Yo! Tried to reply to your post about a visa (thread locked now).
I'm a Canadian, founder, been through the process multiple times, and am helping people with visas. @loganullyott on twitter, loganullyott @gml dot com
DroneSeed is bringing tree-planting drones, remote-sensing data, and predictive analytics to the forestry industry. We're building a fleet of 15 drones to fly over forested areas and fire seed capsules into the ground with pneumatics. It's pretty cool. We're a 4-person TechStars company in Seattle right now, we've got our first customers, and we're looking to hire in two positions.
We're looking for a Co-Founder CTO. Ideal candidate will have experience working with either GIS and Image processing, or UAV flight planning, as well as working with large data sets. Capable of leading a team, the candidate will be designing backend architecture, can estimate hours and evaluate talent. You're keen to provide the software element to our hardware and business skills. Helpful but not required experience includes:
ArcGIS or QGIS, PixHawk, Pix4d, AgDrone, Python, Q Ground Control, ArduPilot, Python.
https://angel.co/droneseed/jobs/115308-cofounder-cto-drone-s...
UAV Mission Planner: This position will be charged with owning the software stack to allow 15 drones to be pre-programmed on how to plant tree seeds, where to go, and how to land autonomously. You have 1-4 years experience working writing code for mission planning software. https://angel.co/droneseed/jobs/114965-software-engineer-uav...
If you're motivated by the problem, equity, and are comfortable working at a fast pace in an aspiring startup in a prestigious accelerator (TechStars Seattle), we would love to talk. Candidate should consider moving to Seattle for 1-4 months. (Housing may be provided depending upon need.)
Logan@droneseed.co , @droneseed on twitter, or PM me on HN
I didn't particularly love the last one, on Musk's "secret sauce," but the rest of the Musk series was absolutely fantastic. You could give it to someone that has never seen a car or rocket, and by the end of it they'd understand the majority of the energy, auto, and space industries.
I was just imagining an autopilot lane with cars flying into the city to pick up their owners.
You could also have parking garages with a much higher capacity per sq. foot if all the cars were smart and could work together. (Or even sections designed for this) Instead of single or double car rows, you could have them 4 or five cars deep, and self-rearranging to let each other out.
Thinking about your last sentence: Elon has been tweeting about Tesla's summon feature - tap your phone and your car will come to you, across the street or across the country. If a car can drive LA to NY legally, without a driver, there should be a way for it to carry a drunk passenger. Whether that means enabling "drunk mode" so you can't grab the steering wheel, or that you have to sit in the back seat, there's surely room for a compromise between the automakers and lawmakers. Technology like this will save lives.
There is plenty of tech out there that can "save lives" but the market has steadfastly refused. How about "No seatbelt, no car move". They tried, but given how many americans refuse to wear seatbelts it has never made it into a product. An enforced 'Drunk mode', presumably with some sort of breathalizer interlock, would be far more disenfranchising and I have to believe would also be rejected.
I like the concept but what if the sensor fails? Suddenly you're stuck who knows where...
I believe Chevrolet has a "teenage driver mode" which allows you to disable the radio, AC, and for it to bug you if you drive without a seat belt. I like that concept far more since it doesn't leave you stranded because the seat belt failed to be detected. It also allows you to set a maximum speed, a maximum radio volume, and for parents to get a report later if they wish.
I never drive without a seat belt. I just don't want to add more points of failure to a car than it absolutely needs.
Wait for the day that your google car won't move because it cannot connect to the server. Or because the lidar lens is dirty. Or a tire pressure sensor is incorrectly indicating a flat. Or (and I really hope this does happen) the engine light has been on for a week. Autodrives will no doubt have many reasons not to move. Seatbelt mandates will seem trivial in comparison.
Because regular cars never break down? I think with self-driving cars it would be that much easier for a remote health check to figure out something is wrong with your car and send you a loaner, analogous to the way tesla lends people cars when anything goes wrong with theirs.
An autodrive call will break down as much as a regular car AND then will brake down more because of the various systems over and above that a regular car does not rely upon.
