SMrF

I think you want var j = i outside the function.

Edit: Oops, this is wrong as well. :-)

Why? No chain is a pretty nice feature. I think a lot of casual commuters would be willing to accept quite a bit of downside to get their hands on a chainless bike (that isn't a penny-farthing or a unicycle).

I wonder, as robots accomplish more and more of our daily tasks at super human speeds if we will also have to slow them down to reduce creepiness levels.

I found this graph a while ago. It illustrates the segregation in Chicago:

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

I moved from Arizona to Chicago a few years ago. While Arizona was far from perfect, I still find the segregation here shocking. While standing on a platform waiting for an El train, it is possible to determine which people will get on which train line based on the color of their skin.

Edit:

Another anecdote, but interesting to me. My wife and mother teach at two different "urban" schools on the south side. There are no white students at either school. My mom's school is 99% black and my wife's school is 95% Hispanic. I know it's a common situation but it still just blows my mind.

My dentist has some pretty crummy chairs in the waiting room. This certainly affects my visits to the dentist. My dentist is not in the furniture business. My dentist also has a crappy website. He is not in the software business.

I considered a maid but decided it wasn't for me. I was having a hard time finding someone I trusted to enter my house when I'm not there. Then if I did find someone, I figure the turnover for maids is pretty high so I'd be searching again a year later. A maid service is out. They are underpaid and being taken advantage of in too many cases for me to even consider it.

There is a Roomba that sanitizes floors exactly as you described it. It's called a Scooba. I'm getting one.

The bathroom you describe is pretty sweet. It's like the bat cave of bathrooms. I don't think my wife would go for it, plus we rent so that would likely tick off the landlord...but I have no idea why public bathrooms don't do this.

Maybe a few of these with a Roomba like strategy. Just walk around semi-randomly and clean as you go. Be able to identify non-cleanable surface like wall paper, etc. This would reduce the challenge to creating something that sticks to most surfaces and software plus laser/camera to identify surfaces.

I've never seen a robot that just "sticks" to everything though...

I would pay $5,000, perhaps more, to never clean my bathroom again and always have a clean bathroom. My budget is a little bigger for a hobby project. I figure $10,000 - $20,000 for me to prototype something, that's including failures, etc. over 2-3 years. I have no idea how much motors cost, but I'm getting the idea that they are pricey.

Edit: if it's more than this it's not a deal breaker, I just have to rope someone else in, spread things out over more years or something more creative.

This looks like it's just a mockup/idea, but intriguing nonetheless. I thought about this approach. I wondered how well a suction system would work and it seems like a failure equals a broken robot.

What if it's not mounted in the ceiling? What about legs/tracks that move the arm to where it needs to go. I was thinking a subsystem that identifies object, e.g. "there's the toilet" or "there's the bathtub", then moves the cleaning system closer to the object to be cleaned.

I have a feeling this puts me closer to a 9 on my scale, but then again I feel like there are robots that do this subtask already? Identify target -> move to target. Plus I could cheat and put some sort of clue (RFID/infrared/big shiny sticker), on each object. Then it's just a matter of moving to the right spot.

I gather this is how industrial robots work? I get a robot with a clean slate and then I guide it through the first few attempts at a task, then it does the same thing over and over again by itself.

Interesting. So I would have:

Toilet cleaner, tub cleaner, shower cleaner, floor cleaner, counter cleaner, mirror cleaner, etc...

The big drawback to this is that's a lot of robot maintenance. The vacuum is pretty easy, I just dump the dirt into a garbage can when I get home. Add five more robots for each bathroom... I will have to think about this.

I've also lost 40 pounds with purely calorie counting. Although I've managed to keep it off for two years, and I don't see it coming back (easily). My approach was to kill bad habits one at a time and create new good habits to take their place. For example I replaced smoking with walking. I replaced high calorie snacks at home with fruits and vegetables so I would go for those instead.

The key has been to take things slowly and not try to do too much at once. I still count calories, but what I eat is pretty much a mindless habit now, (the good kind). I have also gotten into the habit of weighing myself daily and plotting it on a graph. This gives me very good feedback when I'm going in the wrong direction.

Almost 4 years ago I weighed 220 and smoked a pack a day. Now I weigh 175, ran my first 5K this year and I ride my bike 20 miles to work every day!

Edit: I hope you give it a go again. It's not easy, but once you turn the corner it's really worth it.

