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xanderjanz

125 karma · joined April 25, 2014

Coder from Danville CA. 12 years industry experience, iFixit, PlanGrid, and Uber. @xanderjanz on X
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xanderjanz··on Show HN: Browse 61 3D Printable Robots
Thanks!

- Checkout Reachy Mini or Stack-chan on orobotio, those are the top 2 SOTA AI personality robots, what you're looking for! Not an exact match, but I see the vision, it's definitely buildable.

- What AI services are you most familiar with? Claude? GPT? OpenRouter? HuggingFace? Gemini? Something else? I'm planning to support all of them, but will be helpful to know which would help you most.

- What would you estimate your skill level with programming, 3d printing, and building robotics electronics? beginner - moderate - expert?

Join my discord, and I'd love to set up a call with you. https://discord.gg/DWfUsCNVs

Thanks for checking it out!

xanderjanz··on Show HN: Browse 61 3D Printable Robots
@Jinyibruceli

Hi thanks for the question! HN flagged your comment, so I'll respond here.

You said: "I tried building a hexapod last year and the hardest part wasn't the printing, it was figuring out which servo library worked with which controller board. The Github repos were all over the place with dependencies. Does orobot normalize the BOM and software stack info, or is it mainly aggregating the STLs? I'm curious if the agent-generated content catches stuff like "this uses a deprecated ROS package" or incompatible firmware versions."

1) Yep it normalizes BOMs, whether it's on personal blogs, google docs, github, markdown, html, wherever. Agreed they are all over the place and hard to navigate, but LLM agents are really good at this. As much as it can, it tries to build a single one-click Amazon add to cart with everything in it. If parts aren't on Amazon, it prefers Alibaba next, or they're linked separately. Because some projects online are forks and only have BOM lists for their additions, so you need parts from the fork and the original BOM list, orobot puts both in one spot.

2) Yes orobot writes on-device javascript commands to git pull and run Makefiles or do whatever else it has to do to bootstrap. And that's installed over wifi through the app.

3) Yes the Agent install code definitely should fixup deprecated ROS libraries. Either internally to orobot.io, and it even will post push requests upstream, if there are bugs buried in the source GitHub project. Weather or not it has I'm not sure. Some of this is really new.

I don't want to promise anything I haven't tried myself. Can you link which hexapod github projects you were trying and if they're on orobotio already and what controller board and servos you have? I can try to look up for you how well supported it is right now.

Thanks for the feedback!

xanderjanz··on Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 Languages
There are open source versions of everything done within a GCP API call, but it requires multiple machines and lots of data to build an NLP model to be as fast and accurate as GCP, and cloud computing is relatively new compared to OCR.
xanderjanz··on Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 Languages
Also AFAIK GCV uses techniques beyond better OCR that greatly help accuracy. It does image fixing, boundary detection, NLP, spell check, etc.
xanderjanz··on Estimating Value of Facebook by Paying Users to Stop Using It
But other services don't connect to your friends. So I guess it's more like, paying them not to use any intersecting public roads.
xanderjanz··on Estimating Value of Facebook by Paying Users to Stop Using It
Isn't this sort of like estimating the value of Ford by paying users not to use roads?
xanderjanz··on Uber Revenue Slows as Quarterly Loss Surges to $1.1B
underrated post.
xanderjanz··on SEC settlement sends Tesla stock soaring
Investors care about revenue.
xanderjanz··on SEC settlement sends Tesla stock soaring
Wrong, it was the best selling overall sedan in US by revenue, including gas cars.
xanderjanz··on SEC settlement sends Tesla stock soaring
Depends on how you calculate it. Toyota sold more car, but in terms of $$ spent, Model 3 is the most popular sedan in US.
xanderjanz··on Tesla's Finance Team Is Losing Another Top Executive
You don't care about profitability anymore?

Now you want to talk about demand? OK.

- Tesla is mentioned in multiple current top rap songs.

- Elon has the most viewed episode of the most viewed podcast.

- Tesla is working on a rocket powered car.

- Teslas are featured in major TV shows and movies.

