1000. I have been using Scala for the past 3 months in a play framework app that serves json. Today I had to write some quick Java for an Android client, and was quickly reminded how much freedom Scala's expressiveness gives you vs Java old cruft.

I mistakenly wrote a Java anonymous inner class that called a closed over variable from the outer scope like one would do with Scala closures. Of course the Java compiler threw an error because I didn't mark the variable as final.

When programing in Scala, one never has to deal with such low level rigidness. It just let's you get shit done.
The whole thing shouldn't weigh very much, assuming it's limited to delivering lightweight objects, and the rotors could be covered with a screen. I don't see much potential for danger. The worst thing that could happen would be a total system failure causing it to drop out of the sky, and even that could probably be mitigated with something like a failsafe that deploys a parachute if the speed is too high.

It should be safer than multi-ton delivery trucks, which can and have killed people. I was a mailman at one time - we were required to get out and look behind the truck before backing up because a mailman once killed a toddler who wandered behind his truck (though I doubt very many carriers actually follow that rule).
Totally agree. Even if this concept doesn't work perfectly, it puts pressure on couriers to give Amazon the discounts they want.

Its kind of like how large enterprises use an Open Office support quote to bring down the cost of their Microsoft office licensing.
> Even if these libraries get cached in the browser it’s still quite a lot of JavaScript that’s executed every time a site is loaded.

Is it? 39 libraries that are 35 lines of code each or just define a bunch of functions that your code can then call optionally may well not take that long to parse. How many gems does the typical Rails application use? Libraries are the equivalent on the web, only someone else doesn't resolve the dependencies; you have to include the dependencies manually. Is it that surprising that people are using a variety of helper libraries to do ads, analytics, DOM manipulation, etc, etc? That's fairly standard for development.

I think saying we're “drowning in JavaScript” because we've gotten a lot better at modularizing our code instead of copy-pasting it from everywhere seems like lamenting the wrong part of the problem by far. I would rather every site include Google Analytics, DoubleClick, jQuery, and 10 jQuery UI plugins than be subjected to the cascade of security and functionality bugs folks would run into if everyone was trying to roll their own solution for everything. There are already enough with the use of common code.

Using libraries for third party code is good, and the fact that we're doing it is a step forward, not a step back. Now, there may be room for folks to choose the third party code more wisely, but that's a perennial problem when you're willing to use code that's already been written.
Yes, all 190,000 of them.

Every single fucking one.

If you have an alternate argument, I'd like to hear it.
Well if this becomes a thing then the NSA will be golden once everyone is conditioned to drones flying all over the place.
1. New LiPo batteries recharge at up to 10C (ten times their rated hourly capacity), which means a full charge under 10 minutes (including final balancing stage).

2. Octocopters, unless loaded to the hilt, can more or less fly uninterrupted even when missing a propeller.

3. Multirotors fly well even in strong winds (20mph winds and more).

I don't see any technical difficulty preventing a company with the resources of Amazon to introduce this service in a year. The major problems are legislative.
People just want anything that's not bitcoin or NSA.
Wow, that article is fantastic, and provides an amazing degree of background and depth to the picture I'd already had of the TL. Thanks for linking to it!
The intent with these kinds of high DPI screens is usually to use scaling and keep interface elements roughly the same physical size (like Apple does with the RMBP), not to make everything tiny and still pixelated. If you spend all day looking at text it looks fantastic on a high density display.

Support on Windows isn't perfect, but most programs handle it well by now.
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What is Artifact-D?

(Yes, I tried googling it.)
> What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure's sake?

You must be new to Hacker News…
A 4K 39" TV has less resolution than a 4K 24" monitor. Just do the math!

This isn't about real estate; it is easy to buy a big monitor, but about pixel density.
Only in major urban areas where you see a UPS/Fedex truck literally go a block before stopping again would you likely see multiple drones.
I would want, but not expect, far stiffer punishment than that.

This isn't "you suck at your job," this is "you are an evil person, and willingly have broken the law that you know so well to destroy the lives of others in an attempt to further yourself."
Don't forget the robotic mules.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigDog
That's exactly what is on the customs forms going into the US, too. Of course, that doesn't fit into the conspiracy theories.