skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“At the end of the day, I think people want something backing a currency.”

And what, pray tell, backs all the world's fiat currencies? Absolutely nothing.
I wonder if this new generation of robots might be able to do certain kinds of agriculture which, until now, have resisted automation, such as coffee harvesting on steep hillsides.
arduino, lego mindstorms, linear algebra

Actually, a lot of the math for 3d game engines transfers directly to robotics. Matrix coordinate transformation to/from each joint to figure out where/how to place it.
it unclear what these guys have to offer. If it's just the design, they just repeat the idea from 2011 ([1]). If they have a technology to produce these things, why don't they have a video demonstration of a prototype?

[1] http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/flashkus/
How about we wait until Google actually starts building such weapons before we start accusing them of actually wanting to do so.
> What if the robots are only used to kill evil people?

Evil by whose definition is usually the question.
Set up the company in your home country, it will make your life much easier. Otherwise, unless your country has a double tax agreement with the country where you registered your company, you will need to legally declare the company drawings as income, and you will end up paying tax twice.

If your company is registered in a different country than where you file your personal tax return, you will also have a very hard time if the tax years don't match up (for example if one country files tax returns in June, and one in December).

Basically, you can't avoid paying tax anywhere, so don't try. Just get a good accountant back home, and it won't matter where you travel.

I've spent the past couple years traveling this way with a company registered back home and had no problems.
Top Ten Funniest Girl Fails
Pragmatic question: I'm a mathematician by training, and currently a machine learning engineer at a large Silicon Valley company. How does one in their late twenties jump into really working robotics? Machine learning was something I could watch lectures on, read papers about, work the math out on paper, then spend years in Python/C++ getting a feel for across various problem domains. Physical robots don't seem as accessible.
Ummm...hate to break the bad news, but floppy disks (and the rest of the removable storage ilk) was killed off years ago by the Cloud. Better luck next idea.
This is huge. It is cutting-edge, hardcore technology. Worth so much more than Snapchat-like hype (ironically, may be even much cheaper). Well done, Google.
You're saying that it's okay that the British Library doesn't have adequate infrastructure to support people trying to work and access information?

The equivalent would be if Starbucks, the coffee shop, only served inferior quality coffee at a ridiculously high price … wait a minute …
Hey, you could probably contact the developers and save them a lot of trouble designing a single player campaign by telling them that. Heads will roll when it turns out a random guy on the internet has a better idea of their audience than their marketing department.
Augustine found it worth remarking upon that Ambrose read silently. Many medieval letters and books started with something like "don't read this in the presence of others, for it is secret". And there's a reason why we call little working nooks carols and why we still talk about chewing over new ideas. It's hard to imagine a time when reading and (basic, not necessarily creative) writing were separate skills, and that having the one did not necessarily imply having the other. We've changed a bit since printing happened.
For me:

FirePicker for Firebug to quickly adjust colors in CSS https://addons.mozilla.org/hu/firefox/addon/firepicker

Yet Another Smooth Scrolling to make scrolling smooth like on touch devices
https://addons.mozilla.org/hu/firefox/addon/yet-another-smoo...

NetVideoHunter to download videos from YouTube and music from Grooveshark
https://addons.mozilla.org/hu/firefox/addon/netvideohunter-v...

Omnibar
https://addons.mozilla.org/hu/firefox/addon/omnibar/
> Image Zoom

It's such a simple add-on, but I use it daily. Along with NoScript, it's one of the reasons I switched back to FF from Chrome.
Our merchant bank gives us interchange plus pricing, so we see all the rates. We see about 30 different categories on our monthly statements. It is not until we get the statement that we know what is going on. I don't think it is possible to know the rate before doing the transaction.

Here is a link to the interchange rates for Visa (10 pages of rates):

http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-...
Chrome on Android has the Accessibility setting "force enable zoom" that can be ticked to achieve that

Mobile Safari allows the viewport settings to be changed at runtime, so you could make a JavaScript bookmarklet to achieve the same. EDIT: already done https://gist.github.com/jasonbarry/6047338 as per user andrethegiant below.
> try talking to a kid who isn't oppressed by people who think they can't engage with media actively.

That's right! People who are worried about some of the crap kids get exposed to are actually actively causing whatever they're worried about. This makes so much sense.
"Calamitous intent" evil or just "meh" evil?
If one is working on military contracts, then one is a military contractor.

If they are owned by Google and Google honors those contracts, then this is the day that Google publicly became a military contractor.
What makes you think we'd ever be told?
I believe it was 800 million per founder.
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Little Bits/Korg open source synth kit on GitHub
Does anyone know what Google is brewing with their new army of robot engineers/companies? I'm obviously not expecting the correct answer (anyone who know's certainly wouldn't be able to say), but I am curious what others speculate.
Had my plan canceled here in Calif. Less coverage, higher deductible for $70/month more.
How about we wait until someone actually accuses Google of that before we accuse them of accusing Google of that.
> grants from DoD ... They are all practical

You'd be surprised. I've done a couple of grants for projects that ended up being completely open to public and DoD didn't really give a shit about, despite providing some sweet funding for them.

