garply

Out of curiosity, does anyone know how this has affected the economy and real estate market in Barcelona?

Lots of comments on here about the software, but I'm really fascinated by the hardware. Where did you get the conveyor belts and how much did they cost?

For the belt that lifts item up out of the hopper, I notice there's a little white hook (or platform, not sure what to call that) jutting out that does the actual lifting of the legos. How did you get the size of that right? Did you install that jutting-out part, or did it come pre-attached to the belt?

What tools are you using to make a computer do the actual belt rotation? I'm wondering how low-level it is - are you spinning the steppers directly or did the conveyor belts come with some kind of API? I'm guessing the belts don't have a USB port for easy control.

Mostly Python. Some C. Some R to play around with datasets and prototype algorithms.

The bulk of it was:

News article title extraction. News article relevant thumbnail extraction. News article text body extraction. Generating publicly traded stock symbols from business news articles. Some Techmeme-style document clustering.

I studied a fair amount of NLP (a true passion of mine) at school and after I graduated I spent several months working on tech which did this (and other things). That was intended to be a startup, but sadly, at the time, my business sense sucked and I couldn't decide on a good product to fit the tech to (the fact that I was developing tech before I had a strong sense of my product is already telling).

I since have started a completely different (and profitable) company and the code has just been bit-rotting. I'm not sure what I should do with it. Keep it around in case I ever decide to do a business model like some of these companies (I probably don't have time for that)? Open source it (time-consuming to clean the code and what do I stand to gain from that)? I guess I could use the open-sourced stuff to help me find contracts for freelancing, but I just don't see a lot of NLP remote work being offered.

Still, I hate seeing the code rot...

Can you provide me a way to privately contact you? Maybe leave an email address on your HN profile?

A couple of notes from a resident of Beijing:

I wonder how frequently this will be updated. I notice several skyscrapers built over the past few months that aren't displayed yet (they only show the construction huts). So it's at least several months out of date.

This clearly has the most detail for zooming and browsing that I've seen, but for my day-to-day use I'll still be using map.sogou.com, which already has pretty good building and landmark decomposition, but has the best path-finder / location search of everyone in the market by far. I just made several queries on bj.o.cn that fell flat. For really hard-to-find places, I suspect I'll do my searching on sogou first, then pull up the closest landmark on o.cn and scroll over to where I want to be for a good visual description of where I'm going.

sqrt(-1^2) => 1

China has a huge public sector, a ton of money, and deplorable networking infrastructure. I think it has to do with the size of the country more than anything. Russia's probably not any better than the US either.