skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This concept and forward thinking is of the type I make a conscious effort to protect from skepticism and naysayers. Aside from any obvious or glaring safety issues, ideas like this one, that teeter on the reality-joke line, are the exact ones that bring about true disruption. And that's why I encourage everyone around me to keep an open and forgiving mind, like you would with a child.

Will Amazon Prime Air work? I don't know, but I hope so.
i guess they will charge heavy for this delivery.
If you let it keep playing past the primary segment, they show an old segment from 1999. The screenshots featured Netscape Navigator. Good times!
You might be surprised what kind of inconsistencies you'll find in individuals, even restricting yourself to native speakers. I was born and raised in the US and only recently realized that distinguishing "storey" (of a building) and "story" (a tale) is British usage; I had been writing it that way my whole life unaware that in my country we're supposed to only use the latter spelling.

My father spent his first years in the UK and as a kid I picked up a few verbal things from him (most of them disappeared later on). I still think I'm more likely than most people I know to say things like "whilst" or "amongst".
Three letters:

E.M.P.
How Much One Ought to Know Eta Expansion
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UI/UX Designer

+ At least 2-3 years past experience working as a designer
+ Fluency with Adobe CS products
+ Ability to communicate and explain your design decisions to non-designers
+ Bonus: You can implement prototypes of your designs in HTML/CSS
+ Bonus: Past experience in working on a team that's grown an eCommerce brand

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Or maybe he's just orchestrating a little extra PR for Amazon on 60 minutes?
If it were not December, I would assume this was an april fools joke.
> They won't be able to handle a great deal of weather adversity.

I have less experience than you in the field, but I suspect that Amazon would not be promulgating such a service if it had such obvious fatal flaws.
If these get mass adoption, won't it make for highly congested skies in urban areas?

Another question is would they be a threat to birds?

The technology side is cool, but I don't relish the thought of looking out the window and seeing the air packed with delivery drones going to and fro.
Very simple - Bitstamp, MtGox, BTC have trading APIs.

I had a bot doing cross-exchange trading a few months ago, but than MtGox made the withdraws extremely slow and Bitcoins price started raising exponentially.
I have recently gotten a taste of ultra high resolution monitors.

My coworker got the new Dell XPS 15, which has a QHD+ 3200x1800 screen. Just a heads up to coders, unless you plan to hunch your back or get new glasses, very few of you will enjoy the screen as much as you think you would.
Yeah, with the van housing a system to swap battery packs between deliveries in densely populated areas.
> We will be ready at that time.

Except for, you know, that bit (the bit you cut out)
I have an ASUS PQ321Q. Due to lack of support in OS X Mavericks for DP1.2 MST, OS X can only do 30Hz, but Windows on the same hardware can do 60Hz.

The difference is staggering. 30Hz is terrible, and the lag when moving the mouse, dragging a window, or scrolling text is perceptible and annoying.
It's actually the other way around--the spooks want to make sure you aren't on any of the same physical hardware as they are. You can host anywhere you want and they'll still get you (if they want to).
That is an incredibly insensitive and provocative question, one that doesn't seem to take into account the simple information contained in the comment to which you replied.
Google Guava project
Guava:Google Core Libraries for Java
With RHEL 7.
Having never used Scala before, does its type system provide details about errors that other languages do not? Watching a compile fail because of an incorrect type is not something I have run into very often, if ever, in other languages that provide similar type systems.

I mean mistakes can happen and if the type system can catch it for free, so to speak, that is great. I'm not about to argue that it is completely useless. But in terms of probabilities of what kind of bugs might be introduced, type errors seem to be on the low end.

To infer that Scala's type system is powerful enough to catch the more common types of mistakes programmers make, that is quite an impressive claim. I am curious to know more.
Why can't Amazon just have the service be weather dependent like any air service? If some place has weather that makes drone delivery difficult, the option will be turned off.

They'll look at the weather in the next 30 minutes and judge whether or not the drone can fly. Pretty simple, right?
Having to have several sets of batteries seems like on of the simpler problems to deal with.
I would eat one, if only the infrastructure existed to get it to me within thirty minutes. By air.
With linked task failure, this program here would cause the main task to fail, which results in the entire program aborting (once all tasks have finished failing):

fn main() {
// we can't introduce synchronization for this example, so print repeatedly on the main task and check the output for ordering
do spawn {
fail!("child task failure");
}
for i in range(0u, 50) {
println!("print line {}", i);
}
}

Without linked task failure, the spawned task will fail, but the main task will continue on.

