ecuzzillo

On lag: I would imagine that the first teleoperation centers would come from places where sufficient internet connectivity was already in place, and then as the market grew, it would become profitable for service companies to create internet infrastructure in places where wages are lower.

Yes, we envision the first applications being dangerous services. The idea is, at any given time, for any given task, there is a ratio of how long it takes a teleoperated robot to do the task to how long it would take a human. Currently this ratio is maybe 10:1, and a good part of the work in the next couple of years will be reducing that ratio. It's likely to be cost-effective, though, to send robots to dangerous places even when the ratio is high; then, as the ratio nears 1:1, it becomes reasonable to use such robots for household tasks. Then, as we develop autonomy for individual tasks, the ratio will start to go below 1, because an operator can set a robot on one task, switch robots, set a second robot on a task, etc.

We haven't really looked into ruggedizing the thing, partly because Anybots eventually wants to mostly be in the software end of the industry, rather than manufacturing hardware. The point of the prototypes is to provide a platform to prove the quality of the software, and then find manufacturing partners to help make the robots bulletproof and production-ready.

Number of pixels is similarly up in the air, depending on how many we think are necessary to accomplish a given task. Monty's current setup has an array of fixed, cheap cameras, because it's easier to just have a whole bunch of cameras than to have a complicated expensive pan-tilt operation with one camera. One way of reducing the required bandwidth would be to create an option just to ship a user-selected region of the panorama, the one relevant to the current task. For navigation, maybe we could downsample the panorama to provide a wide-angle view of the scene. (The above is all speculation, by the way.)

I'm not totally sure I agree that latency is so terrible. Currently, our operators mostly move the arms pretty slowly, to avoid nonintuitive dynamic effects of pneumatic actuators. I would imagine that if you had to move your arm and wait a fraction of the second for the visual feedback, it wouldn't be so terrible. It would slow things down, but I don't think it would kill you.

Uh, we didn't say that. We said _our robots_ _will eventually_ be able to go wherever people can go, including stairs and maybe ladders. They currently are restricted to floors with small random crap on them.

The point of the wherever-people-can-go idea is that the whole Anybots vision of the robotics market in the next 20 years is that AI won't be production-ready, but teleoperated robots will certainly be production ready. So, we merely have to design robots and software that can smoothly allow a remote operator to behave as if (s)he is actually in the environment the robot is in, and perform tasks that way. In particular, this involves going most places people can go.

So, we have a big bank of monitors that displays a big panorama fusing all of Monty's cameras, so the operator can see what's going on, and a glove and backpack operation that allows the operator's movements to be sent back to the robot.

Initially, the title bugged me because I generally associate specialists as people who are actually good as something (anything), and generalists with people who aren't, and therefore defend their lack of goodness by calling themselves generalists. This is probably the more mainstream use of the term. For instance, a computer science generalist might be very happy, because he's good at many different kinds of software and computing, and can use many different techniques to achieve a goal, but a journalist would call him a computer science specialist. A computer science specialist, by contrast, is somebody like a professor of PL research who has poured his entire career, and especially his journey to tenure, into a useless pedantic language that no one will ever use. To a journalist, both are specialists, but to a CS guy, the first is a generalist, and the second is a specialist. So, if you were a journalist, or more generally not invested in a particular field (let alone subfield), the essay wouldn't make sense.

You seem to have a talent for getting banned from various places.

What do you mean, why didn't he not upgrade it? He did not upgrade his grayscale blog.

Hackers are supposed to be smart people, and smart people don't go for this sort of stuff (Also, hackers don't go around asking people to paint paintings for them for negative compensation).

Look at the front page: the top link is this crap, and then of the top 10, we have 5 completely content-free links, and then another 5 links that are vaguely informative, but none of the kind of insightful fascinating long articles that make one's day (e.g. the violin string thing).

The last two comics struck me as being there because there needed to be a strip, rather than because they had something to say. I hope I'm wrong, though.

Well, a) that, and b) I think the reason this site jumped the shark, if it has indeed done so, is that it tried to start with a bunch of random business people as a community and turn it into a hacker community, rather than starting with a bunch of hackers and getting them interested in startups, which is what it wanted to do. What it's left with is a bunch of random business people trolling about random crap.

I'm pretty sure xkcd just jumped the shark. Please don't let YC news jump the shark on the same day.