But Google... that's a different story.
Yeah, I was having trouble finding a job in late 2008 when the market got really weird, and a recruiter was the one who clued me in to my resume problems. I'd never really had any trouble finding a job before, so I didn't have a lot of resume-building expertise.
Computer Vision is a good gateway.

Also, play with Arduino some.
Those are actually very easy to make. You just float oil-based inks on water, using a stylus or a comb to make the traceries (and clear oil or water drops to make the voids); transfer to the paper is almost immediate and almost total. Marbling's been around for a very long time.
Mathworks now give out student licenses for MOOCs. At least they did for some Udacity courses I took earlier this year.
>Very few things have better margins than software

Ad business and search engine are not selling software.
Nope, already was: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-office-365-and-google-apps-fa...
Interesting. Do you have a link to the story?
What Tech Hasn't Learned From Urban Planning
I had a similar issue, except it was with their Steam client (on Mac). It started hanging and crashing on every launch. I sent them crash traces and tried to get help figuring out what was wrong. However, their customer support is one of the worst I've ever dealt with. I got no help at all, just a canned reply after canned reply that told me to follow the steps I had explicitly told them I had already followed.

After trying to get it to work for weeks, I finally told them that their product is faulty and they're not doing anything to fix it so I would like my money back. Of course they refused over and over. Since I only had a handful of cheap games bought at sales, I decided to write the whole thing off as a loss and uninstall it.
Stupidity is negligence.

False, in general. If you want to assert someone is using stupidity as a cover, you need evidence. I don't believe that should be the default hypothesis.
Annoying how the site creates history entries when scrolling -- would be nice if it used replaceState instead.
Pet peeve: crippling my back button

There's got to be a better way
I think you missed my implication to his response. The way he put it is that Google is evil so when it moves to DoD and it must be evil, and I say that's not necessarily true just because Google being Google.
Couldn't agree more - I would rate this as the second most important news item this year, after the NSA revelations.
>It is the eighth robotics company that Google has acquired in the last half-year.

This is a crazy aggressive acquisition strategy. Does anybody have a list of the other companies?

Where could google be heading to? They already have self-driving cars and a big stake in Uber. Somehow I am missing a connection to a manufacturer that already has an established stake in the vehicle/robotics industry. All they have so far are design companies.
Random unrelated hilarious moment: When I finished reading, I looked at the other articles linked below, and one of the images used was randomly from my flickr page (of my gf) hahaha. Such a weird moment to see that, considering the image only has 16 views. But I do set all my photos for complete open use.
I was wondering when someone would make a comment like this. I don't have a problem with Google tracking me, but I do have a problem with not being able to right click and copy links from a search results page.
The quest to make encryption accessible to the masses
You're talking about badly built sites here. The change to Chrome discussed in the article doesn't make the situation you describe any better or worse.
Somehow this has a better ring to it than "hackernewsing"
Now it's 161+
Maybe they're "headed to" robotic construction? It would certainly leverage Google's strengths as a machine learning / AI company. If they can buy up a bunch of robotics companies and get there first, they might just capture a market that makes search look tiny.
I had no idea what I was going to get at the end, or why I was answering the questions.

"Answering five questions will help sort out some basics that are crucial to your future success."

Should probably read "and get a boilerplate legal agreement outlining..."
do you happen to mean jon clark? i helped work with him on RiSE :) can't believe it's been almost 8 years now. i wasn't working with the robotics directly, though, but studying animal locomotion (measuring foot forces, CM, roll/pitch/yaw ...). good times
ok, so it's pretty obvious mainstream robotics' time is finally coming. growing up, I could teach myself many facets of software engineering with nothing more than a few books and a computer, and build all kinds of interesting projects that I could use myself and share with others, like games, utilities, web sites, etc.

this analogue doesn't seem to be there for learning robotics. if I hack on a robotics project, it feels like it's going to be more of a toy or a demo, and it is self contained and not something that I can share with others to use. sure, I can spend time getting a robot to solve a simple puzzle, navigate a maze, or whatever, but these types of projects seem so less motivating compared to the types of things that got me into coding in the first place: things I could share with others and that they would enjoy using. Are there projects like this? What are some robotics projects that I can build and learn from while and actually use and enjoy, today, relatively cheaply? I want to learn this stuff but it feels very forced to find that most projects seem very academic in nature and not "shippable" like even the most basic toy projects I did when starting out.

