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wxm

I've known the developers behind Marty for years - and this is an incredibly well-engineered bipedal robot! With onboard WiFi or an RPi; and Python, Scratch, C++, ROS - it's a bit like the Turtlebot for humanoids.

Fun fact, back in March I had the pleasure to share the stage with a handful of Martys at the Edinburgh International Science Festival dancing away...

Re:Salters Duck on Friday January 30, 2015 @06:12PM (#8975111)
A friend of mine worked with Prof. Salter. He's an incredibly brilliant, smart and kind scientist. Unfortunately, much of his research was 'blocked' due to someone miscalculating the cost by twice the amount, starving the research field of funding until recently. There are quite a few related spin-outs (e.g. Pelamis Wave, website currently down). Edinburgh also just got a huge wave tank for more experiments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27702506).
Re:How Products Are Made on Sunday December 14, 2014 @08:15AM (#8748226)
I'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be

1. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family)

2. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner

3. use imagemagick to preprocess images

4. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown

5. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML

EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055

Re:How Products Are Made on Saturday December 13, 2014 @06:04PM (#8746817)
Some companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.
Re:Ask HN: Final year project in CS on Sunday September 28, 2014 @11:44AM (#8380006)
Go to the website of departments, research groups, and professors at your university and get a broad understanding of what they are up to. Maybe read (the abstract of or the entirety) of one of their recent papers or check out their public outreach work/press releases. This will help you build an understanding of who's doing what at your university, their current progress/steps, etc. Contact and talk to those professors/research groups that are doing work that you are interested in -- they might have some ideas for undergrad projects.
Re:Datamining a Flat in Munich on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @10:35AM (#8361669)
I've just finished doing the same for Edinburgh, UK and share many of the OP's frustrations. The monopoly that many letting agencies have in that they are also managing apartments adds to the shortage of accommodation in Europe's largest cities. Unlike in previous years, besides a worsening of the availability of accommodation I have also noticed an increase in scammers this year (i.e. people copying pictures from other city's agencies and trying to convince people to pay pre-deposits or application/administrative fees to 'secure keys').
Re:Show HN: Battleboat.js – A robot that plays Battleship on Saturday September 20, 2014 @04:26PM (#8345501)
Won my first game.

[Evidence: http://frupic.frubar.net/32232]

Re:Skype group video calling becomes free on Monday April 28, 2014 @01:45PM (#7661623)
It used to be free a few years ago too until it became 'premium' in early 2011. [1] Difference is that now Skype features more ads than in 2011, even if you have multiple monthly subscriptions (A no-ad version is now a considerable perk of the premium version).

[1] - http://www.macworld.com/article/1157435/skype5.html

Re:Ask HN: Idea Sunday on Sunday April 20, 2014 @11:13AM (#7617000)
In what way would it be different from SoundCloud? No fancy commenting? Anonymous uploads?
Re:F9R First Flight Test on Friday April 18, 2014 @02:26PM (#7610516)
Wikipedia lists the F9R also as "Grasshopper v1.1" -- cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshoppe...
There are unconfirmed reports that the flight has made an emergency landing in [Naning/Nan Ming] -- but hours after it allegedly ran out of fuel (7.5h of fuel on board). Hope for the best.
Re:OS X Mavericks kernel_task eating 100% CPU on Saturday January 18, 2014 @04:26PM (#7082299)
Solution on a late 2013 MBP for me (when the issue occurs no sound is playing anymore - no system sounds, no videos, no audio): Plugging in earphones and unplugging. Killing the coreaudio process as recommended at a few places online doesn't do the trick, unfortunately.
Funding tip for smart startups who recognise that their target demographic is shifting: Find investors in regions where your traction and growth figures peak. Having insight in SE Asia and Indonesia in particular, their familiarity, engagement and loyalty with Path (and Twitter) is incredible and such an announcement shouldn't be a surprise to anyone with knowledge of and interest in SE Asia and Indonesia in particular.
Re:The city of Munich switches to Open Source Software on Sunday December 15, 2013 @09:05PM (#6912278)
Great to see this project being completed after almost ten years. Several similar projects in Germany have failed (e.g. the parliament's attempt to converting to Linux) or Wienux in Vienna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienux). IMO, a major reason for the success of LiMux was the gradual change with extensive training and that the included developing custom templates and generators for Open Office etc.

For a timeline on the project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Re:Your own mini-Heroku for $5/month on Thursday December 12, 2013 @11:36AM (#6895342)
I used this (dokku on DigitalOcean as described) in production for several months for NodeJS - unfortunately some of the containers crashed every now and then and did NOT restart - a manual intervention was necessary. It does, however, work perfectly for PHP & Ruby. And if you know a bit of nginx-config-magic, you can even use multiple domains on the system :)

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