Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Prime Air

amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 604 posts

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#411

Post by Houshalter »

dakrisht wrote: post #130

This is an awesome idea of course. It's a glimpse into the future. I remember tweeting with Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics about a year ago about autonomous package delivery from A > B. I'm sure Bezos and team started nerding out on this concept years ago. Eventually, "vehicles" the size of UPS trucks will be delivering packages autonomously all over the world. This is definitely a glimpse into that day. And it won't…

>The FAA situation. Drones are going to have _very_ restricted airspace especially in populated metro areas, if the FAA grants them these privileges at all. If you look at Los Angeles/SF/NYC/DC/Boston, you see airspace that is so overcrowded that I just don't see how drones are going to be zipping around here.

How do you figure? Do you realize how big the sky is? For every square foot of land there are tons of layers of airspace above it, and it's almost completely unused except for a few tall buildings and a relatively small number of flying vehicles (compared to what we manage to fit on the ground.)

Drones are fairly maneuverable and could be made with decent collision avoidance and sensors.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#412

Post by rmoriz »

udkl wrote: post #231

Why release this now ? Seems to be more of a marketing ploy to bump up prime membership to compensate for the shrinking margins/revenue. Highly interesting and forward thinking nonetheless !

People are probably sick of Black Friday by now and still need to buy holiday presents. Excellent marketing timing. Kudos to Bezos.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#413

Post by psbp »

goronbjorn wrote: post #208
jmduke wrote: post #176

(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 rootin…

> What merit is there in rooting for failure for failure's sake? You must be new to Hacker News…

Okay, but comments on this post seem to be particularly insufferable.

HN is usually filled with poor attempts at being clever; rarely is it ever so completely contradictory and illogical.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#414

Post by ekianjo »

jessriedel wrote: post #309
throwaway092834 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day. On average, 16 people will die in any given day in a truck related crash. One in eight traffic fatalities involves a large cargo truck. Driving vehicles on roads is incredibly dangerous. I don't think it's possible for drones to do a worse job.

That's not the point being made by the people who say a single killed dog could nix the program, in fact, it's the opposite. The point is that the public responds irrationally to new minute dangers like this. Commenters pointing this out aren't rooting for failure, and they're not making an argument about the danger. They're just observing that this thing has failure modes because people are dumb.

> They're just observing that this thing has failure modes because people are dumb.

Yeah, and people were damn scared of electricity when it was first introduced to the masses and many did not want it. Go forward 10, 20 years down the road and it was massively adopted. Of course there are always failure modes, but what's more critical to look at is, what's the benefit of this new technology, and will the benefits outweigh the failure modes? I'd suspect the answer will be a clear yes.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#416

Post by skriticos2 »

qwertz123 wrote: post #407
meritt wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kills a dog!? I don't know what sort of half-ass dogs these people have but I'd be vastly more worried about my dog fucking up one of these drones and being held responsible for replacement costs.

My dog would definitely try to take it out but it's the same as with cats: I would be more worried about the old guy losing an eye than hurting the cat. Those rotor blades look pretty dangerous to me.

I think the original author wanted to imply, that a more productive discussion would occur if we'd think of how to fix these issues. Like put a protective cover at the rim and a grid at the intake so air can flow, but hands, eyes and paws are safe?

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#418

Post by LeicaLatte »

This vision for last mile of deliveries looks right. Looking forward to buildings having "chute systems" that organize and automate deliveries to individual recipients.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#419

Post by kokey »

dakrisht wrote: post #130

This is an awesome idea of course. It's a glimpse into the future. I remember tweeting with Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics about a year ago about autonomous package delivery from A > B. I'm sure Bezos and team started nerding out on this concept years ago. Eventually, "vehicles" the size of UPS trucks will be delivering packages autonomously all over the world. This is definitely a glimpse into that day. And it won't…

This has been coming, and there's also so much room for gains from it. Eli Dourado covered this nicely, I think http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/04/then-internet-now-airsp...

Personally I hope the commercial use of drones become evident and widespread and legislation lags behind it. The last thing we would want is strict military-only licenses for drones out of the fear someone will deliver some explosives to a politician with it.

Re: Amazon Prime Air

#420

Post by xerophtye »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #346
8bitpony wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what? There are millions of people that can't use rsync + git.

And they're all willing to pay ~$10/month for it to Just Fucking Work. Build things that solve people's problems.

That's only if you need MORE storage. Heck i am happy with my data limit, and yes, the major attraction is the "Just Fucking Works" part. Its the usability factor. Just cuz you CAN write your own web browser, doesn't mean you wouldn't use firefox or chrome
Post reply on HN