edave

Converge | San Francisco, CA | Software Engineers | ONSITE | Full-time | Drones / Mobile / Web Apps

We're a revenue-generating enterprise software startup (seed stage) from MIT that makes it easy for skilled professionals (think construction, insurance, real estate, etc) to use drones everyday in their job through a combination of incredible AI and HRI.

* Looking for junior or senior software engineers, and (paid) interns. Everyday, we work on tech that spans from Drones to AI to UX to Data Viz to IOT. We're less concerned with your exact skill set and more about what you would find motivating to work on every day.

* We strongly prefer people who have an engineering/science degree, or equivalent work experience. If you've only taken a three month class on the "full stack," these positions will not be a good fit for you. About Converge:

* Started in 2015, our founders were some of the first people to work on drones in the world, worked on the unmanned Blackhawk helicopter, and created the first mobile app ever for flying a drone (way back in 2008 at MIT…)

* We like people who have excelled at something outside of work, and are just downright interesting to have a conversation with.

* If you are looking for a keg, ping pong table or bro culture, we're not going to be a good fit for each other.

* Our team is small, we're very deliberate about hiring- you would be in the first 10 employees. To get started, please get ahold of via the instructions here: http://www.cvg.io/careers/

If you come from an underrepresented group in tech, please get in touch w/ me (@edave) directly via my HackerNews profile.

Some buzzwords for you keyword searchers: iOS, Android, Fullstack, Rails, Python, Ruby, React, ES6, Angular, Machine Learning

Converge | San Francisco, CA | Software Engineers | ONSITE | Full-time | Drones / Mobile / Web Apps

We're a revenue-generating enterprise software startup (seed stage) from MIT that makes it easy for skilled professionals (think construction, insurance, real estate, etc) to use drones everyday in their job through a combination of incredible AI and HRI.

* Looking for junior or senior software engineers, and (paid) interns. Everyday, we work on tech that spans from Drones to AI to UX to Data Viz to IOT. We're less concerned with your exact skill set and more about what you would find motivating to work on every day.

* We strongly prefer people who have an engineering/science degree, or equivalent work experience. If you've only taken a three month class on the "full stack," these positions will not be a good fit for you.

About Converge:

* Started in 2015, our founders were some of the first people to work on drones in the world, worked on the unmanned Blackhawk helicopter, and created the first mobile app ever for flying a drone (way back in 2008 at MIT…)

* We like people who have excelled at something outside of work, and are just downright interesting to have a conversation with.

* If you are looking for a keg, ping pong table or bro culture, we're not going to be a good fit for each other.

* Our team is small, we're very deliberate about hiring- you would be in the first 10 employees.

To get started, please get ahold of via the instructions here: https://www.cvg.io/careers/

If you come from an underrepresented group in tech, please get in touch w/ me (@edave) directly via my HackerNews profile.

Some buzzwords for you keyword searchers: iOS, Android, Fullstack, Rails, Python, Ruby, React, ES6, Angular, Machine Learning

Converge | San Francisco, CA | Software Engineers | Onsite | Full-time | Drones / Mobile / Web App

* We're an enterprise software startup (seed stage) that makes it easy for skilled professionals (think construction, insurance, real estate, etc) to use drones everyday in their job through a combination of incredible AI and HRI. We're generating revenue and among our customers, count a Fortune 50 company. * Looking for junior or senior software engineers, and (paid) interns. We're less concerned with your skill set and more about what you would find motivating to work on every day. We do work that spans everything from Drones to AI to Data Viz to IOT.

About Converge: * Started in 2015, our founders were some of the first people to work on drones in the world, worked on the unmanned Blackhawk helicopter, and created the first mobile app ever for flying a drone (way back in 2008 at MIT...) * We like people who have excelled at something outside of work, and are just downright interesting to have a conversation with. * We like diamonds in the rough, but like to keep high expectations for each other. * If you are looking for a keg, ping pong table or bro culture, we're not going to be a good fit for each other. We actually do fly drones for our job, so I guess that's a culture benefit? * Our team is small, we're very deliberate about hiring- you would be in the first 10 employees.

To get started, please go to this page to get ahold of us: http://www.cvg.io/careers/

If you come from an underrepresented group in tech, please get in touch w/ me (@edave) directly via my HackerNews portfolio.

Some buzzwords for you keyword searchers: iOS, Android, Fullstack, Rails, Python, Ruby, React, ES6, Angular, Machine Learning

Thanks!

awesome, 6.001 was one of the best courses I took.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine article, those white blood cells are still targeting and killing the B-cells. From my (non-biologist) reading of the article, they crafted a virus which targeted all B-cell, of which, some were lukemia. Apparently there are treatments to restore B-cells in a person, so the article seemed to imply once the T-cell count (the "serial killer" white blood cells) went down, they would treat him to restore his normal B-cell count.

