Just try to beat this robo-cheetah on the treadmill.

For years, robots have been rendering humans' jobs obsolete. Now, they're about to do the same thing to cheetahs.

In the bowels of MIT's engineering department, researchers have ushered a new creature into being: a 70-lb. robotic cheetah with comparable endurance to an actual cheetah. Though the robo-cheetah runs at around 13mph (less than a quarter of the speed of a real cheetah), it's designed to "outpace its animal counterparts in running efficiency," MIT News reported in March. According to researchers, robo-cheetah can run at 5mph for an hour and a half, without wasting very much energy (if only we could do that on the treadmill).

The robo-cheetah strutted its stuff at last month's International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Some noted that Boston Dynamics' version of the Robot Cheetah (apparently this is a trend?) can run over twice as quickly, but viewers were still impressed by the MIT cheetah's seemingly unparalleled efficiency.

Other attempted "running machines," the MIT researchers said, lose energy through heat, friction, and foot (paw?)-to-ground impact. Robo-cheetah, on the other hand, has special energy-saving motors and gears mounted on its joints, as well as a motor that re-purposes the energy the robo-cheetah expels through ground impact, to name a few of its features.

What's the point, you might ask, of designing a robot cheetah (besides ultimate coolness, obviously)?

Sangbae Kim, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, said that super-efficient running machines could aid in emergency response following a disaster. “In order to send a robot to find people or perform emergency tasks, like in the Fukushima disaster, you want it to be autonomous,” Mr. Kim said, “If it could run for more than two hours and search a large field, that would be useful."

Artist's rendering. (Photo: gifmethegif.tumblr.com)

If you're less than observant, you might have missed a little announcement at the top of the Tumblr Dashboard, containing some "bittersweet news" from VP of engineering Blake Matheny.

Okay, you might want to sit down for this.

Are you sitting down?

Okay, while the Tumblr team has been hard at work scaling up to meet the scads of impressions per day, there's one final step left in the process. Just one! However, that one final step has an unfortunate side effect: 

all traffic to blogs and the Dashboard will be suspended during the operation — returning a simple “we’ll be right back” message.

We are preparing for any issues that may arise and want you to expect your blogs to be unavailable starting at 4:00am EDT this Saturday (Oct 6th), and to come back online slowly over the next few hours.

Mr. Matheny closes with the promise that this temporary outage will ensure that Tumblr remains shipshape in the years to come and the company's "deepest apologies for the inconvenience."

(Photo: Facebook)

Ever since its bungled IPO, Facebook has grown increasingly serious about snatching top engineering talent for its sprawling compound. The company has even begun plucking Wall Street engineers from their siloed banking institutions and putting them to work cranking out PHP. In fact, it appears the company is growing so desperate for engineers that they've compiled a little cheat sheet that can enlighten any potential applicants on how to nab a Facebook job.

Today, engineer Carlos Bueno published a note to the Facebook Engineering page entitled, "Get that job at Facebook." Subtle!

"Interviewing for a technical job is hard, and so is being the interviewer," he wrote. "You want to get that engineering job at Facebook, and we want to hire the best people (you!). Knowing what to expect on both sides can go a long way toward making the process work better."

What follows is a handy guide to nailing an engineering job at Facebook, complete with detailed accounts of the process (phoner, slew of in-person interviews, offer), recommendations on what the company looks for in a candidate (culture fit, people with all kinds of coding chops, good problem visualization), and tips for preparing for a Facebook interview.

It's all very Sparknotes of them. We get the feeling your engineering professor probably wouldn't approve.

When this reporter woke up for the interview this morning, she found herself struggling to find something to wear. ("All my lab coats are in the wash," we tweeted.) Turns out that we should've opted for a bow-tie, as Mr. Nye showed up to our interview in Bryant Park in that signature sartorial choice, a green paisley one tied around his neck. On the lapel of his jacket, a Planetary Society pin gleamed in the sun.

