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Product development engineer here. In the early stages of a project it can be useful to have CAD models of a competitor's product when analyzing how to improve upon them. Recently we had an intern reverse engineer a competitor's product, and we've used some of these CAD models as the basis for our new designs.

Out of curiosity, what sort of "useful, practical object[s]" are people looking for?

And are there any hardware-centric sites where one can find an existing free hardware project to contribute to?

>another one is to be "paired" with another online student so you feel a little social pressure.

This is the biggest difference for me between courses that I have started and courses that I have finished. Meeting with someone in real life, even if it's just for an hour a week, easily creates the pressure to continue on that an email reminder simply doesn't do.

If you want to retire earlier than the traditional 65, this is a good starting point to figure out how much to save based on when you want to retire:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

>First, I don't like it. Most of the time, it is awkward stuff, and horribly boring, exercising just to exercise.

It doesn't have to be this way. The best way to stick with an exercise is to find one that you enjoy. For some people that's lifting weights, or running distances. Others like biking or yoga. I play ultimate frisbee, which I find to be a lot of fun and a great exercise. I'll be the first to admit that I should do more, but chasing a piece of plastic through the air for two hours a week is a whole lot better than sitting down at home. Try seeing what sports leagues are in your area, maybe you'll find something you like.

Thanks for actually getting into the details on graduation outcomes. I've considered doing a bootcamp but I've been held back by a lot of uncertainty about graduation outcomes. Being able to go through the raw data and find people like me is really helpful.

I would be interested in knowing more about the background of people before they joined. Do they have a STEM background, what was their job title before, how old are they/how long have they been working, etc. Also if you could categorize the types of companies they work for (startup, large tech companies, non-tech companies, etc.) that'd also be interesting to see.

Thanks for providing transparency to your program!

While I agree with you that this is first and foremost an issue with our government, it is also a matter of ethics.

Doing/making something because it is legal is does not make it right. As you're building a team you should hopefully be hiring only people who act ethically and can understand the implications of their work, right?

Having recently spent some time browsing the submissions of /r/deepdream and seeing how far computer generated imaging has come, I have no doubts that one day we will be listening to wonderful sounds that are generated by artificial intelligence. However an intrinsic part of the music (to me, anyways) as an art form, is the humanity of it. A computer can generate lyrics that are relatable on the surface, but knowing that there isn't a person behind those words, feeling what I'm feeling, definitely detracts from the experience of the whole.

That being said, this is incredibly exciting to me, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses, and probably challenges my ideas of what music is

Working at a 'traditional manufacturing' company that makes a lot of products in Asia, I can see that we are already starting to move manufacturing back to America (where the bulk of our customers are), despite our supply chain still being deeply entrenched overseas. I would expect this trend to continue in the coming years.

I think I remember that article (or at least a similar one)! I can't seem to find it on the Globe's site, though.

This allows magazines and other color-image-heavy content to work a lot better on e-readers (currently they're pretty bad)

Most of the growth pre-legalization at a federal level won't be at these companies though, right? There's no way these guys can be supplying the markets in WA/OR/CO/AK because they'd need to transport a lot of product over national borders and would have to deal with federal border agents. Right?

Could the relative weakness of ZAR be a benefit for international investors? If I'm an American making an investment and I was offered identical investment opportunities in 2011 and today, the investment I make today is at a ~50% discount

Know that you deserve it. I keep an up to date LinkedIn profile, and when recruiters contact me I ask them if the position they're hiring for will pay more than a certain figure (my benchmark is usually 50% more than my current annual salary). Your benchmark value may be higher or lower, but either way it should help you gauge market conditions.

Also when you're taking a broader market into consideration, be sure to consider quality of life. Yes I may get more money somewhere, but it might be a miserable product/team/culture which reduces the value of that position. Or I might have a shorter commute, fewer hours or more vacation, which would add to the value of the other position.

