Root AI is a robotics company dedicated to solving the biggest challenges facing the indoor farming industry. Today’s industrial greenhouses are modern marvels of efficiency and sustainability. These farms are making fresh, locally grown, and nutritious produce available year-round. We’re on a mission to create advanced robotic systems that can see, care for, and harvest these crops. We are an early stage start-up assembling a foundational team of passionate and talented professionals. Join us as we build the future of farming.
I also suggest keeping your .vimrc / .bashrc / .screenrc / whatever other config files you like in some kind of git repo so you can sync your config files to the remote machine nicely. The other nice thing about this is that if you have a remote that you don't use very often, you can either git clone the repo and rake / make to install, or even wget the file and move it in place manually.
Very cool. (1) Have you thought about using HOG templates for the matching step? Seems like you might get some interesting structural encoding similarities there. (2) When generating image patches, could they be different sizes? Or is the idea to make a simple grid?
I use http://zim-wiki.org and make my own sync / mobile options, since as of a few months ago there was no Android version. But someone /is/ working on a mobile app.
The Mathematica language is usually simply referred to as "Mathematica", at least from what I can tell from my experience on mathematica.stackoverflow.com. Probably because the only frontend that allows doing actual work is the Mathematica software (excluding development of own modules).
I get the marketing / branding aspect. From a contractor's point of view, though, there still isn't any guarantee that the firm that is you that is doing contract work will do quality work - there is no audit system other than referrals anyway. I wonder why people are more inclined to refer companies than individuals. Do companies incur more overhead for the client?
Companies tend to project stability more than individuals.
I remember being a hard ass about ensuring that our office was full of life whenever a prospective client came to visit. Even though my employees could just as easily work from the corner coffee shop or home, the idea is: A company with overhead and payroll is obviously doing something right and likely more permanent than this freelancer I met working from his house. Therefore, they're more likely to succeed.
The perceived risk of failure is the #1 reason proposals are rejected. You don't need a brick & mortar office or whatever to help mitigate that risk, but it helps.
Agreed that there isn't any guarantee of quality work - largely it comes down to their public portfolio and referrals. At the end of the day there's a big difference between "I know this company that does great work" and "I know this guy that does great work".
As far as overhead goes - currently it's mostly the same, but part of my motivation to go the "company" route is the ability to hire someone else in the near future. Once that starts to happen there will be a lot more overhead to consider regarding labor costs, employee income taxes, hardware, etc.
I think this challenge, like any other in this space, is to know your product and your customers. In the case of a post on HN, the customer is HN readers and the product is a post. It's good to know that the good old principles of market research apply to this as well.
My thinking about my future prospects as a potential employee (finishing school soon and thinking about the future) has led me to think about the things suggested in this article very seriously: I enjoy my hobbies involving the outdoors. I love hiking, climbing, cycling, and any other form of enjoying the outdoors. If I'm now trying to get a job at a technical company doing technical work, many founders and recruiters expect (sometimes even assume) that I will have some side projects I'm working on.
But I don't want to work on a side project for the heck of it. I want to stay healthy and enjoy my times outside. There is a brand of people out there that aren't just obsessed with the technical, and recruiters and companies who want all kinds of talent are going to have to be open to different lifestyles - including healthy ones.
It's pretty safe to assume that employees with side projects even remotely related to work are a small minority. In all the years I've been in industry, I can count on one hand, the number of people I have known, or interviewed, that had technical side projects.
Most people just go home and kick back in front of the TV, or garden, or fish, or run or something. Rarely is that "something" a software project.
Absolutely! As I say at one point in the post, if I had to choose I would choose life over side projects any day of the week. Although I prefer to hire those who do side projects I have also hired people precisely because of what they did outside of the web.
I don't think it should be a goal of a startup (or any business for that matter) to not fire any employees. The whole point of a business is to be successful monetarily. Sure, initially it may be to get a product out to market or get a technology out there, but eventually the goal is to make money.
If the goal of a company is to keep all of it's employees, then it by assumption the employees will have no motivation to do well in their jobs, if it is known in the company that there is no threat of firing.
While firing sucks, it is always there looming. In a startup, this forces people to push themselves, work hard, strive for good results. It is the role of a manager to determine the extent of the hard work, but it is also his role to say when enough is enough.
Bottom line, if a company never fired anyone it would have no implicit motivational pressure of it's employees.
Root AI is a robotics company dedicated to solving the biggest challenges facing the indoor farming industry. Today’s industrial greenhouses are modern marvels of efficiency and sustainability. These farms are making fresh, locally grown, and nutritious produce available year-round. We’re on a mission to create advanced robotic systems that can see, care for, and harvest these crops. We are an early stage start-up assembling a foundational team of passionate and talented professionals. Join us as we build the future of farming.
Check out our website: https://root-ai.com
And our reveal video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlXSGqvP-A8&t=28s
We have 3 open positions:
* Perception Engineer | https://grnh.se/3dfe8f5e2
* Software Engineer | https://grnh.se/b8e793e52
* Senior Software Engineer | https://grnh.se/9c7983812
Feel free to reach out with questions!
- Michele Director of Software @ Root AI