Like you, I'm unclear on what exactly the side-effects are here. If they boost the B-cell count in the patient, do they risk re-introducing lukemia? Are these "serial killer" white blood cells a general immunosupressant? There was a part of the article about a developed resistance in the B-cells that I didn't understand.

Either way pretty amazing, and it sounds like while the patient had the worst flu of his life for five days, it's way better than chemo

What's your startup?

They have the AR.Drone for comparison and entertainment, it's not considered a serious piece of equipment at all. The drone they're actually doing research on is a Ascending Technologies Hummingbird

Here's a list of books I've put together for classes: http://hci4.me/static/16-475-references.pdf

MIT's OCW class on UI - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Also, look at RISD, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, Cornell (in no particular order).

If you can, anything by Doug Engelbart is amazingly motivational (inventor of the mouse) and insightful.

If you contact me, I'd be happy to send you my slides from lectures I've done on interaction and answer any questions.

I think there's books written on just answering your question, I'll try and hit the highlights. To give you some background, my biz partners and I started our consulting firm as a side job in college, then when we graduated and basically said to ourselves "why the hell not? it's been working so far." The first 6 months or so were the hardest as we figured out what bootstrapping a full-time business meant, as compared to moonlighting from your dorm room. For example, paying your employees first means your monthly paycheck may need to wait until that next invoice is paid in a few weeks. Within 2 years our rates had increased by 5x (and not from $5->$25 either), there were 10 of us, 2.5 offices, a non-profit in Peru and we got all of our business through client referrals. However, I was also very stressed and constantly working

Overall: Honestly, technical skill is only half of doing good freelancing. Even more so as you become successful and find that you're doing more managing than technical work. And obviously, technical skill is the foundation of your freelance ability. Still, let's assume you have good technical skills.

If there's one thing I wish I'd learned much more about early on in my consulting firm, it is how to manage your client's expectations along the entire way- from quote -> negotiation -> project -> deliverables. I don't have any horror stories, but I feel like that was the biggest squeaky wheel as we were getting started. That, and don't worry about looking too professional. You won't be, it'll probably show in ways you don't know, and instead treat as much as you can as a learning experience rather than trying to hide your lack of knowledge. However, watch out for predatory clients who confuse naivete with lack of business expertise and try to take advantage of you or tell you "how things are done"... to their advantage.

1. Clients do expect a certain level of expertise, but your rate, portfolio and past referrals should go a long ways in setting your client's expectations. Specs, even highly technical ones imo, are a fickle thing in freelance work- a phrase I've repeatedly heard from very successful freelancers is "under-sell, over deliver." But that's just one approach.

2. To be honest, there are many freelancers/firms who are not honest about their rates/development process/billable hours and they still pay the bills. On the flip side, my biz partners and I try to run our firm by the Golden Rule* and it's worked exceptionally well for us.

3. Yes, that is a good general rule, but you should decide early on if you want to do speculative work or not (different from pro bono work). Many firms feel that speculative work is damaging unless you are just starting out and need to establish a portfolio/set of client referrals (in which case, you're still being "compensated" with something of value, just not cash...). Also, you may find that you're willing to work at different rates for different clients.

Hope that helps!

I do UI/UX/HCI (both full-time and freelance)... it's been my experience that they're hard to find because almost no one starts out in UI. You're either a graphic designer or a coder who moves towards designing interfaces.

I think that's mainly because very few university programs with a full HCI track in their comp sci (or ID or graphic design) programs.

In general, it seems like there is a shortage- I'm constantly asked if a I know of any good UI designers who are looking for a job.

Ironically, it's the civilian sector that's limiting this research to the DoD. The FAA has very strict regulations on flying autonomous drones outdoors (basically, you're not allowed to do it), so this has seriously hobbled a lot of research into UAVs, etc. Israel, Canada, Western Europe and other places are far ahead now in terms of commercial autonomous drones.

I work with the exact same setup. You're looking at 100-250k for the "Vicon" (motion capture) setup and 4k+ for the quad rotor (an Ascending Technologies Hummingbird).

That sounds like a lot, but the motion capture system can accurately track things with sub-millimeter precision at, at least, 100fps. The Hummingbird is very sophisticated, with a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnometer, 3-axis gyro and high performance brushless motors, and of course, the R&D cost for developing all of it.

DIYDrones has a lot of good info on hacking these together, but you won't get the performance you're seeing in that movie.

I've talked to people who are trying to build a poor man's version of these and they're aiming for 600-800, but it's not going to be as high performance.

I'd argue books have a great analog UI, but this probably wasn't always the case: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFAWR6hzZek

On a side note, books/magazines/newspapers have changed dramatically over the centuries. For example, until (relatively) recently, a lot of books required you to cut open each page, and bindings weren't that great until the 1800s or so.

edit: better YouTube link

Agreed, but I don't think you can draw any definite conclusions. I think the iPad has a blue screen behind it and they dropped in photos of people's legs, etc. The angle/ways people are holding the iPad is too perfect, the legs are perfectly still and the rotation at 0:17 is way too smooth to be done by hand- they must've had it mounted.

