I got into POV-Ray in the late 90s when I wanted 3D graphics for my Geocities page. I was in over my head in every dimension (scripting, math, artistic ability), but it was incredibly rewarding, and the newsgroup gave me a very positive early impression of what a community can feel like on the internet.
Thanks for sharing! I remember enjoying the undersea cable plot in Cryptonomicon.
Inspired by another recent HN post about subsea cables, I'm currently reading The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage which walks through the history of the telegraph. It blows my mind that North America and Europe were connected by undersea cable before the start of the Civil War.
One of my favorite pg ideas: "When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think."
If you didn't see the Chrome extension, it's worth a try - I really like the feeling of serendipity every time I create a new tab. It's a little distracting, but I think in a good way.
Shift Payments (YC S14), based in San Francisco's Financial District
We are building a Visa card that can be attached to any store of value, including Bitcoin wallets, gold holdings, fiat, and soon, loyalty points, airline miles, and more. Our mission is to improve access to financial tools.
We're hiring a strong generalist/fullstack engineer. Experience with Ruby, Java, Sinatra, and AngularJS is a plus, but definitely not a requirement. Experience shipping and operating a live product is a strong plus.
If this sounds interesting to you, we'd love to chat! Please shoot me an email with links to some stuff you've built: [email protected]
I took a couple engineering ethics classes at the University of Virginia (class of '06), and found them valuable and thought-provoking. The curriculum was called "Science, Technology, and Society". More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society
It depends on what you want to do. Vagrant's main use case is to automate setting up development environments, whereas I see Docker as more a way of distributing software and its dependencies to production systems.
A key distinction is that since Docker is built on Linux containers (lightweight Linux systems), it expects to share its host's kernel, and must thus be executed on a Linux system.
Jobs in U.S. factories disappeared to Asia. Now that offshore manufacturing costs are rising, we can expect more companies to follow Foxconn's example, and invest heavily in machines.
If a job is offshored (as much knowledge work has been), it's a good bet that the next step will be to automate it.
I'm optimistically looking for ways not to feel guilty about this. I've always believed that better technology creates new jobs and a wealthier society, but it's pretty clear now that businesses are doing very well by automating away mid-skill jobs. Just contrast the stock market with the job market: companies are becoming more profitable but hiring/paying less.
Tech entrepreneurs are trained to think about optimizing/automating. For example, here's an old blog post by Kopelman: http://redeye.firstround.com/2006/04/shrink_a_market.html Summary: there's a lot of opportunity for you if you find a way to shrink a market.
Without doing too much handwringing, I think it's our responsibility as engineers/technologists to at least try to be aware of what we destroy with what we create.