Mr. Nye, a resident of Los Angeles, was in New York to promote the work he is doing with Sophia, an online portal that hosts multimedia educational tools to promote social learning. He is helming the Sophia Summer Challenge, which aims to combat the "brain drain" that occurs over the summer. Students can sign up to take short tutorials and quizzes for a chance to win an iPad.

"Half of what you learn about science you learn informally or out of the classroom," Mr. Nye told us, after we'd settled in to one of the green metal tables on the outskirts of Bryant Park. "These kids today are in front of a screen seven hours a day. While you’re doing that, why don’t you do some educational stuff? People really lose their proficiency in the summer--you don’t practice math, you forget how to do it."

"What we want is more science literacy," he added.

Mr. Nye is also the CEO of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest organization, which was started by the late great Carl Sagan, one of Mr. Nye's former professors (he believes he got an A in that class, though an A- was also possible). As part of this position, he raises awareness about the Curiosity rover's mission to Mars. Mr. Nye recently had lunch with Elon Musk, the PayPal cofounder who launched SpaceX.

"It's awesome," Mr. Nye said of SpaceX. Before launch, Mr. Musk had a meeting with the board of the Planetary Society, said Mr. Nye. "He sat down with them and said, 'I want to go to Mars. What do I need to do?' And everybody said, 'We need cheap access to orbit.' It's the key first step. Getting to orbit right now is too expensive."

As a proponent of science literacy, what do you make of the gender gap in the field? we asked Mr. Nye.

"My mom was recruited by the navy because she was good at science," he replied. "My mother--and this is not some great-grandmother--my mother could not get an American Express card because she was Mrs. Nye, even though she was also Dr. Nye. She marched in the parade--she told us she threw her bra in the fire--I was not there, though, so I can't verify."

"Science is the best idea humans have ever had," he added. "Half of humans are women, so we want half of scientists to be women. This is a long journey--but the longest journey starts with a single step."

From the man who taught us so much about science, we wanted to know: what did he still find most fascinating about the universe?

"We are star stuff," he replied. "This is to say, you and I are made of atoms that came from exploding stars."

We didn't want to monopolize the chance to interrogate our childhood idol, so we asked fellow "Science Guy" watchers for questions. “Ask him to refute global warming in two sentences,” responded one Twitter follower.

"Global warming is true, whether or not you believe it. Sorry," he retorted.

"What do you make of this whole zombie apocalypse?" one of our Facebook friends encouraged we ask.

"Apparently there are some drugs that can render you pretty useless," Mr. Nye replied. "I joke all the time about how useless zombies are, though. Maybe they're the antithesis of what's cool now. What's cool is to be quintuple-tasking at any time, moving fast, gettin' 'er done, and zombies--along with their slow movement--they seem indifferent to the world around them."

"You don't see a lot of zombies on Facebook," he added.

In the middle of our meeting, a man came up to us and complimented Mr. Nye on his bowtie. "Do you get recognized a lot?" we wondered.

"A couple hundred times a day," he acknowledged. Of his role as a nostalgic figure, he joked, "It's a little disturbing. It's very sweet, it's very nice. I still don't get it. When people say I've affected their lives, I still don't quite get it. I went to work--most weeks--seven days a week. I put my heart and soul into that dumb thing, with the dream that some of you would pursue careers in science and engineering, or at least have an appreciation for it. The ultimate would be if one of you--or a group of you--solve some astonishing world problem."

We were happy to find out that Mr. Nye was familiar with a lot of topics on the tech beat: He raved about the convenience of the app Uber, and expressed excitement about the recent CornellNYC campus announcement.

"I'm hoping they'll give me a job," he added.

Mr. Diamond

At a town hall for NY Hackers this week, its founder Brandon Diamond announced the creation of the Hackers Union, a unifying non-profit resource for all engineers in New York City.

"We’re still sort of in the early stages of a self-sustaining engineering culture like you might find in San Francisco," said Mr. Diamond, who also serves as associate director of NY Tech Meetup and a database kernel engineer at 10Gen (the company behind MongoDB). "Our goal is not to become the next big meetup. We want to consolidate all the activities into a central hub."

