Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#371

Post by rmc » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #131

spyckie2 wrote: post #26

Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…

> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares? A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year. Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost mu…

> The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares?

This is where raising the minimum wage can spur innovation. If we gradually increase the cost of human labour (with higher wages, and other conditions), then the market will be motivated to fund & find technological solutions.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#372

Post by kwhitefoot » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

macrolime wrote: post #321

kwhitefoot wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> illegal to have a maid Utter bollocks!

I said essentialy. There's certainly companies providing cleaning services, but you may find thats it's essentially impossible to find locals who will clean and cook for you every night. The alternative is then an au pair, but they're allowed to do only limited housework and some people have even gone to jail for having multiple au pairs working as maids, tough technically mostly for breaking immigration laws for hav…

> it's essentially impossible to find locals

Presumably you aren't offering enough money. Anyway that is a far cry from illegal. Au pairs are not maids.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#373

Post by tmikaeld » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

beisner wrote: post #22

tmikaeld wrote: post #14

Seems very slow, guess robotics really is hard.

We know how to make fast robots, we know how to make safe robots, and we know how to make useful robots. But we do not know how to make fast, safe, useful robots. A faster robot would need to be heavier to do the same work. Any robot that can move as fast as a human and perform similar work to a human will need to be close to as strong/heavy as a human. And humans can kill each other with their bare hands; we just kn…

That's a very good point, which I guess can't really be solved since we'd always have to trust the software in one way or another.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#374

Post by emiliobumachar » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

callalex wrote: post #325

greeniron wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

move to Singapore then. they have full-time, live-in maids from indonesia or phillipines that can cost as low as USD 300-400 a month. i grew up in Singapore, where I had 3 maids on staff at all times, and they took care of everything, 24/7.

Not everyone is ok with treating a fellow human like a robot.

If Alice hires a full-time live in maid and her just-as-wealthy neighbor Bob buys a robot instead, all else equal, which is having a better impact on the world?

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#375

Post by emiliobumachar » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 12:19 PM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #201

fizixer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The robot is in your house the whole 168 hours a week, not just 4. You're assuming a good cleaning robot would be absolutely useless for anything else, like cooking, laundry, etc. - 4-year robot lifetime is overly pessimistic. If upgrade is not the reason (which has nothing to do with lifetime, it's your choice to upgrade), a robot could last way more than 4-years (especially with right-to-repair laws in place). -…

The first point has an obvious response and the last is speculative. I find interesting to address the middle one statistically. A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ). For inst…

Sorry, what is the supposedly obvious response to the first point?

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#376

Post by yurishimo » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 12:59 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #334

kwhitefoot wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People used to say the same things about dishwashers I still say the same about dishwashers. In the time it takes me to sort things into what can and cannot safely go in the washer, scrape off the food residue, load the machine, and unload the machine, I can simply wash the dishes and stack them on a rack to dry. Vacuum cleaners are useful but actually not very important in the kind of dwelling that the robot could…

Dishwashers have a quality effect like many things. If you have an ineffective dishwasher, you have to do lots of prep before putting dishes in, exclude lots of things from getting washed, etc. That takes longer, plus you don't cycle it as often, so you might find that you need a dirty dish and need to wash it by hand. A very effective dishwasher is one for which you don't need to prep the dishes (just put them in) a…

You can get effective appliances by renting more expensive units too. That was one of the requirements when my SO and I were looking for a new place. Big sink, nice appliances, etc. We're paying about double what we were at our old apartment, but the convenience is well worth it while we're still focusing on paying off school debt but we also want somewhere nice to live.

Especially in the age of COVID-19 in the US, I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a super cheap crappy apartment like we were before.

Bonus, we also spend a lot less on electricity! We moved into a new-ish apartment building and I can keep the AC on 70 in Texas and my bill is less than $40/mo. In my old apartment, I would keep it at 76 during the day and only move it to 72 right before bed to save money. Bills were regularly $100+. Modern construction has so much energy savings built in to code now that you could potentially save money by moving to a more expensive apartment in a new building.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#377

Post by learnvella » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

monkeynotes wrote: post #244

koheripbal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for robots to compete with below minimum wage illegal immigrant labor. I pay $100 for two people to spend 4 hours cleaning a 3000 square foot home - including laundry.

$12.50 an hour, how does someone make a living from that?

better to have the option of working for 12.5/hr than being forced to be unemployed.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#378

Post by monkeynotes » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 2:52 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #273

monkeynotes wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$12.50 an hour, how does someone make a living from that?

By not being the sole income earner. If their partner works a comparable job, suddenly youre looking at $25/hr which is perfectly comfortable in most areas.

That's just about surviving, and with both partners working. How do you have a family and any sense of security and health like that?

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#379

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

bArray wrote: post #293

koheripbal wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when do we define the value of something by the infinite list of things it can't do? I could make a list a mile long of all the things my dishwasher cannot do... does that mean no HNs have dishwashers?

> Since when do we define the value of something by the > infinite list of things it can't do? When that infinite list is things people want. I speaking of course from the "consumer" perspective and outlining some reasons why this robot is many, many years away from being ready for that market. This particular robot will likely never be anything other than a research platform that has all support dropped for it after…

I think you're looking at this the wrong way.

It only needs to be able to do juuust enough work to justify its cost (obviously not true yet).

Roomba is, for example, an even more limited device, but since it does one thing well enough to justify a $500-$900 price.

Talking about all the myriad of things it can't do is just pointless.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#380

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

mav3rick wrote: post #329

koheripbal wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to just start putting that on all my PR. Ex-Googler. No one is going to check, and if it biases the opinions of idiots... so be it...

The sooner you're exposed as a fraud the better. So please definitely use it :)

The reality is that unless you're well known - no one cares if you lie about this stuff.