

Hitchhiking Robot, Safe in Several Countries, Meets Its End in Philadelphia - raldi
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/hitchhiking-robot-safe-in-several-countries-meets-its-end-in-philadelphia.html?_r=0

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snarfy
Publicity stunt?

[http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/turns-out-the-
dea...](http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/turns-out-the-death-of-
hitchbot-was-just-a-freaking-publicity-stunt-for-a-prank-show/)

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jmspring
So, wait, was the destruction of the robot orchestrated by the creators or
some people in Philly?

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SCAQTony
It was a fraud! A terrible fraud.

[http://factually.gizmodo.com/vloggers-faked-a-
surveillance-v...](http://factually.gizmodo.com/vloggers-faked-a-surveillance-
video-but-did-they-destr-1721980896)

~~~
raldi
How much of it was a fraud? The whole project? The destruction of the robot?
Or was that part all true, and just the video was fake?

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huac
"Part of hitchBOT’s mission was to study how to create anthropomorphic robots
that human beings can react to, empathically, so that when a person comes to
work and finds a glorified garbage can with a Samsung Galaxy for a head at his
or her desk, they don’t react by demolishing it and throwing it out the
window. Or, at least, they feel badly after demolishing it." \- @netw3rk

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rohitv
The video surveillance is fake and is supposed to be a "prank". And it was
recorded by the people who saw the bot last.

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dang
There have been astonishingly many posts about this story, but this one
contains significant new information, so we're going to try unkilling,
unburying, and unflagging it.

Edit: since the "significant new information" turns out to be fraudulent, I
guess we'll turn the flags back on, but leave the thread open for discussion.

~~~
raldi
Was it killed due to flagging, or did mods bury it initially? If the latter, I
apologize -- could you tell me a little more about why?

~~~
dang
It was killed due to user flagging. I'm pretty sure that was because it was a
duplicate, in the sense that the story had already had a major discussion.

~~~
raldi
Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that -- I thought I had seen a mention of it on HN,
but I searched all around before submitting and couldn't find it.

Maybe that discussion was flagkilled too?

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dang
Many of the previous posts show up at
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hitchbot&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hitchbot&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story).
There were lists of links in some of these that were voluminous to the point
of hilarity. Let me see if I can find one. Edit: hmm, yes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9998853).

~~~
raldi
Wow. I know you have a long todo list and need to prioritize, but if you're
ever considering adding a "why?" selector to the flag button, one of the
options could be dupe and the flagger could paste in a URL or 20.