The effort has already attracted a potential sponsor--a hedge fund, no less.

With all the anxiety and initiative swirling around building up New York's tech talent pool, we're a little surprised no one's attempted a for-the-hackers, by-the-hackers centrifuge on this scale before. Betabeat talked to Mr. Diamond about what the Union will offer, rebooting the engineering interview process, bringing Wall Street engineers into the fold, and why 10Gen's like an early Google.

Why does the city need something like the Hackers Union?

When I first started working in New York City, it’s just a vast difference in terms of the number of engineers here. We’re getting better, we’ve got great meetups, great programs. But our goal is to build a place where new engineers can go to meet experienced engineers, where we can publicize the message that New York City is not just a great place to be in a startup, but a great place to do awesome engineering. And we don’t think there’s a single unifying resource focused exclusively on techies.

What was your first job here?

I was at a company called Clickable, which had a very small NYC engineering team. It was mostly a sales culture. The bulk of their engineering was elsewhere, so I was one of three guys. It could get a little lonely.

How is the Union related to NY Hackers?

Well it’s not really. It’s a terrible word, but we’ve sort of "pivoted" over the past year we’ve been around. Mostly I was concerned because there were great tech events, but there was nowhere I could go where I could kind of hang out with a bunch of nerdy people without being in the shadow of a sponsored startups. So that’s where [NY Hackers] came from. We started by giving Unix accounts to any hackers who were interested in New York City, which was good, but we found that face time was really important. Then we started doing town halls as kind of strategic play. We get a lot of people coming to these things, I think we had 300 RSVPs two nights ago, but we really wanted to have kind of a centralized entity where we could furnish the information these folks are looking for.

Like what?

We can do things like have a guidance counselor program, if you’re looking for a job we’ll meet with you and connect you with the right organization, bigger picture things.

Why did NY Hackers give them Unix accounts?

Well the theory was there’s all these diverse initiatives—like Adopt-a-Hacker was one of them and the NYTM was doing a program to encourage technical folks to come to the event. But I sort of felt like that was not what techies really wanted, because it’s not the sort of thing I thought I would respond to. The idea was let’s not ask them to come to our domain, we’ll go into their domain. That was by providing these Unix accounts where you would be in an open ecosystem, you could write your own scripts, you could share them with other people, you could talk in IRC, you could even play Minecraft. It worked reasonably well, but we wanted to go bigger.

So this is like an evolution of NY Hackers?

Here’s the problem, we stupidly chose the name NY Hacker, even though we’re good friends of HackNY, so we’ve been kind of invisible as a result. That’s part of the reason we’re renaming. We’ve been going at it for awhile. We hosted a bunch of hackers from Mexico, I think it was Mexico, it might have been Brazil, it was called Hackspedition. We showed them around, they did a hackathon. We’re doing our best, but we really need to improve our website, do a publicity push, and part of the money will go to our first hire, which will be a managing director, interestingly not me. Turns out having a full time job and these sort of aspirations does not—I sleep like, definitely not enough. If someone has the time and passion to carry things forward faster, then I want to empower that person.

Are you going to offer the same types of things as say the Freelancer’s Union, like healthcare?

I don’t think that would be our first goal. One of the things we want to do is, there’s kind of a problem with the way interviews happen with technical people. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that a lot of hiring managers aren’t aware of how to properly screen technical folks. So you wind up in an uncomfortable situation where you’re trying to solve brainteasers on the phone and its not really fun.

How would you fix that?

One thing we were thinking about doing was certifying or vetting providers and counseling them on how to do a successful tech interview. It’s more about asking background questions, asking about projects, and looking for passion and seeing if they can speak conversationally about difficult topics. Then when it gets to a final round interview where you really want to vet their abilities, start with a code sample and then ask them one or two very CS-y, very computer-y thought questions. But definitely don’t ask the color of people’s eyeballs on a desert island somewhere.