I went through Thurn's self-driving car class and started the mobile robot control course on Coursera, but the apex of these is at best a simple little robot platform moving around my house sensing tape on the floor. Even that will cost me $1000, in practice I will probably end up with just a simulation on my PC. Mindstorms looks cool but almost by definition it is just a toy. When can I build a robot that will perform real, useful automation that will improve my life, even in some marginal way, not just seem like a cool toy? How can I build a robot that will fetch me a beer or let the dog out or get the mail or something even minor that will make me feel like I am doing something with purpose and a real goal and not a homework assignment to get a robot to perform some meaningless task.
If Google is the only one with robotics technology, then it can name its terms when dealing with vehicle manufacturers, because they will need to be able to license it to remain cutting-edge. By not acquiring/having a formal stake in the automobile industry, it limits its risk (since we all know how risky that business is now!).
Suggestion: 3D scan and release as open source 3d models of everything in the British Museum as well.
Not to poke holes in the implementation but even one-wire requires two connection, [1]Data/Power [2] Ground. Even with their optical mumbo jumbo how the hell can they actually transfer data?

On one hand they talk about optical things, and then on the other hand they're talking about 'conductive'. Seriously? Regardless, you do not bypass the laws of physics. You need atleast a complete circuit for it to be powered. And if their cop-out is that it's got a super-micro-pico-tiny-high-density-capacitor then I'm not even going to bother poking holes anymore.

Well, there is a way but it's pointlessly slow - inductive power.

The whole concept is quite flawed in my opinion [EDIT - unless their plan is to showcase a theoretical ultrathin USB flash drive.]
The article is not sensationalist.

While it's too short, and only scratches the surface of the topic, his idea is valid and not unfamiliar to people who like or hate these games.

I've played these games before and thought "this is American bullshit (for reasons stated in the article).... but kinda fun at the same".
From [1]:

Google bought seven robotics companies in the past six months -
Schaft, Industrial Perception, Meka,
Redwood Robotics, Bot & Dolly, Autofuss and Holomni -

[1] : http://allthingsd.com/20131203/google-acquired-seven-robotic...
I'm currently working on a project for uni that does something like this. It let's you "tag" items in the world. So, for example, I can leave a message on the painting on the wall. Next time I take a picture of that wall, it will show me my messages again. You could also use it to send messages to other people. "I left you a virtual message on the fridge." The other person walks up to the fridge, takes a picture, and gets the message. I think it has some interesting potential.

It's on github [1]. Though I haven't created any video or documentation yet.

[1] https://github.com/Alexander-Dhoore/tagTheWorld
Your link appears to agree with me. That ppx/device-pixel-ratio is used to make CSS pixels an angular measurement. Although I haven't encountered a TV browser that does this properly yet.
It's not a purchase, it's a rental with the entire rent paid up front. You know it's a rental because you enter into a continuing contract with them, which causes the games to be returned when either party breaks the contract. You have to map your mental model to view it that way, and put a matching value on things. It's why i only 'buy' games on steam when they're steeply discounted because that's the only time they're fairly priced.

Anyway, at some point this is going to get regulated, especially in the EU. They won't be allowed to use terms like 'purchase' and 'buy' without a specific legal consequence (like the right of resale). Until then we can only hope they get onerous enough to get on the radar of lawmakers.
if it is going to happen, isn't it always closer than ever before :)
I've got a friend who works over at Blue Origin...damned fine bunch of engineers, and I'm hoping that when they finally decide to make news it'll be something fantastic.

Bezos is serious business.
The mediocrity is why they sell as good as they do. The simple story-line, roller-coaster style "on a track" interaction are what makes it appeal to the lowest common denominator.

The main audience of these games are being misinterpreted in this article and in these comments. CoD is not a sophisticated game - it's a game that 12 year old boys get really excited about beg their parents to get for Christmas, or college aged guys that are sick of halo. If you think the CoD producers are designing a game for people expecting a complicated storyline full of puzzles and riddles, you're mistaken.

I don't understand the purpose behind this article. It's basically like being upset that a fisher price toy is too simple minded and easy.
It's all still just words. No two humans could ever fully agree on what constitutes "harm", racist ones would even debate who is "human".

It's like everybody has the public methods what_is_harm() and what_is_a_human(), but how they're implemented matters, not the function signature. The laws of robots are just placeholders for something that never got written.

Words are tricky. What if robots decide that the best way to avoid harm coming to humans is to prevent any being born? So that means you have to rephrase it, into something like maximizing human happiness. Oh no, now they're injecting everyone with drugs and cloning humans by the planetfull. What now? Actual source or it didn't happen.. just creating an empty file called solution_to_the_problem.txt doesn't work, I tried it.
Exposing the growing epidemic of "iDouche's" and "Multitaskers"
You'll be surprised, but Google dominates social networking. Don't forget about YT.
If that's what he meant, that it's really low. For comparison a Tempurpedic is 5.3 lbs. per civic foot for it's top layer, nearer 8 for the structural bottom layer.
Are robots possibly the "Internet of the future" in terms of the kind of impact they will have on humanity is a short timespan?
Because the cache doesn't disappear when you turn the machine off, forcing you to read the games from spinning rust every time.
There are better causes to devote yourself to than spreading your hatred for one man.
Good work man.