If you want to reintroduce linked task failure with current master, you can do so explicitly using `std::task::TaskBuilder.future_result()`. It's a bit awkward though. And you can probably do better than what I have here, it's just a quick sample:

fn main() {
let mut builder = std::task::task();
let future = builder.future_result();
do builder.spawn() {
fail!("child task failure");
}
// check for failure before each of our prints
for i in range(0u, 50) {
if future.peek() && future.recv().is_err() {
fail!("parent task failing because of child failure");
}
println!("print line {}", i);
}
// and block on the result in the end
if future.try_recv().map_default(false, |r| r.is_err()) {
fail!("parent task failing because of child failure");
}
}
I feel like I'm kind of getting it but in quite an abstract sense. Do you have any thoughts around how this might look put into practise in software development?
We could debate what the velocity of bitcoin is/will be, but the relationship between velocity, money supply, and transaction volume is definitional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money
Yeah, right. The privileged information available only to the mega-rich...pfft.
I recall a period during my stint in SF where they started allowing drinking in the parks because "the homeless live in parks and should be allowed to drink at home"

I think they're there because they don't freeze and an idealistic population allows it.
Drone piracy. Think about it.

On one hand, totally awesome. On the other, how does Amazon defend against it?

Let the drone wars begin!
The ones here in Uruguay and especially Argentina are mostly concerned about illegally entering or withdrawing cash (US Dollars mostly).

You have to declare cash above a certain amount, and I believe excess cash can be confiscated.

There are also other questions (for example: if you're bringing animal products - we had very damaging outbreaks of foot and mouth disease, the mad cow scare, etc)
California accounts for nearly a quarter of the entire homeless population in the United States [1], largely due to its climate, its support programs, and its dense network of municipal services and population centers. Approximately 14% of all homeless in the US are military veterans, many of whom suffer from PTSD and were turned out of VA clinics in the 1970s and 1980s due to budget cutbacks. The article is correct in placing a lot of the blame on Reagan, who as governor of CA and president of the US, aggressively scaled back support for both veterans in specific, and the homeless in general. As the article mentions, he also closed a lot of psychiatric hospitals, whose inpatients were turned out onto the streets, left to their own devices. Reagan wasn't the only legislator responsible for this turn of events, but he was probably the most powerful.

Perhaps homelessness is inevitable to some degree. Perhaps some proportion of the population in a laissez-faire, competitive country like the modern US is always going to fall through the cracks. Perhaps we lack the will or the budget to solve the problem completely or permanently. Perhaps some people just can't be saved. I'm not going to launch into an armchair, pollyannaish prescription for solving this problem when I don't have a fantastic solution. (That said, I suspect the best long-term solution is at least as preventive as it is rehabilitative.)

Regardless, there's one thing we can control on an individual level: the way we view and treat the mentally ill and the homeless. Let's not further the stigma, or wax poetic about the homeless in SF as some sort of quirky, fun landmark. I suspect that's not the author's intention -- he's setting out to celebrate the homeless, not to denigrate them -- but some of his language lends itself to misinterpretation. As someone with a close friend who's been homeless, and other friends who've been institutionalized, I don't find the "crazy bums" characterization very constructive.

[1] https://www.onecpd.info/resources/documents/pit-hic_suppleme...
Battery recharge time - out for 15 mins flight? Recharge for 2 hours.

Short trips to/from a fixed distribution point is the canonical use case for battery swapping in electric vehicles.
She did not act alone. It is abundantly clear that the prosecutors knew that there was some funny business going on. There are extremely perverse incentives for prosecutors to cheat by any means possible for career advancement.

The only way to fix this is to set it up so that "getting a conviction" in no way whatsoever enhances a prosecutor's career.
How Content Can Reveal the Value of a Site
Apple was talking about its "Knowledge Navigator" back in the 80s -- not because it had the technology. It still doesn't have that level of technology 25 years later.

They did it to generate some buzz and to foster the notion that they were a technological leader.
One well-placed shot from a pellet rifle could bag you a drone and a cookware set.
Seems like an inverse correlation between the ability to make money online and the number of libraries.
Amazon Air Predicted by Techendo's Zac Morris
Are there any vaccines given to newborns that are contraindicated for immune-compromised people? That strikes me as rather unlikely.
Wait, why WOULDN'T he expect to be arrested?

Possession of CP is illegal. He went into a police station in possession of CP. Therefore, he is a lawbreaker. Simple as that. Yes, it's stupid...but these laws ARE stupid. You'd be in the exact same situation walking into the police station with a bag of cocaine or a sawed-off shotgun. They don't HAVE to bring charges and might choose not to, but that choice is at their discretion. No?
There's no requirement to carry one, but in many states you must produce it if you are carrying it, and of course you need one to drive. If you're being cited for something, even something that doesn't typically come with jail time like say jaywalking, lack of ID usually translates into being arrested so they can "ascertain your identity".

