Hacker News Reader

amjaegeron Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?

Definitely publish! Check out the Journal of Open Source Software - https://joss.theoj.org/

amjaegeron Groundbreaking arm amputation surgery makes a ‘phantom’ hand seem real

https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scirobotics.aan2971

This is one of the first papers describing the AMI surgery.

Do you have a source or a specific reason to comparing to Morocco? I was there in 2015. The trains were in pretty rough shape, on one of the trains the toilet was damaged and you could see the train tracks... I don't remember any other specifics, but overall the transportation was a bit rough. That being said, I don't know much about the quality of transportation in America outside of the east coast.

amjaegeron Jello 3D Printer (2013)

This is so cool! And it's from 2013, thats amazing. A very similar printing method is being explored by MIT's Self Assembly lab, I think they first published in 2017 - https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/rapid-liquid-printing https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/3dp.2017.0037

amjaegeron Ask HN: What is the oldest image online in which the link is not broken?

The old MIT leglab website is still live and hosted by csail. Wayback machine has oldest capture back in 1996. I checked a few of the images of the older robots and wayback machine shows the links were unchanged since96. http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/leglab/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210126053221/http://www.ai.mit...

amjaegeron Maine Becomes First State to Use Ranked-Choice Voting in a Presidential Election

It's hard to tell. In the 2016 primaries Trump had 44% of the vote. That's a lot, and it's more than the other candidates, but its not a majority of the total vote. In the earlier primaries he most of his victories were in the 30's. So now you have to guess where he ranked for the 60-70% of people that voted for other people in early primaries. He might have still won, or other candidates could have emerged with majorities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Republican...

[edit] I guess that doesn't really answer your question, because you asked about this election...

amjaegeron MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations

Chris Bourg sent the email announcing it.

amjaegeron An Oregon creamery making vodka from milk

I think this is it. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_o...

amjaegeron Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

Octave looks really cool, I am not familiar with it. Like I said, gibbon is open source, so you could attempt to port it. I didn't write gibbon, so I have no idea what the dependencies are like. But I imagine it would not be trivial.

amjaegeron Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

If you get an mri or ct scan you can use this package to segment the bones and the convert the image slices to 3D geometry. https://www.gibboncode.org/ It’s open source, but uses matlab which is not free if you are not at a university. It will also take a while...

amjaegeron The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)

Amusing note, The "what is the common thread" slide literally shows the promised land. It's a picture of Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.

amjaegeron 3D Color Print

I order material cartridges for my lab's Stratasys Connex 500. There are a lot of different materials at a lot of different pricepoints... but generally $125 - $250/kg of material. I would expect HP to price in that range.

amjaegeron Ask HN: Is there a fitness wristband that is hackable?

These guys started from a kickstarter 3 or 4 years ago, and are still in business. I bought one but never had time to use it. https://mbientlab.com/

amjaegeron Ask HN: How Much Alcohol/Coffee Do You Drink?

0-3 cups of coffee per day (with 3 being rare) 3-16 drinks/2 weeks. I just graduated so that number was even higher cause of celebrations, but it was usually pretty low.

I wish there were more comments here, would be a cool survey for HN

amjaegeron Ending the cult of the CEO

I'm sure the majority of the article is valid, but Apple's stock skyrocketed after Job's death. I'm sure it's an outlier but kind of wish that had been acknowledged given the image used.

amjaegeron Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2017)

Hi, Is there a reason this job is not listed on the general jobs page? https://lco.global/jobs

amjaegeron Ask HN: What am I missing about this FCC order?

Not an expert, but one difference I see often mentioned is the ISPs have a monopoly. Don't like google tracking you then use DuckDuckGo. You don't have that choice with ISPs. I'm in Worcester (second "most populous" city in NE) I can pick Charter or Verison DSL

amjaegeron Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (2013)

Article does not present and solutions to picking a good leader and avoiding the issues mentioned in the article. Unless the advice is "only elect female leaders" - which also seems broken.

amjaegeron Google’s self-driving car team prepares to spin out from Alphabet’s X

If I'm not mistaken, this is the presentation that discusses mapping the roads before autonomous travel. They compare the maps to what the car sees as it drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk

But there are a number of reasons the need pre-mapping are not a huge issue. A) When autonomous cars start to be introduced people will still know how to drive, and can pilot the car through unmapped areas. By the time everyone has an autonomous car, and no one knows how to drive the world will be mapped. B) Google has already shown with Streetview that they can create detailed, up-to-date maps of most roads. C) This problem will likely be solved in time.

amjaegeron Google’s self-driving car team prepares to spin out from Alphabet’s X

Uber's "Otto" is already making autonomous trucks.

You're describing a traveling salesman problem - which there are plenty of working solutions (even if we don't know the best solution yet) And then an autonomous forklift problem - there are a few companies already making them. And packaging + placement can simplify any issues if they exist. Maybe throw in a robotic arm in the back of the truck for good measure.

Autonomously refilling a tank of gas could be a fun problem to solve. But full service stations already exist. Those should be able to stand in until there is a better solution, such as Tesla's battery swap stations but for trucks.

Now, without a human driver the trucks can be working 24/7. No need for sleep. Which might be worth it even if a human accompanies the truck and just sleeps in a back section. Also who wants to pay a person to drive a truck, when the truck can drive itself for free?

amjaegeron Trump’s attorney general pick could restart the encryption fight

A little tired of election news on HN, but I know that encryption and privacy is important to HN community. This article should serve as a heads up to be weary of encryption laws in the next few years.

amjaegeron The Night a Computer Predicted the Next President (2012)

I think I first read about this in the 2nd edition of Computer: A History of the Information Machine[1]. Still fascinating

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-History-Information-Machine-...

amjaegeron MacBook Pro is a lie

Robotics Engineer(ing student). Also annoyed that only the most expensive pro has a real graphics card.

