dkastner

But even if these magnets were only as powerful as rare earth magnets, the benefits to the environment are huge.

I put together an example of how to run chromium with --headless driven by cucumber/capybara: https://dkastner.github.io/2017/04/21/headless-chrome.html

As another Faraday employee, I'll add that we didn't start right away with deployment. Instead, we used docker to provide a consistent way to test our apps. Once all of our apps were properly dockerized to run tests, we were able to move to deploying the app with a simple docker-machine + docker-compose setup. After that, it was a relatively easy move to ECS. docker-compose can probably handle 80% of your development needs, but the tool we wrote allowed us to quickly switch our apps from a canonical "image mode" to "source mode" while developing. It also provided a way to run acceptance tests locally with our entire app cluster running locally. A little more info: https://dkastner.github.io/2015/07/25/accidental-continuous-...

A huge payoff that Rust provides vs Ruby or JavaScript is when writing development tools. It saves so much time and trouble to install a binary than to try and get someone to download the right version of Ruby, gem install, etc. Rust, while having its tax, is really great about telling you why your code won't compile and keeping you from footgunning yourself.

While it's true there are more sources of plastic other than fossil fuels, the big disadvantage is the extra amount of energy and water needed. I doubt we'll be able to scale alternative plastics to match the levels produced from fossil fuels. But I do think we can get a lot of plastic from simply recycling it (maybe dig it back up from landfills). We can also reduce a lot of plastic demand by using reusable containers for things like groceries.

Not only is it made from the lowest-grade oil, but this low grade oil constitutes the majority of all the oil (and near-oil substances) that's left, e.g. tar sands, oil shale.

The $1000 question is what the downside of the curve will look like. Will it be a sharp drop-off or a long plateau and decline? It's looking more like the latter at the moment.

You're going to burn a lot more energy getting to and from the asteroid than what you'd be able to bring back.

I like the colors

I've been using a very similar tool, browserify to do the same thing. The great thing about browserify is it already comes with core node.js library support, as well as an http module wrapper.

With tools like this, I love being able to modularize my client-side code using CommonJS modules and running JS test from the command line using tools like Vows and Buster.js. I also love being able to declare dependencies on npm modules. It's just as easy as testing and writing Ruby code with rubygems and rspec.

The only issue that still bothers me is that nearly every DOM querying/manipulating library out there assumes there's a global window or document object. This means I have to stub it out in any CLI tests I run and then make sure jquery or whatever is referencing a virtual window I create with jsdom instead of the global stub.

I have a few project using vows/npm/browserify for reference if anyone is interested. A FF/Chrome/Safari plugin: https://github.com/brighterplanet/careplane A simple SPI app: https://github.com/brighterplanet/hootroot1

Yes, I realize that most of our electricity comes from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. However, that fact doesn't preclude the idea of using solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to generate all electricity. It's much more difficult to use these energy sources to power automobiles than it is for trains.

Yes, I know that patent is actually more specific than "driverless car." I was just being snarky.

Prior art: trains.

Seriously, though, this is a complete waste of time. Mass transit has been solving the problem of getting people from point A to point B without them having to do the piloting for a hundred years. What we really need to be spending our money on is rebuilding the streetcar and intercity rail systems that used to connect nearly every town in the country and electrifying them. This will drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (because oil is the only portable energy source cheap and powerful enough for automobiles) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Instead, we're talking about an overly complex solution involving creation of an automated driving system on all our highways and compelling thousands of users to upgrade to driverless cars, which may or may not be electric.

In other words, Google's driverless car is to transportation as Dart is to DOM scripting.

I read your Hacker News post and was very impressed by your skills. I would like to talk to you about a career opportunity that I'm sure you would find very interesting. Please contact me if you are interested.

My new business plan: 1. Abandon the city for the wealthy suburbs 2. Leave the poor behind, defund infrastructure 3. Sell tours and photos of neglect and destruction 4. Profit!

Some things to consider: * While the population of Detroit proper has fallen, the total population of the metro area has remained fairly static over the past 40-50 years http://www.somacon.com/p469.php * The Detroit suburbs are just as nice as your typical American suburbia. * The State of Michigan is training hundreds of Emergency Financial Managers who now have the power to go into any municipality the State deems "financially unsustainable," dissolve local governments, and terminate any contracts (union or otherwise) in order to force a balanced budget. So while urban areas continue to be defunded by the state and by fleeing wealthy residents, they are put in the precarious position of trying to balance their budgets or risk a hostile takeover. * Meanwhile, we all have a good time looking at the pictures.

You'll also need plenty of hafnium, titanium, and molybdenum. Not exactly abundant resources. All that just to get a 4% solar->electricity conversion rate. You can put these panels under your solar water heater and get slightly hotter water with an additional trickle of electricity into your home. Maybe you could power a pair of USB heated gloves.

I've created a quick fork of tmuxinator (originally used for defining sessions for tmux) to also generate iTerm setup scripts: https://github.com/dkastner/tmuxinator

I forked tmuxinator to generate the appropriate applescript that will set up iTerm according to your tmuxinator config: https://github.com/dkastner/tmuxinator/commit/c96d04d994cd8c...

Here are some great rebuttals to "Just Food:"

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-08-mcwilliams-locavore-...

http://sharonastyk.com/2009/09/11/start-by-asking-the-right-...

I forgot how awesome geometry was. Anyone know of any courses (online) that each geometry through functional languages (or maybe even vice-versa)?

I've found that using function compositions/closures for event handling makes my JS code much more testable and readable: http://numbers.brighterplanet.com/2011/06/10/a-pattern-for-j...

I think context matters here. The article was discussing GUi word processor usage.

When using an app like Pages or Word, the mouse will be faster because keyboard navigation in those apps is terrible. You may be able to save some mousing with command-p, but for general editing tasks like highlighting and moving text, the mouse will always beat the keyboard.

In vim, however, editing via keyboard is well designed and always faster than mousing.

The true test would be to compare editing LaTex with vim versus a rich text document with TextEdit.

GNUStep is licensed under the GPL and has not implemented as many Cocoa features.

Cocotron is licensed under MIT. Assuming that the GNUStep authors want to maintain a stricly GPL codebase, they would not want to borrow anything from cocotron. The authors of cocotron chose MIT specifically to be friendlier for commercial developers.