cornellwright

As someone else pointed out, this could be a good way to crowd source watching the watchers.

You may be able to get a list of law enforcement license plates through a FOIA request and then use this plus a network of many highway cameras to show a map of where law enforcement was last seen.

Looks like the domain was registered on Oct 8th and I can't find "Fly Maids" or similar names on the Delaware Division of Corporations. (Maybe it takes longer for it to show up?)

Either way super weird and creepy.

Yes, but how do you stop that? Isn't any investment in a company involved in litigation implicitly an investment in the litigation? (Or at least a bet that the litigation isn't material to their business.)

The whole SCO vs IBM case was pretty unscrupulous, sleazy, and opportunistic, I agree. I'm not arguing that I have the solution to stop abuses like this. I'm saying that limiting financing is not it.

Yes of course you should. This is no different than a lawyer taking a case on contingency. It provides people without the means to hire a legal team a way to take on more well-financed opponents.

While abuse of the legal system is certainly a problem, the way to solve it is not limit financing. That only increases economic inequality. It's like saying we can solve the SF housing crisis by banning mortgages.

The incentives don't quite work like that though.

With normal FIFO queues you're free to abandon your place in line if, for example, you decide it's taking too long and you'd rather do something else. If later the line dies down you're free to go get back in line and you're not being a jerk.

However if you get stuck too far back in the LIFO queue, then it's actually in your best interest to abandon it and come back later. But there's no socially appropriate way to do this.

I think if you tried to do this in the real world it would quickly devolve into a mob. Random order would probably work better.

That's a nice pricing, particularly paying what you actually use but it's still more than 3x the cost of just storing it in S3.

Yeah, that's what we're seeing. We can finally get to US-West2 again from our office. Employees who were working from home didn't experience an outage at all.

An easy way is to just create a new screen (see the Unix command "screen") and then open a text editor in it. The second participant then joins the screen (via screen -x) and now you both can type into the same editor.

IANAL, but monthly payroll is legal in California for salaried exempt employees. For non-exempt it has to be at least bi-monthly.

It's a mix of both. In terms of simulating the shape the robot makes and visualizing its motion, that is basically all done in software the first time. Simulating interactions with the environment, however, is quite difficult. While we did have a simulator, most work was done on the robot itself.

In the past we did some that were battery powered, and it's doable.

As a research project, a lot of the research is on the motion and mechanism design. Given limited resources (both budget and people), battery power was removed from the scope of the project until there's a strong reason to do it. It's more of an engineering challenge than actual science if that makes sense.

I used to work on this project - surprised to see it on the front of HN. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions.

This video is relatively old. Here are some more recent videos of where the technology is now:

Overview of the most recent robot design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=64&v=te4M-b69fVs

Video of the "Snake Monster" made with multiple snake robots as legs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMVO6rI5mL4

Main webpage about the project: http://www.snakerobot.com

Great to finally see a cloud service competing against Glacier. Hopefully this will lead to some sort of response from AWS.

It took a year for management to figure it out. It took much less time for his coworkers to figure it out. You're definitely right. "Blame" for the damage done falls mainly on management inaction.

I definitely learned a ton from that job.

I think one thing the author fails to realize is how much worse it is to hire a terrible engineer than not hire a good engineer. I've seen a terrible hire cause more than $1M of damage in the year it took for him to get fired.

While I think that these sorts of people are rather rare within the population of engineers at large, they appear much more often in the interview process as they are more likely to need a job, and probably have to interview many more times before they find their way into a company.

That said, I do agree with the author that extremely deep technical interviews are also unreasonable. Variants of FizzBuzz are generally enough to weed out the terrible engineers and it's pretty hard to tell the good from the great until you've actually worked together.

What about property owner permission? I feel like that's something really important. Even if I'm not at my house I should still have a say if someone wants to fly some 50 lb contraption over it.

Given all the comments, I'm surprised to see no one mention flat field images and flat field correction. This would be the proper way to measure and even correct for blemishes and dust like this.

Basically a flat field image is an image of a completely uniform illumination pattern (i.e. given a perfect sensor and lens with no vignetting all pixels would have the same value). This lets you measure all sorts of things, but comparing flat field images of before and after dust/tape were applied would actually highlight the exact effect.

Using flat field correction, you can even correct for these issues to a great extent by scaling the pixels as appropriate to basically account for their being light paths between the object in the scene and the image projected onto the sensor.

People work from home from time to time and it's fine. We do have a couple of remote contractors as well. I don't see how free food prevents this.

We don't tell employees what to think about or talk about at lunch. Sometimes it's work related and sometimes it's just shooting the shit. In either case I feel like both employee and company win.