Unfortunately, I do not think that you may legally share the works. Their terms of service currently say:

1.2 You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content.

1.3 You may not: [...] re-distribute, reproduce, or transmit the Content by any means including electronic (e. g., via e-mail) nor post it on their personal or public websites or on public networks...

So while you may have the copy of the book legally, it seems unlikely that you can give it to your students. There's always a chance that what they're saying isn't legally enforceable (see non compete agreements), but I don't think that's the case here. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say for sure.

I very much disagree with the idea that you don't have any ethical stipulations if you receive money from a kickstarter campaign.

Although they label things as "donations" and "rewards", it is a de-facto presale platform. If you're going to put a project on there and tell people you'll send them something for giving you money, you're making a promise beyond the words that Kickstarter is using. And while I know that there's a certain amount of risk with any project, you damn sure do have an ethical obligation to do everything in your power to make good on your promise to your early supporters.

I, too, worry that I may have worked at the best place in my career as I was getting started. I'm a mechanical engineer, and got to work at my dream job as a semester-long internship right before I graduated. The product and culture were both amazing, and I loved the work and the empowerment I felt--even as an intern. Despite getting great reviews from my manager and the team I worked with, the timing did not lead to a full-time offer. Business wasn't great and the company was down-sizing, and my group was being hit especially hard. It was also a small team to begin with, so there wasn't really any place for me to fit in.

I've since taken my first full time job, and I've missed my old role a lot. It's not that I don't have a good job--I certainly do. My coworkers who have worked here for most of their careers love it, and don't see themselves leaving. But I've seen how things can be better--I've seen great jobs. I've interviewed at a several places, but I'm not taking any role at a job opportunity unless I think it will be great. One day I plan on starting a company and making it an amazing place to work.

However, in addition to telling you to keep looking because great jobs are out there, I think you need to look at how you can make your current role better. Try to see what can improve the culture, nudge things in the right direction. It might not be big and it might take some time, but you can certainly make progress. And when you leave, your office will be better for it.

Can you explain why a flatter hierarchy is necessary for software development?

My background is in hardware engineering, and this strikes me as surprising (although something I haven't ever given much thought to). What about software makes it incompatible with hierarchy? Don't a lot of traditional software companies have a sort of hierarchy?

I have a large collection of post-rock and similar instrumental songs that I frequently listen to while working. Spotify has a great selection of songs on a curated playlist called "Deep Focus". Having something playing that I'm not going to focus on really helps me get in the zone and focus on what I need to get done.

Also, sometimes I'll listen to Coffitivity instead--times that I'm looking for some background noise but I'm tired of the usual playlists. It's a looped recording of various public places. Eventually you get to notice the loops, but its still pretty solid.

Interesting question.

I would say that yes, startups (as a whole) are likely diluting their own markets. When a startup notices a real pain point and tries to solve it, but cannot make a sustainable business out of it, it shakes the customers' trust in trying an unproven company. This can have negative consequences.

Think of it this way: currently, people have faith in the 'startup brand'. A potential customer's internal monologue may be something like: "Oh a startup is trying to solve this problem that I have? They're probably doing something really innovative and they're inevitably going to build a successful company because of it." After the same customer gets burned a couple times by a new company shutting down, they're not going to be as likely to put their faith in the next new company that comes around the block. The 'startup brand' to them comes to mean a bunch of naive kids who will fail in the next year or so. Even if this company can do it better than before, it may not be worth the risk of frustration/headaches/delays that using the old startups' software has caused them in the past, so they choose to not try the new product. This makes user acquisition a lot harder, and I'd imagine that it would be a net negative (when compared to a scenario where the weak startups didn't try to start a company).

I'd recommend the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminars from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. They're all available on iTunes.

My credit union used to have a similar, although not as bad, password policy. I believe password length had to be between 8 and 10 alphanumeric characters, and then there were other crazy rules that reduced the entropy of passwords further. I think there had to be at least 3 numbers in the password and it couldn't start with a number.