I love my Air. At the time I bought it I was consulting and travelling. I wanted a personal laptop that I could take with me everywhere to work on my side projects that didn't weigh down my laptop bag. My work laptop was a beast, so the second laptop needed to be light as hell. Then the Air came out and fit the bill perfectly.

There are other reasons I love this machine but they are largely personal preferences. I for one hate really huge, heavy laptops with wide screens. I like that the Air is very comfortable on my lap. But I also own a desktop, so my laptop can be used as just a laptop and doesn't need to be a desktop replacement.

"Anyway, I rather hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to drink my coffee and read during my commute as my car drives me to work."

I was struck by this comment, because I do this every day...by riding the train. Automated cars, flying cars, double-decker highways, etc. are fantastic innovations, but I sometimes wonder if we couldn't do better than the car, at least in terms of our regular commuting. I ride my bike and take the train because I have that option where I live and I love it.

Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.

From the response;

"We can't use database transactions because performing a big move would slow Basecamp down for everyone. So we have to log the process of each step of the move, and make it so any failure in the move can be rolled back gracefully. That means a move is actually a series of copies and deletions instead of just changing a field for each moved item"

After upvoting this comment I had a second thought: I think the hypothesis of meditation is that it improves attention, (and that is indeed the point). But has that hypothesis been proved? I can provide my own anecdotal evidence that indeed, it seems as if a meditation practice has boosted my attention span. But this is not really science.

It was originally created by Paul Buchheit. It's in point 6 of Google's corporate philosophy "You can make money without doing evil." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dont_be_evil

Edit: I couldn't tell if you were making a joke or just misinformed.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for posting a link to all of these papers. There are so * many * cool * papers. I'm now fully absorbed learning about genetic algorithms searching for novelty instead of the direct objective. Fascinating!

http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/papers/lehman_gecco10b.pdf

I don't think this is a very good comparison. Firing is different than quitting. I can come up with a scenario where someone leaves amicably one day after vesting, but I can't think of a nice, friendly parting where someone gets fired one day before their cliff.

"I think it's now possible with a big rack of multi-core machines in an MPI cluster to approach the capabilities of a fruit fly's brain."

This seems so unlikely. Isn't it more likely that it takes a rack of multi-core machines to simulate a fruit fly's brain using our extremely primitive algorithms for approximating intelligence?

In other words, it's a software problem.

We once escaped an infestation by storing all of our worldly possessions in a POD outside in the middle of the summer in Arizona for three days. Then we moved to Chicago.

We kept our mattress sealed up in plastic for over a year because they can live without food for that long (seriously).

Edit: business idea -- bedbug insurance for apartment building owners.

In the past I've done something similar where I asked potential customers to pay me to build a product and learned, before I wrote a line of code, nobody wanted what I was selling.

On the other hand, I've run into a situation recently where this didn't work as I expected. My current project is sold to businesses. When I asked a few of the businesses I was talking to if they would pay me the price I was going to charge for the service to actually make the product, something strange happened. Even though the amount of money I was asking for was quite small this request still went through the entire purchasing apparatus of the business. I figured the manager I was talking to could just write me a check, but I was wrong. Long story short they wanted to own a part of the business if they payed me money to make it, so I opted to not take their check.

I figured this was good enough validation and I'm plowing ahead on development even though I am a tad worried about what my sales cycle is going to look like. But I never would have learned this if I hadn't straight up asked for money before I even built it.

I find myself agreeing whole heartedly with the sentiment of the article. So much so in fact, that I am a bit nervous to share the link with my social network -- mainly because I know my dad will read it!

"Who’s fault is it? Person B can claim that since their code worked with the older version of X, it’s person A’s fault. But person A can claim that module Y should never have depended upon that particular behavior in the first place."

So apparently the point of having the private keyword is so you can point the finger at your coworker and say, "You should have made that private!"

I totally sympathize and if you are on the startup path it sounds like quiting was the right move.

But I think your expectations for an entry level job are too high. One thing newly minted adults would do well to realize is your first few years at any job are going to be spent doing the grunt work. If you go into it expecting to spend your days oscillating between mind numbing boredom and hectic days filled with busy work, it's a lot easier to deal with. People with this perspective know opportunities for better work will arise -- and seriously, two or three years is just not that long.

We've known each other for a very long time, (met when we were 10, started dating 10 years ago), so this was just another experience in a very long series of events. Our relationship is stronger now, but it was strong to begin with.

Any more than this is too personal to share.

Yes, my wife is amazing. She never believes me when I tell her though. This comment might finally convince her!

I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you.

The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these.

The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back.

I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again.

And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.

And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.

And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.