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joexner's comments

joexner | 2 years ago | on: Why checked exceptions failed

Checked exceptions give you, essentially, syntactic sugar for handling just a few kinds of exceptions and re-throwing the rest.

It's useful when there are one or two error cases you want to retry or handle specially, but you want to just barf any other error up the stack. It's a specific use case but it's prevalent.

The downside is that sugar can only separate your error conditions by Java type. If everything is just an Exception, you'll have to use sort out your error cases in code.

joexner | 3 years ago | on: US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a cardboard box

They didn't try very hard to train this system. It wasn't even a prototype.

- In the excerpt, Scharre describes a week during which DARPA calibrated its robot’s human recognition algorithm alongside a group of US Marines. The Marines and a team of DARPA engineers spent six days walking around the robot, training it to identify the moving human form. On the seventh day, the engineers placed the robot at the center of a traffic circle and devised a little game: The Marines had to approach the robot from a distance and touch the robot without being detected.

joexner | 3 years ago | on: Analog Chess

> Capturing in this game is a little bit goofy. Basically, if your piece overlaps the opponent's piece it is captured, and you cannot move past the first piece you overlap.

> One interesting side effect of this is that you can capture multiple pieces at once. :)

Which way is "past"? Can only knights milti-kill, since they can "jump" past the first point of contact?

joexner | 3 years ago | on: Why roller coaster loops aren’t circular anymore

The balloon would probably move toward the front when accelerating and toward the back when the bus slows, if it moved at all.

It helps (me) to imagine an air bubble in a sealed, nearly-full fish tank on that same accelerating bus. The heavier water gets "flung" harder away from the direction of acceleration, and the bubble gets pushed out of the way in the opposite direction. Same principle.

joexner | 4 years ago | on: Pg_cron

Idempotent resource cleanup tasks are the ideal use case for k8s crons.

joexner | 4 years ago | on: The Animal Is Tired

The article says kids make people (Europeans, anyway) happy except for the financial stress.

joexner | 6 years ago | on: Amoma.com is a scam (2017)

I got a similar sinking feeling just a few days ago right after booking a flight through Kayak. It was a too-good-to-be-true rate on a flight from Boston to Barcelona with a company called Vayama. Vayama runs lots of little scams, like selling airline tickets before actually buying them from the airline, and cancelling the order if the flight fills up or they can't purchase them profitably. A quick web search shows hundreds (thousands?) of complaints against Vayama, but Kayak keeps pimping them.

Some people seem to say that using Vayama worked out for them, but with my trip 3 weeks away still I'm pretty on edge.

We're supposed to learn that Kayak is pants now, and they should feel bad.

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