Beheld is a new startup that lets you scan, send, and print yourself, starting from the idea that the most popular application of 3D scanning and printing is in 3D figurines. These tiny action-figure-like representations were wildly popular print subjects back at Shapeways but they were notoriously difficult to capture and print. Now, thanks to improvements in scanning, color printing, and software, they’re surprisingly easy.

Credit: Beheld

Kinkead, the CEO, has an MFA in industrial design and has worked in the 3D printing industry for half a decade. She helped build 3D printing procedures for places like Michael Kors and they founded Beheld in January 2017. They’ve raised a small amount of angel funding. The system is simple: you enter a booth-sized scanner and strike a pose. The scanner takes multiple pictures of your body in 360 degrees and then stitches them together, creating a 3D model that you can share with your friends for free. If you want to print yourself, however, it will cost you about $40.

Source (John Biggs, “Beheld is a new startup that lets you scan, send, and print yourself”, TechCrunch, 03.11.2017)

Waymo, the former Google self-driving company is launching public road tests of its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans, with no safety drivers on board of the vehicles. The test are is in Chandler, Arizona (part of the greater Phoenix metro area), and the cars are allowed to go anywhere within this defined space. This means that Waymo is operating at level 4 autonomy, sharing public roads with human-driven cars and pedestrians, with no one at the wheel to intervene when things may go wrong.

CEO John Krafcik said that Waymo will be operating a fully autonomous ride hailing service without any humans at the wheel, a major first for the industry in terms of realizing the dream of making commercial self-driving available to the public at large.

Residents participating in the trial will also be able to use them exactly as they use the test vehicles with safety chauffeurs today – for any trips within the designated area, whether for commutes, trips to go shopping, heading to school or whatever their transportation needs. They hail the vehicles using a Waymo app, and being the trip onboard with a push of a button. There’s also an onboard support system that allows them to talk to a live Waymo support agent at any time.

Source (Darrell Etherington, “Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel”, TechCrunch, 07.11.2017))

When it comes to which languages developers like and dislike, Stack Overflow has some insight. Based on the languages developers tagged as those they would not like to work with in their Stack Overflow Jobs profiles, the company has found that Perl, Delphi, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and PHP are the most disliked programming languages, while R, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Rust are the least disliked.

The least-disliked programming languages, based on at least 2,000 mentions:

1. R
2. Kotlin
3. TypeScript
4. Rust
5. Bash
6. Clojure
7. Swift
8. Python
9. JavaScript
10. Go

The most-disliked programming languages:

1. Perl
2. Delphi
3. Visual Basic for Applications
4. PHP
5. Objective-C
6. CoffeeScript
7. Ruby
8. C#
9. Java
10. C++

The numbers were based on the 20 most-disliked tags among those mentioned at least 200 times. “It’s worth emphasizing again that this is no indictment of the technologies, their quality, or their popularity,” Robinson said. “It is simply a measurement of what technologies stir up strong negative feelings in at least a subset of developers who feel comfortable sharing this publicly.”

Source (Paul Krill, “Stack Overflow reveals the most-disliked programming languages”, InfoWorld, 01.11.2017)