Things that need a lot of RAM:

Solidworks, Fusion360 (I can't even run it on 8bg with and an integrated gpu) And using Solidworks remotely is a bad joke.

Robot Path planning, motion planning

AI Assignments,

ROS + RVIZ + Gazebo + actual robot software

Anything written in python

[EDIT almost forgot] Matlab, VMs

Playing music or having a web browser open while any of the above things are running...

16bg would probably be fine for 2 years. But >$2000 is a lot to pay for only 2 years of use. People seem to think that just because its no longer current_year-1 that their desktop app can use previous_version's_RAM+0.5gb

There are enough people with enough reasons for having only a laptop. The dell precision m5510 is around same price as mbp (depending on setup) and yet it comes with a real graphics card, and the option for 32 gb of RAM.

amjaegeron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2016)

Location: Boston MA, USA

Remote: No

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: Robotics, ROS, Python, C/C++, Java, Solidworks, MATLAB,

Resume: www.jaeger.engineering

email: amjaeger@wpi.edu

About Me: Senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute studying robotics engineering. Looking for entry level full time job in robotics starting august or later. My background is mixed software and hardware, I have experience with Navigation, AI, Robot control, Embedded, Mechanical design. Information about my projects can be found at www.jaeger.engineering

amjaegeron Ask HN: 5th grader seeking science mentor in California

Hi, Unfortunately I do not live in California - But maybe look into existing FIRST lego league teams in the area.http://www.firstinspires.org/ There are a lot of volunteers that work with the kids. They might be able to join an existing team abd it would also get them involved with other students interested in science and engineering.

amjaegeron Ask HN: Reccomendation, Hand Written Notes to Text File, Smart-Pen

I know you're looking for paper, but I've had a lot of success with a tablet with a digitizer and stylus. I have a sony vaio duo 13 - only because when I bought it the surface pro wasn't great yet. It uses the ntrig pen used for the current surface pros. Microsoft's handwriting -> text is fairly robust.

amjaegeron Ask HN: Why is inter-device file sharing still a hassle?

For a short time I had a windows 8 phone. That was the only time sending stuff over bluetooth from computer -> phone, phone-> computer, phone -> windows phone actually worked well. Unfortunately the rest of windows phone sucked.

amjaegeron Paul's Online Math Notes

This site is how I learned calculus & the only reason I never failed a math class. But I wish he had some notes for linear algebra

amjaegeron Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2016)

Seeking Summer internship

Location: Worcester Ma, Boston Ma USA

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: Robotics, Solidworks, ROS, C/C++, Python, Java, Embedded computing, rapid prototyping

Resume/Portfolio: www.jaeger.engineering - resume and portfolio can be downloaded

email: amjaeger@wpi.edu

Looking for a summer internship in robotics, or robotics related fields. Availability: Mid May - August

amjaegeron South Koreans triumph in US robot challenge

Hi, I was there! I was on the field team WPI-CMU's robot Warner. (I am one of 4 undergraduate students on the team, I have worked with the team for 1.5 years. I worked on UI's for operator control, robot testing and many other side projects). Just thought I would mention that our Atlas Robot never fell down or needed a reset. We completed 7/8 tasks, we unfortunately failed the drill task twice. The first time because of software error, and the second time a hardware error. There will be some papers coming out in the future from my team, and I am sure there will be plenty from the other teams. I am using in flight wifi, so I will not be providing youtube links to my comments, but I encourage you to check out the youtube pages for WPI-CMU Warner, MIT, and IHMC

To respond to some of your other comments: WPI-CMU, MIT, and IHMC all had their own balance controllers and specialized walking for atlas. I do not know as much about the other atlas teams. The atlas robot is ~400 lbs and ~7 feet tall. My team looked into fall recovery, but we found that the arms we not capable of doing a "push-up" to get the robot off the ground. At that point we decided the best strategy was to do everything in our power to avoid a fall. My understanding is that both MIT and IHMC damaged their robot during their falls. Any attempt to recover would have likely failed anyway. If a fall occurred the safest option was to e-stop the robot to turn off the hydraulic pump. Picking objects up off the floor is tricky. Our team has done it successfully on occasion during tests, but it was very risky and also often caused the robot to fall.

In many cases the software reaches the limit of the mechanical capabilities of the Atlas robot. Even though the Atlas is the cutting edge in robotics getting out of a car is a challenge because it's range of motion is incredibly limited compared to that of a human. It takes Warner ~3.5 minutes to get out of the car and onto a platform we added on. This the result of 2 years of work by a brilliant researcher who exclusively worked on egress. It might be true that most manipulation was pure teleoperation for some teams, but that is not the case for WPI-CMU. I also think MIT and IHMC were highly automated. The pauses in operation were often the robot running planning algorithms. For example we click a point on the operator screen to select an object - such as the drill. Then the robot autonomously determines the location, and finds the most efficient way to grasp it using a technique called trajopt. (If I'm not mistaken) Tartan Rescue used another technique called RRT's - it's rapidly-exploring random tree. These types of algorithms take time. Regardless, after some practice operation with full communication and with com dropouts had similar run times.

Manipulation and locomotion are difficult because manipulation changes the location of the center of mass on the robot. WPI-CMU uses a static stepping technique the always shifts the center of mass above a stationary leg, it then lifted and moved it's other leg, then placed it down. The robot would shift it's weight after the foot is on the ground. Moving the arms while one foot is in the air is not easy. IHMC has a karate kid video where they balance on one foot and do a few kicks and move their arm. It is very very impressive, but not easy.

Originally teams were given 30 minutes to complete each task. Now teams had 1 hour to do all tasks. Things were going to have to change. Hopefully everything I wrote made sense, and helped clarify things.