Hiibel is the main precedent here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_Distri...
In every critique of scala, there is this: http://i.imgur.com/KrNcIGt.jpg
Next on eBay: PrimeAir the Ripper, automatically targeting, scanning, RF jamming, hijacking PrimeAir delivery drone for your next Macbook.

I mean, even Iranians or someone in the mid-east could hijack US drone(s), how difficult would it be for a 15 yo in the US to figure out how to crack a Prime Air in his/her backyard?
I'm a fan of the peanut butter and sour kraut, myself, it's much more nutritious. Throw some sardines in there if you're trying to stock up on good omegas.
Funny that you should link to this as a friend of mine on the weekend decided he'd invented something similar. Essentially a sandwich (or open sandwich) but with a lettuce leaf as the top slice of bread.
Great comment. I agree with nearly everything you said, but where I end up is the polar opposite. I can't stand Scala for all the reasons you mentioned.

The poetry thing is really dead on -- when Larry Wall spoke of Perl -- he said he explicitly wanted you to be able to write poetry with it. This led to the write once, read never reputation of Perl... that Scala is quickly stealing.

Scala is on my "will not work with" list of languages/technologies -- which is generally limited to old languages/tools that I have experience with (like Progress 4GL, Mumps, etc), but don't want to touch. It is a maintainability blackhole and generally horrible (to me) to work with, despite being fairly comfortable with the core (1400 or so hours billed).
Nothing an Amazon-Prime-Air-follower-and-grabber drone couldn't handle!
This isn't exactly news...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/30/ibm_amazon_court_ko/
Actually, i think, a drone could carry a human. Like a taxi.
Amazon's page reads like a Google April 1st post.

Or maybe someday we'll look back at these comments like we do at http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/
To prevent capturing them you could charge a deposit equal to the cost of the drone, when the drone returns safely you get your deposit back.
A quadrotor (or 8-rotor here) drone depends on rapidly throttling the propeller speed on each arm up and down, something that you can't do with a mechanical transmission without adding a lot of weight. You can do a gas/electric hybrid, but again, weight.
Take a look at this http://www.mycodeschool.com. They are in very early stage though
Isn't it more likely they'll use these drones inside their warehouses to fill orders? Longterm maybe home delivery but they/Bezos have to be planning on using this to process orders inside their warehouses.

so is this all misdirection, or really their longterm plan?
SEEKING WORK - REMOTE

I am looking for some small to mid size project. Primarily I code in PHP(w/, w/o Frameworks) but I can work on other languages too.
To summarize, I can develop:

1- Web apps(PHP, Python, Rails and Java)

2- iOS apps in Titanium, Android

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4- APIs and systems integration

5- Browser Extensions(FF, Chrome, IE, Safari).

Contact Details:

Skype: sidlabs

Email: kadnan (at) gmail.com

I can work on fixed price, hourly basis or Full time remote job
That's more of a question for FedEx and UPS. Of course existing contracts with Amazon will require tweaking, but I don't see how drone-outage periods will be much different from other volume spikes.
One can imagine apartment buildings being fitted with rooftop chutes for this express purpose.
"specie" when produced as a currency.
Original link is broken now and neither Google nor the Internet Archive have caches. Anyone happen to have a copy?
Amazing, but scary, at the same time. Either way, kudos to the Amazon Team for the idea, very interested to see how this will play out.
The cargo cults which sprang up after WWII were based around imitating the behavior of the airfield staff, in hopes that doing so would summon the airplanes full of supplies.

Use of terms like "fiat currency" is, in my experience, similarly an attempt to mimic the behavior of people they've seen winning arguments, in hopes that doing so will result in winning arguments.
"Mostly thanks to the regularity of the RISC instruction set, the size of the compiler could be reduced significantly. It now measures less than 2900 lines of program and compiles itself in about 3 seconds, which is proof of its efficiency. The entire system compiles itself in less than 10 seconds."

Very nice indeed.
We all eat. We're also curious about oddities, especially when they somehow warrant a Wikipedia page of their own. Add to that the anticipation of assuming this couldn't surely be a sandwich with toast in it but might be a new gadget or programming language or Android release.
>> a more concise java with some handy functional syntax thrown in

Sounds like Kotlin.
The Product Jobs [Update]
They could be a threat to a lot of things. Small-scale collision detection is far from perfect.

A system-wide software glitch could also cause quite a mess in a dense city.

I think this could be cool but I would prefer my packages to be delivered by the Planet Express ship.
I disagree that they're making the same play as Google. Google has never claimed they're going to make a self-driving car, or offer it as a service. As far as I can tell with a few minutes of googling, they don't even have a home page for the project. It's a research project and a tool to "push" the law in the direction Google wants.

