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Spire Global (https://www.spire.com) | Sr Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA

Spire is hiring sr software engineers to automate one of the largest SATELLITE constellations ever built. We have already launched 30+ SPACECRAFT and are targeting a steady state of >100.

Our team is ~130 people with 60 engineers across broad variety of disciplines including software, mechanical, electrical, RF, etc.

To apply, please email me at marcus(at)spire(dot)com or visit: https://spire.com/careers/openings/?gh_jid=525585

My takeaway was that he doesn't want to be in the crossfire in the ads war. I can imagine that being very stressful and unpleasant with lots of hate mail etc. Especially if you compare it to an app like Overcast that brings joy to everyone using it.

Neat project!

Last christmas in SF I wanted to create a "winter vibe" as we were celebrating with the family, and I was looking for videos showing cozy snowfall and winter landscapes. It was surprisingly hard to find something really good. I think it'd be cool if you could select what kind of "window" you want and had a few presets like "Tropical", "Winter landscape", etc.

I personally found the mix of soothing slow music and hyper lapse videos to not be relaxing, I think I'd prefer if the videos were running at normal speed or maybe even in slow motion depending on the video.

That is certainly one source for error. There are many. Another is that testing does not give you exhaustive coverage of the state space just because each branch of the code is visited.

The standard does mention "formal verification/methods/proof" but to my knowledge it's rarely been used extensively.

This times a thousand.

It also means "To support".

HEADS UP TO IOS DEVS: You may want to update your iPhone to iOS 8.2. You'll need to download the new XCode to deploy the app after that but it's not possible at the moment due to STATUS_CODE_ERROR.

I used it pretty much daily in Sweden back in the 80s and 90s to check news, broadcasting schedule, weather, etc. There were a few hundred "pages" and each page had a 3 digit number that you'd punch in to retrieve it.

During my 14 years in Silicon Valley I haven't met any successful founders that I'd characterize as mean. Lots of them have come across as sociopathic and ruthlessly egoistic, but that's something different. They've made their way to success by looking at the economics and optimizing for themselves. If this meant manipulating, lying and breaking promises to cofounders, employees, customers, investors, etc so be it. But... I'm not sure even Steve Jobs was mean; I think he was extremely hard on people because that was the best way he knew to get the results he wanted. I never met him.

Anyway, it seems to me that most people (at least here in the west) would vastly prefer a product created by people that operate with integrity, humanity and decency to one created by dicks all else equal. And that a slightly inferior product can beat a better one out by having a better more positive story behind it.

I think there are already economic incentives for founders to behave well and that this trend will continue. The employees and customers talk freely on secret, glassdoor, etc and I think it's critical to realize that if you don't operate with decency and good values people will a) know about it, b) make purchasing decisions based on that, c) take that into account when considering employment.

I think companies will increasingly make an active effort to (if nothing else for purely financial reasons): a) operate with decency and good human values b) protect and elevate the company and it's people by making this clear to the public

I wonder if Boosted Boards has tried putting the propulsion system on a regular skate deck instead of a longboard. Looking at the powered truck design it seems it should be doable. It seems the market would be bigger since most skaters don't ride longboards.

It might be better to include a parachute above the rotors.

The Cirrus SR22 single engine aircraft has this (their system's called CAPS.) It lets you sail to the ground in the event of some catastrophic failure preventing you from landing the aircraft safely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_SR22

No matter how high taxes are, if you let people in a first world country work with whatever they want, you're not going to end up with university educated professionals in a shoe sweat shop. If they work in a sweatshop in Sweden, it will be one of clothing design, software engineering, or some other line of work producing many orders of magnitude more value per hour where they can make some solid money for themselves while paying a significant amount of taxes.

And yes, of course I believe that productivity and happiness are two different things and that they need to be balanced. I don't believe in trickle down economics, or that they are two different facets of the same variable on a linear axis that somehow move in unison as you slide left/right up/down.

You can probably quantify humanity (like the Gross National Happiness people are trying to do) somehow, but it's of course not going to resemble true science. I do think there are some basic markers of a civilized society that I have a hard time understanding how some people disagree with though. These include public access to nature and beaches, good education for everyone, good healthcare for everyone, etc. To me, this is a separate _economical_ issue from how much the government meddles in the work life of its citizens. If it's easy for you to think of these issues on one axis be my guest, but it is not a mental model that works well for me.

Cheers!

The way I think about economic systems is

- Level of business regulation. From left wing Marx style central production control to pure capitalism.

- Level of redistribution of wealth. From high taxation with redistribution of wealth and strong infrastructure for all citizens (think Sweden or Denmark) to low taxation.

I believe some form of capitalism mixed with somewhat aggressive redistribution of wealth would yield the highest productivity and the most humane society. This is basically how Sweden operates.

I grew up in Sweden and I second that. Stockholm imo is literally paradise on earth three months per year, especially the archipelagos. I've never seen a place like it, unbelievably beautiful, people are so full of life, you can wear a t-shirt at 5am, temperature is perfect, and so forth.

The problem is that the rest of the year it's pretty miserable weather wise. You notice a huge difference if you visit Swedish friends in the Winter and Summer, they're just totally different people.

I love snow and I don't mind the cold much. It's the darkness that is an issue. Some people go to hospitals to get "light therapy" and even if you live in Stockholm (which is rather far south) you'll probably have 15 minutes of sunlight per day - on your way to and from lunch. It will be dark when you go to work, and dark when you come home.

