flor1s

If you want to feel better, Australia also exports a lot of uranium afaik

As an aside, the original Kinect and Kinect for Xbox 360 use different technologies for 3D detection. The original Kinect projects an infrared pattern and then detects the deformation of the pattern to determine distance/shape. The Kinect for Xbox 360 uses more traditional time of flight.

Why even limit yourself to two cameras? If I recall correctly multi-view geometry benefits from having as many cameras as possible.

In the future we will all have walls covered with a checkerboard pattern in our garage to calibrate the cameras on our self driving cars. :)

I guess it's creepy in a similar way as people shooting other people virtually (in shooter video games), though a making a waifu "vending machine" adds another angle of objectification to it.

In my opinion,

1. You can be highly educated in a subject without getting a formal degree.

2. A CS degree is not a programmer/developer degree. CS is to programming as art is to drawing.

3. Having knowledge of CS might mean you can more easier adopt to a variety of roles (front-end, back-end, systems programming) but comes at a cost that you probably have less practical skills than someone who is specialized in this (because of self-education/going to a trade school/learning on the job).

I have a bachelor in informatics, master in CS and PhD in informatics (technically informatics is not CS, but there's a lot of overlap), but I would say I gained most programming/development knowledge through internships and working on personal projects.

Nice video. The article somewhat addresses this: "These previous approaches include using a belt‐driven band saw‐type mechanisms or water jet cutting. These approaches have limitations, most notably that the outer leaves of the lettuce can be easily damaged when harvesting and there is a lack of reliability in stem cutting height and quality."

Seems like the solution discussed in the article does not really improve upon this significantly: "As the project stands, the damage rate, caused by cutting the lettuce stem too short, is too high for supermarket standards, although the harvested vegetables were perfectly edible. The most recent sample size of 69 lettuces was enough to confirm this as the next problem to address (hundreds of lettuces had been harvested over previous iterations). Future versions of Vegebot will need to address and improve the damage rate, perhaps with visual feedback from the harvested lettuces dynamically adjusting the force threshold at which the cut is made. In parallel, the end effector needs to be made lighter to achieve a human‐level cycle time, possibly by manufacturing with carbon fiber, or by using an alternative, stronger cartesian arm design."

UT4 got killed by the success of Fortnite :(

The gameplay of games such as Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 3 Fortress and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory was very satisfying because they felt like arena shooters (due to their use of the Quake 3 engine) but were early examples of games having role specialization.

That's just good production values that most AAA shooters like CoD and Battlefield have. AAA studios can iterate, hire top talent and do a lot of QA testing, so naturally elements like gunplay, weapon balance and map design can be top notch.

I think the genius in PUBG can be found more in seeing the opportunity of creating a standalone realistic Battle Royale shooter at the right time.

Don't forget to review calculus as well. Khan Academy is a good start for learning about single variable calculus (http://www.khanacademy.org), but their content on multivariable calculus is a bit lacking (neural networks / deep learning use the concept of the derivatives and the gradient a lot). A good supplement for multivariable calculus would be Terence Parr and Jeremy Howard's article on "All the matrix calculus you need for deep learning": https://explained.ai/matrix-calculus/index.html

After reading this book (or during), take a look at the author's (Boyd) video lectures on linear dynamical systems: https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE263/

There is a lot of overlap between the book and the course.

Waymo can of course cherry pick the scenarios which they present about. Meanwhile a human driver still has to intervene every few thousands miles.

Check out http://www.turtlebot.com, you can attach a manipulator from for example ROBOTIS to it.

Not quite the Netflix of online lectures, but there is http://videolectures.net. Quite some good stuff on there, e.g. lectures and conference videos on AI and robotics. The website feels very web 1.0 though.

Except that conference proceedings can be exactly like a journal, i.e. you often need to pay to access them.

Also there is Draft (https://kubernetes.io/blog/2017/05/draft-kubernetes-containe...)