How does the non-profit aspect work?

We’re still doing a little debating about 501(c)(3) versus (c)(6).  (c)(3) is more for the common good type thing. Kind of the way you would encourage kids to exercise and eat fruits, [we encourage] engineers to come to New York City. (c)(6) is the same except it’s for industry organizations so you’re allowed to do political lobbying, but they tend to run using a dues system. We don’t want to do dues. The other big difference is that donations aren’t tax deductible, but we want to run using sponsorship money instead of the dues.

Do you have potential sponsors?

There’s a company, but it’s kind of still up in the air. It’s a hedge fund that wants to give us a very large seed investment, which we’ll use for all the expenses we’ll need to worry about while we’re incorporating. One of the things that we really wanted to do is have our own kind of fund, where folks who want to do like a hackathon or a movie night or a class can approach us. We’ll say well here’s pizza pies, we’ll help you reach people who are interested and go do it.

If a hedge fund is interested, does that mean it’s not just for hackers in the startup world?

We have folks from banking, from all over the place.

Do Wall Street hackers get along with startup hackers?

They actually do. Most of the folks in the room are wearing t-shirts and shorts and then a few other guys come in with a full suit on. But we’re all concerned about the same thing, the only difference is where we’re working. And when you do the traditional hackathon, you kind of exclude those people—I think the majority of people are from banks and advertising firms—because that’s sponsored by the startup world. There’s not really a great level of discourse between the two. We’re kind of an unaffiliated central hub for what we hope will become a thriving hacker community, which, by the way, will benefit the startups, the banks and the whole city.

So, how are things going on 10gen, which of course, is Kevin Ryan's "most promising" investment?

It’s really exciting. I had a whole year doing startup stuff, during which I thought, if I don’t succeed, which is not likely at all, then where would I want to be. There are a lot of good startups in NYC and they’re all solving interesting problems, but 10gen is solving the sorts of problems we studied and talked about in school. I would have to compare it to what early Google might have been like. There’s free food; we have free lunch Friday. The CTO, he basically freestyles on tech topics that we all shout out. It’s a meritocracy. Having the money, yeah, it makes things more chaotic, but everyone’s excited for sure.

Early Google in terms of potential growth or the environment?

Maybe both! It’s really interesting growth-wise, it’s an engineering oriented company, which is surprisingly less common than it used to be in the early 2000s, late nineties. The CEO [Dwight Merriman] sits in the same place where all the other engineers sit, along with the CTO. [Mr. Merriman] comes to work everyday, he actually writes more code than most of us, he’s an incredible guy, he’s extremely inspiring.

Ha, he’s better at it than Zuck. What are you working on right now?

Our focus right now is on improving concurrency, a major thing people want to do right now is map reduce, which is kind of a new way to process data when there’s a lot of it. We’re focusing on parallelizing the database and handling concurrency better. We kind of distance ourselves from MongoDB because we want the community to really own it, so we say 10Gen sponsors MongoDB. We’re continually improving the product.

Ain't no party like a Bits Blog party.

The New York Times has a story today about New York's efforts to woo a top flight engineering school that could produce homegrown tech talent.

Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steele spoke at the Googleplex, because Google is the kind of Silicon Alley powerhouse New York hopes will take root here during the coming decades.

But something about the tone of the story seemed awfully cynical.

Without one, the city has fallen far behind San Francisco, Boston and other metropolitan areas in the competition to attract new technology companies and the jobs they create. ... For all their efforts, New York’s fortunes are still closely tied to the ups and downs of Wall Street. Many of the biggest investors in start-up ventures are based in the city, but the companies they back tend to congregate in Silicon Valley and around Cambridge, Mass., which is home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

Someone missed the memo about New York funding more startups than Boston, more tech jobs than Silicon Alley, and generally being in the midst of a full-blown bubble for tech investment.

The city's event explains why Eric Schmidt was spotted sulking around the Soho Apple store.

And for reasons why startups would choose NY over CA, have you seen the kind of parties we throw!