I need to apologize for this post. It's uncalled for and inappropriate.
I wish I could take it down as it sets the wrong tone for this conversation. It was not written from the right place and calls people out in an improper and angry way.
To everyone who might read this, I would like to extend my apology.
No, I did not check if this was posted before. However, these videos do such a fantastic job of explaining exponential growth and how such growth applies to our every-day lives I felt that I had to share them, even if they have been posted before.
I wish I saw this lecture while I was in school, the connection to real-life would have made the theory so much easier to grasp. Heck, I wish all of my teachers were like Dr. Bartlett, but that's not possible.
I'm really glad to have found this lecture and I wanted to share it with others who may not have been aware of it.
I submitted my blog post here as I'm curious what people on HN think about the effect of Backbone.js, et al. on how the traditional way of building web applications using MVC is changing.
I'm curious what the community thinks about this especially as entrepreneurs and developers/designers.
I spend a huge portion of my time learning new languages, tools and technologies that fitting in fiction/non-fiction books that do not directly relate to building a business or learning a new technology is extremely difficult. (e.g. I've been reading a US history book for a couple of months now)
I'm sure people on HN have interests in a large variety of topics, what do you do to cover all of those topics? Or __do__ you cover all of those interests at all?
Do you just pick a couple of interests and stick to them or do you dabble in many different ones and only dive in deeper if you get "bitten"?
Sure and Cloud9 is working on getting PHP/Ruby/etc. integrated into their environment, but when you're working on the project you're using more than just PHP or Ruby or JS, it's a combination of several technologies - your application stack - that you run your code on. It seems that's what's missing.
Gist is ok, but their dashboard is useless to me. I already can see my calendar and twitter feed through my regular work-flow. I need to be able to see contact information, whom I contacted recently and whom I need to contact. Gist is ok for social aggregator of my network, that's about it.
I worked for a startup where it felt like I was being crushed. Most of my co-workers and people running the company were average to poor, we didn't have a choice in technology and I saw a person who downloaded porn all day, was barely at the office and was caught with child porn on his computer promoted to senior management.
That's not a good enough reason. I worked for a large company and know others who work for large companies and find the work very rewarding.
The choice of what experiences will best suit you on your way to starting your own company is more personal than black and white comparisons. Not all big companies are evil empires designed to crush you (e.g. Google) and not all startups are rosy playgrounds for engineers.
In the end, as expressed by several people here, it's a personal choice that has to fit your own values and which experiences you want.
While not exactly what you asked, here's a Kauffman study (http://www.kauffman.org/research-and-policy/the-coming-entre...) about average age of an entrepreneur. I don't have a source, but I read another study which showed majority of companies were started by 30+; this would merit the assumption that most companies are started by people who worked at other companies, including large corporations.
This rings true since working for other companies allows you to build a network and find out where the pain points are in different industries.
Is anyone looking for an Embedded Linux developer to do some contract work? I have a full-time job but I'm looking to supplement my income.
I have experience with x86, ARM, MIPS and PowerPC development on different kinds of systems from user-space apps to kernel drivers (wireless and character devices).
For an Incubator, there's Founder Institute (http://www.founderinstitute.com) chapter, UCSD business school has a program, Qualcomm has some kind of program, there is a TechCoast Angels chapter, BootStrapper's Breakfast chapter and a whole host of other programs that I've forgotten or don't know about.
For hacker meetups there are San Diego Super Happy Dev House (http://groups.google.com/group/sd-shdh) and San Diego HN chapter (http://groups.google.com/group/sd-hackernews). There are also all kinds of groups for various topics such as Ruby, Python and LUG that you can find on Google Groups and MeetUp. Quite a few of them meet at UCSD by the way.
I'm working on software/tools for embedded field as well as trying to develop a wireless driver for 802.11p (automotive "WiFi").
It's actually not that expensive to get a prototype done with many of the hardware resource available for either free (as samples) or dirt cheap in small quantities.
Say you want to build a new Gaming Router, you can buy the underlying hardware to do development on for under $200 in quantities of < 10 and that will give you all the needed parts (board, radio, antennas, cables, enclosure, etc.) with the right specs to do just about anything you want. You'd then run Linux on it (OpenWRT is easy, comparatively) and wright the necessary software on top of that.
As the Ideas point #27, linked to by ig1, shows, most of the problem solving is in software.
Give you an example, I worked for a startup, 3 software guys (myself included) built a router that had all the capabilities of a Cisco small business-class router in 6 months from getting the hardware to being feature complete. No hardware people were involved. We used a crappy, 3 year-old platform that would over-heat (the SoC would start to literally smoke) if we ran more than 2 IPSec connections, but we were able to tune the kernel and our software to make it a viable product for a lot of businesses.
If you know your way around Linux, building embedded products is unbelievably simple.
If you or anyone else is interested in talking more about this field, shoot me an email (it's in my profile).