Lockheed Martin Sikorsky | Autonomy Software Engineers | Stratford, CT | ONSITE | FULL TIME
We are working on a project called ALIAS for DARPA developing software to make helicopters fly semi- or fully autonomously. We have several opening for perception, planning, database, 3D/GUI, test and infrastructure. We're working on C/C++ on Linux and VxWorks.
It's exciting stuff with a great team and a truly exceptional leader. We're working under the Sikorsky Innovations program modeled after Skunk Works. We get to move quickly and try lots of new things. Our team has our own custom helicopter called SARA (Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft), which we recently tests flown by non-pilot reporters from Wired [0] and The Verge [1].
You can get in touch with me directly. My email address is in my profile. Include HN in the subject line.
Just to provide a counter-point on the vacation policy, I worked at a start-up where this kind of policy worked just fine. Most people took a two-week vacation at some point in the summer, and nobody worked between Christmas and New Years. Other days off, usually in ones and twos, whenever needed were always allowed. It worked out great.
He does not appear to intend to enter either the Republican or Democratic primary. While his independence is commendable, this makes his path to victory much more difficult for reasons of practical politics. Independent candidates lack a sizable, established base of voters.
Indie candidates can win, but the only two indie candidates in the Senate right now only faced one viable major party opponent. Sanders and Lieberman both drew heavily from one of the major party's base making them de facto major party candidates and independents in name only. The last indie Governor to win was famous before running for office. Ventura's fame and his choice of Paul Wellstone's legendary ad consultant enabled him to draw from both parties' bases.
Duverger's Law makes establishing a sustainable third major party difficult if not impossible.
His realistic chances right now do not look good but it is still early. All bets are off if he catches fire on the Internet and one of the major party candidates turns out to be a dud. NM has a small population making it less expensive to get the word out.
I would advise him to do some research (polling, talk with grassroots leaders, etc.) and enter one of the two primaries. There is another Senate election in 2014. Even if he doesn't make it this time, he will establish a personal base by competing in the primary that can help him get off to a faster start in 2014.
Running as a partisan doesn't mean you must give up your principles. Parties adapt and change over time based on the views of the members and candidates. Case in point, the Democratic Party in CT is much more progressive than it was even 10 years ago and part of the reason for that is candidates, who more often than not lost elections, spoke out like Ham is doing and attracted more progressives to the party. Eventually progressive Democrats started winning, brushing off the Republican wave of 2010, and we now have what I view is one of the most progressive group of political leaders in the country.
I agree - type overloading says templates to me rather than inheritance. C++'s tuple class lets you do some of the cool listy type things you can do in Haskell. Using typedef tuple<double, double> FloatPoint and taking it from there seems a lot more like the Haskell example and would be less code - one line each for the typedefs and a one-line function to implement <<. (Not taking anything away from Haskell, which I'm completely in love with.)
You can see Browser-share as opposed to Browser-version share if you go to the statcounter page linked above. Webkit is around 6% and Chrome is 27% making WebKit ~33% and rising. All versions of IE are ~38.5 and falling. Firefox is ~25% and falling really slowly. Opera is <2% and rising really, really slowly.
I agree the manufacturer would not necessarily take on the bulk of the risk. However, there is supposed to be less risk once this technology is perfected. If the technology is indeed superior to human drivers, auto insurers will offer discounts to self-driving car owners. Furthermore, autonomous cars make more sense economically if they are part of a fleet service like a robotic taxi service. The future subscription-based Zipcar or ad-based Google Cars service would carry the insurance. The human is just a passenger no more responsible for an accident than a human-driven-taxi passenger.
I sometimes fall into the trap of not asking questions in order to avoid looking stupid. However, when bullshit rises to a certain level and I've heard practically no substance, I don't ask questions mainly because I don't care. Once the bullshit bit is flipped, it is hard to unflip.
