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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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And social. I'm curious what sort of utility such a service could yield, but I'm not interested in filling our airspace with service drones. The low-elevation sky is relatively uncluttered by our works.

I think it can work with minor interruption to everyday life if the drone are confined to the paths of major highways. It will reduce their noise pollution (and be marginally safer in a crash).

The bigger impact would be on smaller retailers, that don't have this service. This service is an absolute killer, making it faster to order a toothpaste from Amazon compared to picking it up at a shop outside your house.

This would be an incredible benefit to human economy. Imagine the millions of retail jobs completely obsoleted by drones. Consider the price difference between wholesale and the corner retail shop -- a cost this could largely eliminate. Consider all the hours wasted in retail-facing interactions.

Why would a small store serving a local population not be able to offer this? There is a lot of open source drone stuff out there, so the technology should be readily available. At least available within a year of Amazon putting it into service.

If my local mom-n-pop store has an app and a drone, I would shop there.

I can think of a few problems:

1) Scale: a small store might not have enough sales to justify buying a single drone and training the staff to use it.

2) Regulation: licensing and certifications to be allowed to use these - particularly in a completely hands-off way - may have high fixed costs that a small store can't afford.

3) Lack of knowledge: most small store managers probably don't have any idea of how to set this up, or that it is even possible.

And in the end, why would you buy from the local mom-n-pop store? Nostalgia? Helping the people you know? I think that'd wear out pretty soon or just not work for many people.

Could you get your pizza or Chinese food delivery via drone?

Yeah, for food I think it could actually work, if you had a startup like GrubHub handling the drones, which would just fetch the food from the chosen restaurant and deliver it.

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