Can you make the license permissive? MIT, BSD or Apache?

For the code presentation, Have you seen pycco? http://fitzgen.github.io/pycco/
Hmm, as someone who also sells a digital product, I have to disagree. I'm very generous with refunds. I figure a reputation for great customer service more than makes up for the small amount it costs me.

Sure, there's nothing, literally nothing, stopping someone from downloading my entire 40-hour+ back catalog, unsubscribing, and asking for a refund. They could also sign up for the free trial, download everything, and unsubscribe.

Or they could just pirate everything. And there's nothing I can do to stop it.

So who would I hurt by refusing to offer refunds: The freeloaders? Or the legitimate customers who gave my product a try and found that it didn't fit? Maybe I'm naïve, but I think that positive word-of-mouth a friendly and prompt refund will benefit me more in the long term.

I know that if I got a non-functional product and couldn't get a refund, I'd be livid. I'd execute a chargeback so fast their head would spin, and I would badmouth the company involved for months.
But what is more evil - that your coworker works on encryption technology that is used to pilot drones, or that your coworker didn't work on that technology, and thus in order to foil a terrorist plot, ground missions were required that ended up costing the lives of a strict superset of people? Don't get me wrong - I don't condone the lengths to which our government uses war technology, but as an engineer, the probability distribution over {my technology will be evil by some metric, my technology will promote good in this world by that metric} is by no means certain.
I looked at the data supporting the article's assumption that older workers make up a greater percentage of the long term unemployed than exist in the marketplace, and it is just no that great of a difference.

Instead of blaming employers, there are other causes for long term unemployment. The first of course is a slow growing economy that would normally absorb the unemployed. The other, I believe, is the greatest cause of our long term unemployment: raising the federal minimum wage $2 back in 2008.

Without going into detail, creating an artificial floor for the price of something limits the supply. For example, Some employers won't hire someone at $7 an hour, but might at $6. Some employers could hire 5 employees at $5 an hour, but only 4 at $7.
> Groovy with Gradle is a pretty good answer that is there today

I've heard many good things about Gradle's functionality, but not so many about Groovy. Only yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6884355 ) I asked if Gradle will ever expose an API so developers can use the same language for the build scripts as they do for the projects they're building, i.e. Groovy with Gradle for Groovy projects, and Scala with Gradle for Scala projects?
Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2006/10/google-to-acquire-yo...
I have a funny feeling we will be reading about this in history books in 50 years.
It's a really, really good time to be a programmer. I don't know how long it's going to last, but it's really good right now. I recently took 2.5 years off (during which I worked on my own technical projects, which helped a lot), and not only did I get a lot of recruiter interest during that time, once I started seriously looking for a job again, it only took about one month to get exactly the job I had been fantasizing about for years. They asked about my time off, but they asked really politely, as if they were afraid of putting me off.
I sleep on this $400 mattress I got at Costco, so if you're telling me that your mattress is comparable to that of the big boys, this seems like a nobrainer for me. I didn't think I needed a new one until this post :)

Feedback: I really like the idea of having a boutique mattress (whatever that means) at an affordable price, a product that I can tell had a lot of thought put into.
i like hearing a large accounting firm say this. i feel a lot of the troubles bitcoin has had is due to having the term 'coin' in its name, which implies it is a currency.
I too would absolutely love to know how you can get involved with robotics as a hobby without spending and arm and a leg (assuming I have access to a workshop equipment like at TechShop or NoiseBridge).
Hi, thanks for the reply! I see you already mostly fixed the issue, with the box now scaling relatively to the screen height. I'll file an issue about the scrolling behaviour.
With a little manifest file describing the priority of each file, Steam could easily allow you to play while it's still downloading.
In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 seems a little excessive.
I guess the original article concluded that it doesn't look like a Poisson distribution, and this is the journalist's attempt to explain that for the intended audience.
Want to make your own app?
Get a kinetic, put some wheels on it and then get ROS/PCL running on it.
"If a game is going to portray war" it should feature death, dismemberment, despair and misery ...
ROS and Gazebo are Open Source, are used by professional researchers, and are all you need to make a real contribution. You can't afford a robot, but you can simulate a very good one for free.

http://www.osrfoundation.org/
Thanks.

Isn't this list of acquisitions tilted towards mechanics and hardware for mobility? And less towards perception, intelligence, and planning? Do they think they have the latter areas covered in-house?