ben11kehoe

An article that sums it up well for me is "Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk" in Current Affairs (2021) https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/04/surely-we-can-do-bett...

They keep the train centered by the differential effect. The angle of the cone is very slight, nowhere near enough for gravity to overcome friction to cause the train to slip laterally into the center. And then keeping the train centered as the track turns results in the train turning with the track.

I think this may be the primary reason why narrow-gauge railways are better at tighter curves: the shorter axle means the same wheel radius difference (caused by lateral displacement) causes a smaller turn radius versus a standard-gauge axle.

Agreed about arg parsing. One day I decided to figure out how to get Python arg parsing in a bash script. The horrifying result: https://gist.github.com/benkehoe/c469ebb76ad80d45405077e1093...

I don't think it requires sign-in for content that's not behind the paywall. I think it occasionally prompts the user to sign up or sign in, but you can click outside the box to move past it. It's hostile that they don't exclude an explicit "dismiss" button, though.

I think people don't realize that Medium doesn't require articles to be behind the paywall. There are two ways an article gets paywalled:

1. You opt-in to getting paid for views.

2. If you put your article up for curation AND it gets picked. If it gets picked to be shown in curated feeds, it goes behind the paywall, but if it doesn't get picked by a curator, it's openly accessible.

If you don't select getting paid for views or put it up for curation, it's always openly accessible.

I use Medium because hosting my own blog would be too much of a hassle. I never put my articles behind the paywall; my aim in writing is not to get paid, and I don't put them up for curation because I don't have an explicit goal of increasing my readership.

I'm also a Medium member, because I do think we need ways of paying for content, and paying for good content (the curation part). Maybe Medium's model is not the best way to do that, but I'd rather support a company that's trying to find the right balance than declare that all content should be free.

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Sounds about right.

It's even worse when comparing Google's attitude with, for example, Microsoft releasing a dedicated, extensible accessible controller for Xbox https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-one/accessibility

Also featured recently on the New Hampshire Public Radio podcast Ouside/In http://outsideinradio.org/shows/coydogs

http://html5zombo.com/

Mathematica has the cool ability to do symbolic tracking of numerical precision, for the ability to tell you when, for example, your differential equation solver is giving you meaningless results.

It gets better: https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/123010716162/thesparkofrev...

But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters - hundreds of them - and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his house. What kind of guy does that?

It's also more or less equivalent to the Dymaxion map but stretches instead of disconnecting, which is a bit misleading, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

iRobot | Cloud Robotics Software Engineer | Boston area

As a pioneer in the robot industry, iRobot's goal is to drive innovation, serve as an industry catalyst and change the world by fueling the era of robots.

iRobot is at the bleeding edge of serverless cloud architecture. Our production cloud application supporting our connected robot fleet is built on AWS and uses zero EC2 instances (but yes, it does use S3). Hear about some of the work we're doing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGa2O9qZ95w

Plus, there's robots! And IoT! And creating the future of the Smart Home. It may seem like a veritable buzzword soup, but our commitment as a company is to delivering actual value to users, rather than creating technology for technology's sake.

Apply at https://careers-irobot.icims.com/jobs/3067/cloud-robotics-so... and/or contact me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben11kehoe/

There are other job openings available, especially in computer vision: http://www.irobot.com/About-iRobot/Careers.aspx

Yes, all programmers are the same; none of them have different needs or desires.

We are finding that unit testing is pretty straightforward with Placebo [0] (also Mitch Garnaat!), for which we use a common "boto client getter" library that the unit test framework can hook into to inject Placebo.

The really hard part is integration testing. You can Chaos-Monkey your Lambda functions, but you can't Chaos-Monkey DynamoDB. We're looking at ways of building tooling to do that.

For deployment, we wanted to use Serverless, but as they started to move away from CloudFormation, that didn't work for our more enterprise needs, so we've been rolling our own, based on ideas from Kappa.

[0] https://github.com/garnaat/placebo

iRobot | Boston area | on-site | full-time

As a pioneer in the robot industry, iRobot's goal is to drive innovation, serve as an industry catalyst and change the world by fueling the era of robots.

We are building out our cloud robotics teams, including research, DevOps, and security: https://careers-irobot.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchKeyw...

We are also expanding our navigation team for software engineers with experience in SLAM: https://careers-irobot.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchKeyw...

It's hard to take someone seriously when they ascribe floating point rounding error to a language defect.

This still seems more limited than the Mathematica syntax, which includes postfix operators, for example. I also appreciate that parentheses are used only for grouping, not for function calling and such. I'm not saying this couldn't have been done with Macsyma or on top of Lisp more generally (indeed, that would be nice), or that Mathematica wasn't influenced by Macsyma; I'm saying that purely for syntax, I think Mathematica ended up with a better, more extensive, and easier-to-use system than pretty much any other language.

And with good cause, I think. Mathematica syntax (both the verbose form and with the various syntactical sugar) is immensely more readable to the average person than Lisp. Of course, this could have been done on top of Lisp anyways (and wouldn't that be nice?)

PowerShell gives a good alternative: the things passed between the programs should be objects. It requires, of course, that everything is communicating with a common runtime, but for a shell that is not the biggest burden.

Trillian still works with Facebook chat: http://www.trillian.im/ They wrote a little eulogy when imo dropped 3rd-party chat support, I'm sure they'd be happy to see Pidgin add FB support! http://blog.trillian.im/?p=2902