I'm not saying Apple's bad for blue screening, it would've been difficult to setup those shots in real life, but like the "big hand" and shortened sequences for the iPhone, it's basically bordering on false advertising from my point of view.

> In all seriousness - can you cut this out? You've got valid and good points, but adding snark/sarcasm doesn't help them.

No sarcasm intended, he seems pretty happy with how he's done things. :-)

Thank's Avand, your article is really hip and all. I'd really like to agree with it, and then go about back behind the school yard and smoke a cigarette and tell The Man go to hell.

However, I really can't do that.

Let's start with your high school experience. Going to a prep school in Boston means you (most likely, not assuredly) come from a privileged background. I went to a high school prep school too, and like you, I wanted to have the "too cool for school" attitude.

That didn't really happen though, instead of being bored, I got something that was challenging (athletics, which I sucked at). Yea, it was way cool at the time to pretend that all those classes I was acing (well almost, shouldn't have slept through AP Chem as much as I did), didn't matter and that I knew what I wanted to do as a jock 17 year old. Looking back, I was damned lucky to have such good classes and not be in some (unfortunately) underfunded public school. And also, it turns out now that I'm glad someone forced me to take French, I'm heading to France next month to work with a client. Didn't see that one coming as a 17 year old either.

Avand, likewise your take on college is quaint. I understand now that you've been successful with no college degree it's cool to keep rolling with the same theme of "skoolz lame!" It's actually kinda shame you're so biased though that you think college is just about increasing the number of facts you know, otherwise I'd bet you'd do well at the real point of college- giving you the tools to think about difficult problems in a number of different ways.

But that's cool, I've met plenty of intelligent/motivated/successful people who didn't go to or complete college (or went all the way and got a PhD). However, if you really were the intelligent person, motivated person you claim to be, I don't think you'd be half-assing it just taking night classes and then writing with such supposed authority on how college is worthless.

Here's what it really comes down to- you seem to be doing well marching to your own song, Avand, and that's great, keep it up! However, don't confuse your half-finished experiences as showing that school is worthless and expensive. You simply don't have any real authority to talk on the subject.

Ha ha ha, I'd sure hope so. The tilt controls are only intended for fine-grained control of moving a little ways... otherwise the user navigates the MAV around by specifying waypoints.

Someone once aptly described to me how Microsoft handles standards as "they take a normal, rational standard that everyone agrees upon, then they screw it up just enough that only their products will work with it."

To be fair- GMail doesn't display background colors either.

The NYT's content is generally very good, so I have no argument against paying a subscriber fee. Their iPhone app is another problem though- it's definitely the buggiest iPhone app I've used and needs a lot more stability before I'm willing to pay a subscription for something which crashes 1 out of 3 times I use it and has blatantly broken features.

Please do use lightboxes _if_ your site will not work on that browser. A perfect example of when you want to interrupt the the natural flow! I've found ie6-upgrade-warning works well- http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/ for what you might be trying to do.

Most importantly, look at how many of your users are using IE6, or anything other than FF. Will the better experience for your FF (or simply IE6+) users outweigh losing almost all of your IE6 users? Keep in mind that many people who use IE6 now simply can't upgrade because of hardware or administrative constraints.

I think the article makes some good points in general, but largely misses the fact that MS Money was not that great of a program in many aspects, nor did it innovate. Likewise with Encarta- it seems that these programs were designed in the 90s and then tried as much as possible to keep that mindset, even as they introduced new features.

Interesting, but I find it odd that he discounts how universities will change and adapt. Will the university of today be irrelevant in 10 years? Absolutely. But most universities are successful because they've adapted several times in the past.

Really well written! One thing I was curious about was the use of TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 instead of TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA: what's the difference between these setups in terms of mem/cpu usage? Obviously it varies between servers, but is it roughly 2x, 10x slower?

Interesting, how do you feel about all the talk on Google's data-driven UI development?

Right, and maybe you're right that I was deluded, but my recollection is that the original motivation for Firefox was "Mozilla (and IE) are bloated and slow, let's fix that"

I know that the skill sets overlap some, but icons laid out in a window does not make you an interface designer.

Please read Hackers and Painters: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html seriously.

I think excellent designers use both intuition and data. First you need to have the intuition to know what the right question is to ask, then you need decisively prove what the correct answer is to that question.

Glad to see I'm not the only that finds it ironic how Firefox only took 2 versions to abandon the original reasoning (lightweight, fast, better UI) that made them so much better than anything else. It's not like in the last few years people have suddenly wanted heavier, slower, harder.