- $45k auto loan is within range of your average middle class budget.

You think that wont translate to sales? We'll see.

xanderjanz··on Tesla's Finance Team Is Losing Another Top Executive
I guess by definition, as long as they lose money, they lose money on each Model 3.

But really what you're implying is, when Fremont is a closer to full produciton, each Model 3 will net a loss. Best engineers say no. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/2018-tesla-model-3-munro-...

Even Tesla's public financials show they lost more money, when they made less model 3s.

xanderjanz··on Tesla's Finance Team Is Losing Another Top Executive
No.
xanderjanz··on The “Developer Experience” Bait-And-Switch
Yep. UX is our jobs (as devs), it should be our main focus and sacrifices of it made minimally.

For better or worse, does seem the days of Apple engineers working weeks on perfecting an animation behavior are largely over.

xanderjanz··on The “Developer Experience” Bait-And-Switch
Have the people who complain about javascript page load performance read about netflix.com? Netflix uses JS to render their landing page server side. No client JS necessary. How can a page load faster than raw HTML?
xanderjanz··on The “Developer Experience” Bait-And-Switch
Russ, whats the value of UX on products that don't exist yet? DevEx is the egg that creates the UX chicken.

I love your attention to UX, but clearly developer experience is above user experience in simply a chronological sense.

xanderjanz··on Fusion.js: A Plugin-Based Universal Web Framework
We have high order functions in JS. Which are similar to decorators.
xanderjanz··on Tesla plans China factory that can make 500,000 vehicles a year
Thats how all invention works. Scaled up versions of existing tech.
xanderjanz··on Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership with Lime
Yea it does. But if you fraud multiple companies you're increasing the odds one will detect you.

This is why companies don't rely only on their own data, they do credit checks, and buy data from third parties.

xanderjanz··on Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership with Lime
cc is a measurement of displacement, only useful for combustion engines.

Equivalent for electric motors would be Wattage.

xanderjanz··on Uber Will Rent Scooters Through Its App in Partnership with Lime
It's common for gig companies to limit payouts, because it lowers the cost of fraud, which is common. A smart charger charges for multiple companies, and could easily hit higher payouts that way.
xanderjanz··on Modern JavaScript Explained for Dinosaurs
You're talking about Lodash. But the remaining issue is of locality. If you use a package as a standard library, you still have to send that package to a client for them to use your app. Whereas a 'real' standard library would already exist as part of their interpreter/browser/operating system.
xanderjanz··on ECMAScript 2017 Language Specification
Even in es5 you can do Object.keys().reduce().
xanderjanz··on Web Developer Security Checklist
Apparenlty written by somebody who isn't responsible for the actual web development themselves, just upfixed web devs work for enterprise pen testing.
xanderjanz··on CockroachDB 1.0
That's just like your opinion man. Maybe they will love it. Having a name that stands out is generally good marketing actually.
xanderjanz··on Uber faces criminal probe over software used to evade authorities
Here's a better metaphor. If a local city inspector is looking to catch a pizza shop selling liquor without a special license, and calls to order beer, the shop owner recognizes the caller ID, lies, and says he doesn't sell beer right now but he should call back tomorrow. But then later, the town votes to remove the special license requirement. Did the pizza shop obstruct justice?
xanderjanz··on Uber Taps Eric Holder to Investigate Discrimination Claims
I sympathize with your viewpoint here, but recognize that a 'crucifixion' may help change the culture and retain Engineers and improve their daily lives which would help Uber deliver it's product faster.
xanderjanz··on As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America
This is a hard news story, not an editorial. They are reporting on comments by global experts.
xanderjanz··on Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee
Thats not how I read it. They tried to push out the last few women, while scheming to keep them? Why hire them in the first place?

I take it at face value, Oblivious Employees/Managers thought that not paying extra for women's jackets was equality.

xanderjanz··on Show HN: Generate a quiz from a Wikipedia page
no worries, cool project. Here's the changes I had to make to make it hostable if you're interested.: https://github.com/lutherism/WikiQuiz/commits/master
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