It took them years before they finally listened to reason and allowed you to have a stronger password

I'm not sure how appropriate this discussion is for Hacker News, but I find it rather insulting that religion is listed as a 'weird' belief here (and repeatedly). A huge majority of the world has some kind of religion [1], which would suggest (to me) that there's something pervasive about religion in our humanity. (Although I'll be the first to admit that I am not a religious scholar.) Does the author have something against Judeo-Christianity that makes it especially weird, and fitting with the context of the rest of the list?

[1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscap...

You should probably figure out what your risk tolerance is. The more you stand to lose, the more you could win. What are you going to use this money for in 1-3 years? The traditional advice is either bonds or stocks, likely with some amount of diversification. Bonds are safer than stocks, but might not return as much. See this site [1] with a quick overview of some investment options of varying degrees of risk.

For what it's worth, it's probably not a bad idea to put it in the S&P 500[2]. In the long run, it's probably going to outperform most other investment strategies, although if the US economy tanks in the next few years you could lose a good bit of what you put in there.

I also think that allendoerfer's advice about investing in yourself can be very good, depending on your situation

[1]http://personalfinance.duke.edu/prepare-your-future/savings-...

[2]https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundId=0040&...

I'm glad to see someone trying this out. It's something I've been wondering about [1], and it seems pretty uncommon. I'll be looking forward to seeing how this works out for them, and any other companies that are so inspired to try to improve the status-quo.

Frankly the American culture of working continuously seems like a negative to employee and employer both--and even if it were only a negative to one, it would be something worthy of change.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053580

They've been actively trying to do this for at least a couple years now. Amazon acquired robotic warehouse company Kiva systems in March 2012, and I believe that team only works on automating Amazon warehouses now. I believe there was a feature on it on 60 Minutes or Chronicle.

Do you think that 4 years is the right amount of time? Why do you reject one year as not being enough? Simply because it isn't what is usually done by other companies, or is there more to it than that?

Also thanks for sharing that link. It's a good read, although I don't entirely agree with everything in it

>I'm not really sure how you solve this problem, or if sites like CoFoundersLab can solve the problem.

I think it might have to do with the approach that they're using. When someone comes here and posts an Ask HN about how to find a cofounder, people frequently mention how it's important to actually have a working relationship with the person you're starting a company with. A common piece of advice is to just start working on a side project with someone and see where it goes. CoFoundersLab profiles (and to a certain extent my interactions with people on the site) seems to focus on "here's what my background is, here's what I'm willing to invest, this is the industry I want to go in". It's less about "I have this idea, if anyone with background X thinks this is cool and wants to help me out, feel free to get in touch". Its a subtle difference, but I think it makes a big difference to not trying to 'force it'

I'm a mechanical engineer, working in product development. I have an interest in programming to the extent that I can try to automate some tedious tasks, but very little formal training. I'm definitely a long ways from being a "hacker" as its known here.

I agree with all of your reasons for visiting HN. I've mentioned this before on another thread, but the guideline that posts should be "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"[1] tends to produce a lot of content that I find interesting, and I'm sure there are many more people like us here.

One thing that I will add is that I wish that people posted more non-programming jobs in the monthly Who's Hiring. Even if you just posted the approximate job title it'd be better than omitting it entirely. Every month I control+F>"mechanincal engineer", and there are almost never more than one or two posts, despite the fact that I see some of the same companies posting these positions on different job boards.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I would also offer my anecdote to the statistics that Tiktaalik provided based on a few trips to Montreal and French Canada over the last couple years--while it's true that many people speak English as well as French, English seems to be popular because of the large number of English speaking tourists that visit the city (in no small part because of its French culture). Even in the touristy areas you're greated with "Bonjour-hello" to see how you choose to respond. There were a few times I've been grateful to have some background in French, as the person I was talking to didn't know any English (this however, was mostly on the outskirts of Montreal and in smaller towns). Overall, I was surprised at how francophone the city/region as a whole were, as before traveling I had anticipated it being equally French and English.