The problem with saying "kubectl is the new ssh" is that it is simply not true in my opinion. Something more akin to "kubectl is to controlling a cluster as ssh is to controlling a server" would be more accurate I think. The point the OP makes about "Most Developers Don’t Have Google-Scale Problems" is true, I don't think you should use Kubernetes if your app consists of just a website and a database. But do people working on such (relatively simple) apps really consider using Kubernetes?

Isn't one of the appeals of Kubernetes to have a portable cloud environment, which means I can easily switch between Windows Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, on premise, and even Minikube (localhost). Is there any simpler alternative for that?

Maybe they should have a data warehouse (which is typically denormalized) instead of a database (which should be normalized)?

So much food is thrown away by grocery stores on the expiration date or just the day after. Usually you can eat that for a few more days, but grocery stores do not want to take the risk of selling it.

arxiv is great, but for getting your PhD and a future career in academia, publishing there doesn't count nearly as much as publishing in peer reviewed journals does.

I wonder how popular downloading via Usenet is outside of The Netherlands, where me and my friends shared an account in high school. Here in Japan it seems no-one is using it (for downloading).

I love how much effort MIT is putting in making these courses widely available (i.e. releasing slides, video and exercises online).

That resembles some paper processes in Japan, e.g. to get an international conference trip refunded (as a PhD student) I need to submit around seven forms: 1. Application for travel 2. Acceptance for travel 3. Schedule 4. Request for payment of conference entrance fee 5. Export control form 6. Travel Report 7. Notice of absence

Because most of these are also required for travelling within Japan I sometimes just don't bother asking for a refund.

I don't think these kind of coding interviews are given to average programmers though, and if they are I'm sure they are taken with a pinch of salt (or with a lot of help from the recruiter, or using simple tasks such as FizzBuzz [1]).

In my experience, having been an average programmer (and maybe still being, I hope that by now I'm at least slightly above average) who worked in The Netherlands at a "system integrator", a web dev "sweat shop" (some projects using 10 year old tech, relatively high staff turnover) and even a startup, such companies don't ask for whiteboard coding, however take home projects are quite common.

I also interviewed at some more "hot" unicorns in Japan, which do have these kind of questions (using a dehumanizing online test in fact).

1: http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest

The types of robots used in Japan are very diverse. HAL Lumbar Support is an assistive device that helps caregivers to lift patients / objects more easily (it is also being tested in other areas such as construction work). Paro is a seal "stuffed animal robot" with minimal sensing and actuation, but it's very cute nonetheless (if you ever visit Tokyo, go to Miraikan in Odaiba, you can touch it there). Pepper (made by a French subsidiary of SoftBank) is a humanoid shaped robot on a wheel base that is mostly good for voice/gesture communication.

Interesting comment regarding Conal Elliott. I've always thought there is some similarity between probabilistic programming (specify a probabilistic model as a graph), functional reactive programming (specify some reactivity as a graph) and deep learning (specify some linear algebra / calculus / optimization operations as a graph). Too bad the word "graphical programming" would be interpreted as "visual programming" (or programming using plots and charts!) and not programming using an explicit graph structure.

Companies pay low tax in one country for money they earned in another country. Almost every multinational does that, there are buildings in The Netherlands in which a dozen of international firms have a postbox just so they can redirect their revenue and pay the lowest tax on it.

Being Dutch, I am ashamed that our government does not do anything to change the laws which allow for this to happen.

I didn't read the book, just the TOC, but it seems like this book is only about programming, not so much about theory (automata, discrete math, calculus, linear algebra, etc), and not even so much about the engineering side of it (automated testing, algorithms, DevOps, etc).

Anyway, there are various websites which list an "online curriculum" for Computer Science, e.g. https://mindweb.network/board/computer-science-a-full-bachel...

I also really enjoyed the book by my former professor:

Design Methods for Reactive Systems: Yourdon, Statemate and the UML

by Roel Wieringa, Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers, 2003

This is all about specifying reactive systems though, not about how they are programmed.