jonnydark

The balancing stems from an inverted-pendulum problem, and that's something that's reasonably well understood in robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum

Of course it's more complicated than that because it looks as though the centre of mass can move and the legs can bend and are not rigid, but it would make more sense approaching this from a kinematics perspective rather than a ML one.

From what I can tell the writer is arguing that abstractions and encapsulations are wasteful of resources. The author claims that this is an inherent problem of abstractions and a lack of understanding of their implementations. The justification for this is that time and mental energy are resources as well and although we are being wasteful of other resources we use up less time and mental energy. The author states "However, during recent years, I have become increasingly convinced that the portion of true tradeoff is quite marginal" however doesn't seem to give anything quantifiable to illustrate this marginality. Much of the argument is based on anecdote and personal ideas on general human nature.

I am inclined to think that the author has come to this conclusion because time and mental energy are less valuable to them than other resources and that's not an unreasonable stance to take. However I don't think this view is widely shared and that thought most people agree that premature optimisation is the root of all evil.

It's a bladeless fan, not a fanless fan. It works using an impeller in the base and it feeds the air through a thin gap in an annulus shaped aerofoil. Strictly speaking you could argue that impellers have blades and all they've done is conceal them inside the base rather than remove them entirely. A truly bladeless fan would use something like an electrostatic fluid accelerator to accelerate particles with an electric field - but that's probably a little too sci-fi for a consumer electronics company!

It'd give somewhat better traction but at the same time you increase the likelihood of stalling your motors. How does the machine know if the motors are stalling because there's something jammed in the wheels or because the vacuum is sucking stuck to the floor? You can design algorithms or sensor mechanisms to try and determine this and also tune the motors but now you have even more problems!

Haven't got a ruler to hand but it's about 4-5 inches. It's not very wide compared to others, hence why it looks tall.

The innovation is mostly in using the monoscopic 360 degree camera in such a way that it can do SLAM.

I tend to try and avoid "the zone" because I'll often find I'm holding too many ideas in my head rather than in the code and as such I'm not expressing myself well in code.

I used to come across code I'd written while in the zone later and have a hard time figuring out what I was doing/thinking. As such I end up with poor variable name choices and weird hard to follow algorithms that all made sense at the time but are a maintenance issue after the fact.

When you're programming in the zone, you're programming at your peak cleverness. I'm reminded of the Brian Kernighan quote - "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

In the USA

It verifies that you're actually connected to the server and it is listening to you rather than just some dumb box that keeps nodding and replying with "OK" with glazed over eyes regardless of what you say.

But it's not just HTML and CSS - you need to create a completely new user journey because you can't make asynchronous requests to the server. In some instances you may even need to manage server requests completely differently. UI elements may have to be changed as well as you can no longer rely on Javascript to animate them.

You're essentially maintaining a second UI that is divorced from your main UI. There's significant cost in that. It's the same reason most sites don't support IE6 anymore.

I've been at a Hackathon for the last 15 hours and we've cobbled together a text message service that you can ask questions to and it responds in the style of Yoda.

It's imaginatively called "Ask Yoda" Pretty useless, but pretty cool and hella fun to make :)

Join the ranks of VIMmers! One of us! One of us!

I am reminded of the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The design idioms seen in Gnome 2 and Windows 7 are essentially highly refined versions of what existed on the Apple II OS. Personal computers and what we use them for have come a long way since then and it makes sense to redesign the UI to reflect this. Often this means getting your hands dirty and trying new things. Also - first time users are going to be around for longer than experienced users ;)

It's not just prestige though, it's also legitimacy. Scientific journals have formal peer review and it is this process that is supposed to ensure that papers that get published aren't totally spurious. One might argue that NASA could be exempt from this process given its own reputation and level of accountability, but submitting articles to journals for peer review and publication is standard scientific practice.

The paywall is arguably just for business though, a lot of papers get put up on sites like arxiv pre-publication anyway.

I don't see much in the argument from the view of the taxpayer though. In the UK a lot of public funding goes in to research and the papers are largely behind paywalls - Graphene research for example. Now, if we had government subsidized peer review journals - I could definitely get behind that.