Amazon, on the other hand, is 100% offering a product. It has a name, and they indicate a plan to, "enter commercial operations as soon as the necessary regulations are in place." This is partially about getting into the game early, but it's also focused on a product in a way that Google's car isn't.
That's fair I suppose. I won't argue in favor of spending more just for the privilege of doing so. But A quick look at Banana Republic puts the rack price in the $60 to $125 range, and I'd hope there is a noticeable quality difference between 'fancy gap' and tailored clothing.
It does not have value. Nobody is denominating services or goods in BTC. They denominate them in USD and BTC is simply a convenient way to spend USD, maybe even make some profit for the short time you're holding it. That's the value of BTC. Hard-to-trace, global (and local), decent-rate, unregulated money transmission. Decentralized and cheaper Western Union.

Makes you wonder if Satoshi isn't simply the NSA.

The more I think about this the more predictable this outcome becomes. BTC is making techies everywhere invest in what effectively amounts to USD.
(Disclaimer: I work for Amazon, but not for anything related to this. This is the first time I'm learning of Prime Air.)

I'm somewhat disheartened by the skepticism of a lot of comments from HN, Reddit, and Twitter. Not stuff like "I wonder how they'll handle adverse weather" (which I think is intellectually interesting) but stuff like "As soon as one of these kills a dog it's done for". What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure's sake? This feels like science fiction in the best way possible.

I have no idea whether or not this will work, but I sure hope it does. It's incredibly exciting.
I guess we are getting closer and closer to the Pizza delivery technologies described in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Entire industries dedicated to getting things into consumer's hands faster and faster. The "now" in "I want it now" keeps getting shorter and shorter.
Agda and Idris are both very interesting to me, especially the latter since it was designed with systems programming (read: real-world applications) at its core. They both seem kind of like beefed-up Haskell.

However, I wonder how much actual utility they can provide, seeing as (1) dependent typing is generally acknowledged to be rather difficult (and that's a statement coming from those who generally tend to already be good at a language like Haskell), and then also (2) the fact that a great deal of real-world applications, such as FFI, accepting data over a wire, dealing with exceptions and faulty input, etc, mean that no matter how bullet-proof the code you write is, you'll still have to account for all of the ugliness which the world can throw at you, which means unit testing, exception handling and other things which seem to undermine - to a degree - the strengths of strong typing in the first place.

Or am I exaggerating things? I've written a lot in Haskell and enjoy it a great deal, but at work I use Python and JavaScript, and honestly, although there are some things that would be streamlined away by a strong typing system, particularly in the development cycle, there are still a ton of ugly, mundane real-world things that would still need to be dealt with in much the same way if they were written in Haskell. I would still love to have the opportunity to write in Haskell (or Agda or Idris, etc) at work, but I'm not sure how much trouble it would save me from at the end of the day. Would it? And would the additional mental hurdles of dependent typing add real tangible benefits on top of this?
Well said. It's original thinking like this that moves us forward as a human race. And in order to move forward, you have to take huge risks, face uncertainty and do whatever you can to prove everyone wrong.
like you would with a child

Why would we turn off our critical thinking skills when contemplating claims of a leap in technology that transcends what many of us understand to be possible currently?

There are times to encourage creative thought, like with children or within the context of a brainstorming meeting.

But most of the time we should evaluate claims critically with the best practices of the Scientific Method.

IMO, there's way too much gullibility in our society for religions, junk science, Internet scams, and political dogma.
Especially since, thus far anyway, they have not responded to any of the criticism or even approved any of the comments submitted.
Spray allows you to define custom (even invalid) headers, all you have to do is subclass HttpHeader. I'm sure the author knew this, but it's not obvious from his criticism.
It is, but keep in mind that for weight efficiency the LiPo batteries are only protected by a heat-shrink skin, no physical or fire protection at all. They will spontaneously combust quite robustly in a crash, or during charging of they are faulty or have been stressed in flight.

So they have to be charged in a fire safe manner, and (in a commercial setting such as a distribution centre) away from the main facility. Not beyond possibility, and again with changes in battery technology this will improve (LiFo is looking hopeful relative to LiPoon the safety front), but another logistical hurdle, so still worth mentioning.
Namecheap Swag & New Logo
Launch success sends Chinese Yutu rover to the Moon
I don't understand that chart. What does "% change in millions" mean? Comparing the % change for a small user base (WeChat) to a much larger user base (Facebook) doesn't make much sense either. Facebook is huge, so a 60% growth in their mobile app is still impressive.