I'm Swedish and I emigrated first from Sweden to France and then France to the US. I can't speak about going the other way, but having done this twice I think it takes a long time to make _real_ friends with locals almost anywhere if you are past college. Lots of interesting people are busy and have limited time.

If you're a kid or in a primarily social environment like college it's obviously a bit different. I moved both for college and my first job and made tons of friends right away, some of which I still stay in touch with.

I went to the best physics program in Sweden. It was pretty amazing and at something like $50 per year essentially free. In addition, the government provided ~$300 per month in assistance plus a low interest ~$900 loan.

Any good policy or form of governance (including socialism) will look bad if executed poorly.

Yeah, Jobs did the same thing. There are plenty of people that feel they want to get that psychological tumor out of their lives after being fired and I think it's understandable even if it's not entirely rational in all cases. I'd probably do the same myself.

I guess the only consequence being resentment from the people close to you, and missed opportunities to develop deep lasting relationships.

As a Swede I can honestly say that for all intents and purposes Sweden, Norway and Denmark are all the same and we love each other.

Thanks for sharing your structure!

My feeling is that it's maybe more important which states and principles one has and that everyone understands them than whether they reside in one or four projects. Personally, I think it's a bit easier to focus if I only have to look at the stuff that is relevant at the moment, but I see where you're coming from.

How did you chose the number of slots: 5, 15, 10, 7 and 20?

Author here: I agree Kanban boards have benefits. I've helped other people implement the system I described in Trello as well.

Personally, I think it's harder to get an overview of what's going on in Trello - especially on a small screen. I also think it's too complicated to move things around in Trello, and that the structure doesn't lend itself well to things that are not processes/pipelines.

In the end, the tool is just there to support the principles/processes that are there to support the people. Hope you got something out of the article that you can use in your tool of choice!

This description made me laugh. Yes, clearly there's >>10x difference between a useless programmer and an amazing one - I've always thought of a "10x programmer" as one that is 10x more valuable than one that is merely good.

I'm a Swedish product designer and engineer, and think Swedish creativity is the same and any other country's: it's about taking stuff you've learned in one field and applying it to another.

Swedish people in my not entirely unbiased opinion tend to be exceptionally good at this and I think that's because education tends to be very broad - if you want to take music lessons and learn to play an instrument in Sweden it's essentially paid for by the state. Want to create a study group to learn about painting, same thing. If you go to study say engineering physics at a masters program, they'll also force you to learn at least the basics in fields like construction, electrical engineering, software engineering, etc. When you exit high school, even if you've taken a scientific route, you've learned about wood work, mechanical engineering, probably at least 2 languages beyond Swedish, etc.

Part of this I think is attributable to the culture isn't so focused on knowledge being measured or "accounted for" financially.

A second reason is probably that it's pretty cold in Sweden in the winters, but I don't think that has nearly as much to do with it.

Disclaimer: I'm born 77 and left the country 99. Some people claim that education isn't as good as it used to be. I don't know, but I think most of the people creating kick ass products right now are people that were born in the 80s or earlier.

This resonated with me. If the programming tasks are somewhat mechanical/procedural, I am not sure that an exceptional engineer can create 10x as much value as a quite good one. I've never seen it.

What I've seen several times are engineers that are able to tackle problems that require so much creativity or skill that giving them to a less qualified engineer would most likely be a waste of everyone's time. In instances like that there can be a 10x difference in the value created by a quite good and an exceptional engineer. I've seen it in the static analysis software domain.

This sounds super interesting. I couldn't find a site for the company; do they have one?

Calico.com is registered to Oracle and there's nothing there.

My understanding is that one of the reasons that relays are still used for many these systems is that the latency for going into a safe state is very low, and that they are easier to verify than so called solid-state interlocking systems.

A relay-based system like this might look simplistic and archaic to a casual observer but it's quite complex and there's no room for error. Formal proof (static analysis) is often used to verify both the formal specification that dictates what constitutes a safe system state, and the actual system's compliance with this specification.

There's a Swedish company called Prover specialized in this. I used to work there and moved to SF when we set up our US subsidiary.

His point is that playing the market is "speculation", not investing. He differentiates this with "investing", where you simply try to assess the intrinsic value of a stock, and if the stock is trading at a significant discount to it, then you buy it.

Further, once you've bought it, you keep it. You don't try to time the ups and downs of the market, buying moving and out of the position quickly. Since this is how Buffett likes to invest, one of his key principles is investing in owner-operators or people that are behaving as such. You want the executives of the company to treat it as if they owned all the stock and could never sell it. Because when you have the people running the company worrying about next quarter, you're not worrying about next decade.

Also related, Buffett's two key rules to investing:

Rule #1. Never lose any money

Rule #2. Never break rule #1

I think you're dead on with the "boo-hoo god forbid I'd have to sort my trash, raise my own kid, pack my grocery bag, carry my luggage mentality."

Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag.

The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.

Change leads to awareness. Whether this awareness leads to fondness depends on the context. In the case of the environment, this seems to sometimes be the case. I think young Swedish people have a much greater appreciation of and respect for the environment than our parents.

In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.

Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual, almost all universities and certainly the top ones are run by the state and free, and people are accepted based on academic merit. I went to arguably the best engineering physics program in Sweden; it was free, and they paid me a $250 stipend per month, the rest of money needed to live was borrowed at a low rate.

It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes.

Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?