Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

It's a robotic arm on an already automated espresso machine that's existed for years. Calling that a barista is pretty thin...

View on HN

Yeah, until advanced AI adds some bored-teenager attitude and hipstery snark towards the customer, it's not a barista proper.

teenagers serve coffee where you live? I think you need a humanities degree in NZ and Australia to do that these days...

Getting a humanities degree only to serve coffee is what produces the appropriate level of snark.

Right? What a waste of time it is to study such a non-practical skill. Unlike us smart folks, who produce highly valued products and definitely not digital garbage. Now let's all pat ourselves on the back for being so clever.

The startup I work for is developing a back patting app that we hope will help combat impostor syndrome and disrupt the back patting space. We've just completed our Series A round of financing.

Don't forget to do a prior art search first:

https://www.google.com/patents/US4608967

Lol omg I cant believe that's real!!!!

fair enough, but people need to make enough money to support their families and majoring in Art History is not the best first step towards those goals.

Disagree. If society believes that supporting families is an important social priority, it is up to the government to put in place the best policies to enable that to happen. 'Making money' is only one way to achieve that goal.

I think deductibility of home mortgage interest highly correlates with that goal.

I think you're reading too much into it. It was really a smartass comment about how people with degrees now do jobs that people who didn't even have high school diplomas used to do.

In that case the snark is justified, since those humanities graduates can see right through the misery of theirs and yours human condition.

I've been ordering coffee all over the world for 25 years. I've never experienced this snarky barista the internet keeps telling me about.

It's just a meme to enable people to look down on them. Snowflake could probably be fit in here too.

Exactly. I would guess that eliminating the robotic arm would increase efficiency and agility. The automated espresso machines that I know already have the automatic cup dispensers, so it is just clicking the button and grab the finished drink. Not waiting behind a glass while a slow arm moves it a meter.

This robotic arm that serves ice cream is much more relevant as it performs a few more tasks (although at the end still a gimmick):

https://youtu.be/mmMn__FNBCM

mmM! Delicious!

What would be cool is a robotic cocktail bar. It could keep tabs on when you're over the limit, perhaps via a "breath before serve" test. If so, order an uber or notify your self driving car to pick you up. If you're dangerously drunk, it could stop serving you too.

I'd probably call it RoBAR.

There are venues like that: You need to buy tokens (from someone who will judge your sobriety, and at a maximum of five tokens at once) and you insert tokens for drinks.

I've not seen it done with cocktails, however, only draught beer taps.

Interesting. Where?

Is the joke that "robar" means "to steal" in Spanish?

I suspect "Automation is eliminating jobs for factory workers" is the main sentence the editor wanted in there. The rest is fluff.

They got ~20 simultaneous news stories published in high profile newspapers / sites. Pretty good clickbait (editor-bait?) story, and not bad PR work by the company.

Absolutely. It's really more a robot waiter that hands you the coffee.

It doesn't even do that, check the video. This thing is just a ridiculously inefficient coffee vending machine.

Also....a 6 DOF arm seems like overkill for this. Hell, you could probably get away with just shoulder yaw and an extra-wide gripper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com