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

[snarfy]

Publicity stunt?

http://www.barstoolsports.com/philadelphia/turns-out-the-dea...

[jmspring → snarfy]

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

[SCAQTony]

It was a fraud! A terrible fraud.

http://factually.gizmodo.com/vloggers-faked-a-surveillance-v...

[raldi → SCAQTony]

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?

[noobermin → SCAQTony]

To be honest, unless the creators are in on it too, this still reflects poorly on Philly and the US as a whole.

[curiousjorge → SCAQTony]

I always felt something was odd about that 'surveillance' video.

Well, it looks like we've been trolled but I'm sure the internet hate machine is waking up.

I predict their little publicity stunt will ultimately end their personas and fame.

[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

[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.

[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 → dang]

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 → raldi]

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 → dang]

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?

[dang → raldi]

Many of the previous posts show up at https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hitchbot&sort=byPopularity&pre.... 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.

[raldi → dang]

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.