This is a bit like saying "I have a great idea for a painting. Will you paint it for me, and then give me half the money you get from selling it?"

Just out of curiosity, which is smarter, a fish or a salamander?

wikipedia

Undo-able votes, or an are-you-sure on votes-- accidentally downmodding random comments is unhappy.

38. I don't act nearly that autistic, though. I think that's mostly through training. You wouldn't guess that score if you met me.

Two points: 1) It does seem to matter for at least CS grad school, as was said in Undergraduation, because of research opportunities. So if you just want to start a web startup and get rich, fine, but if you want to go to grad school after you get rich, not so fine.

2) I've taken classes at CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford, and while the differences didn't particularly correlate with the rankings (since the relative rankings of those three places in CS get permuted regularly anyway), there were serious differences in attitude and rigor. CMU and Berkeley were both very rigorous; the difference was that CMU was rigorous in a somewhat more pointless, soul-sucking manner, on average, and didn't explain things as well. Stanford was somewhat less rigorous, which I imagine was because of the Ivy-league difficult-to-get-in but easy-to-pass phenomenon. This seems to correlate somewhat with the number of undergrads at each place involved in research; at both CMU and Berkeley, I know many undergrads involved in research, while the one professor I talk to at Stanford hungrily scrounges for the rare undergrad who's good at research.

So there are differences in curriculum and selection, I think; they're just not particularly amazing predictors of success. They certainly should influence the decision of which colleges to apply to, though.

Most of what I said was inferred from the Reddit discussion resulting from the aforementioned interview, and most of the content in that discussion came from people who were actually involved. So, maybe I inferred wrongly; which things weren't true?

I am under the impression that my clothes mostly match by default, since all my pants are khakis. I just imagined some set of images that I was supposed to compare for appealingness, and then have a hidden set of answers I could compare to; that would demonstrate it pretty strongly for me, without having any power of suggestion involved.

Do you know of any quizzes that test for that kind of perception? I know I'm not colorblind, but I strongly suspect I'm lacking the color-combination-preference circuit.

This is the best article to come out of the switch to hacker news yet. _exactly_ what I'd read all day long, time permitting.

I expect Matt will have more personal bad experiences, but the most well-publicized one goes approximately as follows:

- Aaron applies to YC, starts Infogami with a co-founder who drops out (presumably because of Aaron's special interpersonal sparkles).

- Aaron launches Infogami, with a promise of a new feature every day.

- Aaron complains for a long time about how he doesn't have a co-founder, and then merges with Reddit.

- Aaron abandons Infogami (pissing off all its users, including me), and then proceeds not to do anything at Reddit, to the chagrin of the Reddits, who just effectively gave him a bunch of their stock. Aaron nevertheless has time for nauseatingly many melodramatic blog entries. - Reddit gets bought, and Aaron gets an equal share of the spoils.

- Aaron cries in the bathroom (literally), and then quits Wired, the acquiring company, by just not showing up to work. (And posts a suicidal blog entry, and proceeds to delete it.)

- Aaron does an interview in which he claims to have been part of Reddit from the beginning, pissing absolutely everyone off.

Except that for many people outside the club, what he says won't be true, since many people outside the club aren't actually that smart, and, worse, aren't actually working in a market where there is obviously something to be had.

Watching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.

I would definitely read (and even buy) Founders at Rest; in Founders at Work, you get a bunch of stuff about what successful founders do, but you don't know which stuff is necessary and which stuff is coincidental. You need a bunch of negative data points to make a really correct assessment about necessary and sufficient conditions for startup success.

I'd buy it.

The point was to make it like reddit-of-old, not reddit-of-now. This is nauseatingly reddit-of-now-like.

This seems nauseatingly reddit-like.

I had that for a while, but stopped wearing it because a) I can't wear watches, and b) it takes just a little too long to convert in your head. It would work much better if all our amounts of time (minutes in an hour, hours in a day) were powers of 2.

I think so. I care enormously much. I spent an inordinate amount of time finding a correct keyboard position and chair configuration. I ended up with a GoldTouch adjustable-angle keyboard I found lying around my workplace, plus two books taped together held up by a waterbottle stolen from a coworker to hold up my wrists. Then, I pilfered a sideways mouse that wasn't being used in another part of the office.

Nobody else at the company goes quite so far, but the two other main programmers do have Aeron chairs, at least.

What's one of your fundamental issues with SCMs?

The poll link doesn't seem to be working anymore.