I fully embrace that we get more value out of providing free food than it costs us. That plus the fact that almost everyone seems to like it is enough of a reason to do it.

Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? I feel like better communication and more discussion hopefully leading to doing a better job is also beneficial to the employee. Working on a more successful team probably leads to higher satisfaction and better long term career prospects. Even when I've worked in places that didn't provide food, all or almost all of the team still usually ate together, just because we liked what we were doing and enjoyed one another's company.

My point is employees aren't losing anything by taking or not taking the perk. We wouldn't pay someone more not to eat the food. Aside from all the weird bad team dynamics that would cause it would also be a net-loss to the company. When people work from home, we also don't pay them any more, despite that we order less food and they have to buy/cook their own.

As an employer that provides free food, I think there's more to it than that in that both sides receive more value. We don't provide free food in order to pay our employees less. We provide free food because we see a lot of value in everyone eating together and employees get a lot of value in just not having to think about lunch or spend the time to go out and eat somewhere.

I think most people get more value you out of the free food than if they were simply paid what it cost to provide. In the case of free food I see it as where both employer and employee do better with the in-kind perk than the equivalent cash alternative.

Cool idea, but I'd be really wary of the long term effects to be one of the first people using it.

Maybe you could try this, but I don't think this is something that any reputable institution's IRB would approve.

I would actually recommend trying what you suggest on cadavers. You'd have to inflate the lungs first though.

TerrAvion - http://www.terravion.com - Dublin, CA

Apply at http://www.terravion.com/careers.html or email hr@terravion.com.

Hardware / Systems Engineer We have an opening for a hardware / systems engineer and are looking for talented, hard working, innovative candidates interested in working in an early stage company. We are Y Combinator alumni, venture backed, and growing fast. Our core product, OverView, has seen over 200x growth in the last year. If you live to deploy scalable hardware to the field, this job is for you. You will have primary responsibility for building and maintaining our imagery collection system, which mounts on to the belly of a single engine airplane. The first version is already flying and generating revenue, but you are going to design the fleet.

Responsibilities Architect, design, and build hardware and software for imagery collection which can be reliably deployed in the field Assist in data processing activities - this requires training and working with our ops team on new features you will deploy Communicate with stakeholders (operations and customers) to determine requirements for imagery collection system and imagery calibration Interview and evaluate potential engineering job candidates Assist in other activities as necessary in an early stage company

Requirements Bachelors degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Optics, Remote Sensing, Software Engineering or Computer Science or equivalent experience Demonstrable experience designing new hardware systems and writing low level software Experience designing and deploying complex systems in the field Experience working in C, Java, and Python on Linux Strong problem solving abilities Very strong hardware and software troubleshooting skills Strong written and oral communication skills Ability to work well alone or in teams, with limited supervision required Ability to commute as necessary to Dublin, CA (our office is a 10 minute walk from the West Dublin BART)

Bonus Attributes (These are skills/experience we would really like to see but candidates without them should still definitely apply.) CAD/mechanical engineering experience Knowledge of radiometry, image calibration, cameras, and optics Interest in general aviation Experience with UAVs or drones GIS experience Farming experience, interest, or connection

Wouldn't the target notice if you flew a drone close enough to them to hear them?

I have an Ecosphere that's around 18 years old. There are still a couple shrimp (well I'm guessing offspring of the originals) alive. It's pretty cool.

Namecheap as well.

I tried roasting my own beans once and it was a ton of work and made a lot of smoke. I just buy 5 lbs at a time from a place on the internet which roasts when I order and ships the same day. It tastes great and I don't have to deal with roasting.

What's different is doing it as a subscription and at a high revisit rate. Farmers can interpret NDVI and what's actually more amazing is the amount a grower can tell about her fields from just a visual photo. By providing a time series of 30 weekly images it makes changes readily apparent and doesn't require expert consulting (beyond the extensive expertise that farmers already have) to make better decisions.

Something like the Insitu ScanEagle is probably the drone closest to being effective for our application: http://www.insitu.com/systems/scaneagle/capabilities

However, they're still quite expensive and not really cheaper to operate than a Cessna, and then there are the legal issues. I personally think that once of the things that will drive the cost of drones down quite a bit will be when an autopilot maker comes out with a way to retrofit Cessnas and other proven, GA airframes into OPVs (optionally piloted vehicles).

We looked into this quite extensively. It's actually surprisingly cheaper to fly a Cessna vs use a small drone. We can cover 100,000 acres in a day with a Cessna, compared to maybe 400 (not including time for battery charging) with a small hand launched drone. Along with that farmers are really busy and not very interested in operating another new tool.

We intend to move to drones whenever they are legal, cheaper and more effective, but in the meantime Cessnas are the answer.