Hitchhiking Robot, Safe in Several Countries, Meets Its End in Philadelphia | Hacker News Reader

Hitchhiking Robot, Safe in Several Countries, Meets Its End in Philadelphia

nytimes.com

37 pointsraldi14 comments

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Publicity stunt?

http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/turns-out-the-dea...

So, wait, was the destruction of the robot orchestrated by the creators or some people in Philly?

It was a fraud! A terrible fraud.

http://factually.gizmodo.com/vloggers-faked-a-surveillance-v...

How much of it was a fraud? The whole project? The destruction of the robot? Or was that part all true, and just the video was fake?

To be honest, unless the creators are in on it too, this still reflects poorly on Philly and the US as a whole.

I always felt something was odd about that 'surveillance' video.

Well, it looks like we've been trolled but I'm sure the internet hate machine is waking up.

I predict their little publicity stunt will ultimately end their personas and fame.

"Part of hitchBOT’s mission was to study how to create anthropomorphic robots that human beings can react to, empathically, so that when a person comes to work and finds a glorified garbage can with a Samsung Galaxy for a head at his or her desk, they don’t react by demolishing it and throwing it out the window. Or, at least, they feel badly after demolishing it." - @netw3rk

The video surveillance is fake and is supposed to be a "prank". And it was recorded by the people who saw the bot last.

There have been astonishingly many posts about this story, but this one contains significant new information, so we're going to try unkilling, unburying, and unflagging it.

Edit: since the "significant new information" turns out to be fraudulent, I guess we'll turn the flags back on, but leave the thread open for discussion.

Was it killed due to flagging, or did mods bury it initially? If the latter, I apologize -- could you tell me a little more about why?

It was killed due to user flagging. I'm pretty sure that was because it was a duplicate, in the sense that the story had already had a major discussion.

Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that -- I thought I had seen a mention of it on HN, but I searched all around before submitting and couldn't find it.

Maybe that discussion was flagkilled too?

Many of the previous posts show up at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hitchbot&sort=byPopularity&pre.... There were lists of links in some of these that were voluminous to the point of hilarity. Let me see if I can find one. Edit: hmm, yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998853.

Wow. I know you have a long todo list and need to prioritize, but if you're ever considering adding a "why?" selector to the flag button, one of the options could be dupe and the flagger could paste in a URL or 20.

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