When a regular car brakes down there is normally something you can do. The vehicle is still movable. An autodrive car with a blown lidar unit is probably bricked.
> An autodrive call will break down as much as a regular car AND then will brake down more because of the various systems over and above that a regular car does not rely upon.
I'm sure glad you have the data to back this up.
> When a regular car brakes down there is normally something you can do. The vehicle is still movable. An autodrive car with a blown lidar unit is probably bricked.
You can still put it on the back of a truck or tow it, the same way you would for a car which has actually broken down. You can do the same for the theoretically broken replacement car.
(1) Are you kidding me? This is basic logic. Adding additional failure points to a system, with everything else being the same, creates higher failure rates.
(2) If you need a truck to move it, I call that bricked. Normal cars, when they loose various systems, are still mobile. A normal car can still be rolled even without any electrical system working. Steering and brakes can be are completely controllable via muscles alone, even on electric cars. An autodrive car could be a total unknown. Some don't even have a manual (non-electic) steering wheel.
I was thinking more of something like "I'm drunk, so I'm going to voluntarily give my car control to take me home." Basically turning it into a driverless taxi.
"No seatbelt, no car move" is restricting in that it's always enabled. Something like what I've dubbed "drunk mode" or "taxi mode" gives you more options.
So a drunk mode that need the drunk to acknowledge that he/she is drunk and voluntarily initiate drunk mode? I don't think drunks are the best judges of whether they are drunk, or their driving ability. The law agrees. For drunk mode to be safe, to properly make a dent in the drunk driving problem, it has to actually prevent them from taking the wheel even when they want to, especially when they want to. Otherwise all the confident drunks, the alcoholics, wil keep taking to the road.
This is important because so many of the "human factor" mistakes cited by autodrive proponents actually begin with alcohol/drug use. If the human really cannot be trusted, the car has to take away his authority.
That was my first reaction. I played Draw Something for a week or so, 3 years ago. I know many people still play Candy Crush Daily. The purchase to get Draw Something was probably premature, whereas this is a more established market.
I can't help but wonder how much this has to do with the style of game. As far as software enforced rules go, Draw Something is VERY open, where a game like Candy Crush only accepts input that moves the game in the direction of their choosing (towards purchases usually). Most of my experience with Draw Something comes from watching a child play, and by "play", I mean they would write the word out. I failed to find a way to convincingly explain that this ruins the game. At 8 years old, it's extremely difficult to explain why someone should be following rules that the software doesn't enforce.
Certainly it beats Draw Something in sticking power, but are people still going to be playing Candy Crush in five years, ten years? There's a lot of other companies I can buy for five billion dollars and be confident that they'll still be selling stuff in a few decades' time, but this one doesn't fill me with confidence.
Worse news: the thing that they sell is something that people regret buying.
very few people are going to be playing anything for five years or ten years. few games last that long. activision's world of warcraft has defied all expectation. by all standards the graphics look extremely dated. ea has been making sports games with annual refreshes, and this other major studio that makes the assassins creed series are also doing the same thing - large AAA-level open world games with in app purchases AND annual refreshes, which seems to be the way forward now in video game profitability.
There have been lots of articles mentioning Dorsey taking sewing classes, sketching classes, going sailing, etc while running Twitter. (And in moments that outsiders consider crises, and employees were working longer hours to hit deadlines). The 6/4/1 is an exaggeration, but still...
Dorsey often tried to act as if he were in control, posturing that his actions were all part of a bigger plan, but employees saw him frequently pacing in frustration around South Park. He also habitually left around 6 p.m. for drawing classes, hot yoga sessions and a course at a local fashion school. (He wanted to learn to make an A-line skirt and, eventually, jeans.)
From what I've read in the Musk biography and elsewhere, he is involved in really really low level decisions, to the point that he's been labelled a "nano-manager." Surely he's not involved in absolutely every decision, but by all accounts he is much, much closer to the details than you would expect a CEO to be. Especially when it comes to design/ engineering details.
I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."
They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.
As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.
