Obvious plug but my company[1] is building a multi-user real-time 3d engine. Think Figma meets Unity.
There are lots of fun use cases around working collaboratively on subparts of a larger 3d system without having to break it apart:
- architects working on different parts of a building
- engineers working on different pieces of a CAD model
- game designers working on different levels, etc
3dverse | Montreal, CAN | Onsite/hybrid (within CAN)
About us: We are building a real-time cloud-based 3D engine-as-a-Service to reduce the pain in building, collaborating on, and deploying 3D content at scale. We are a team of 12, almost entirely technical. Our stack is a combination of C++, Typescript and sprinkle of Go.
Role: Full-stack or Front-end Engineer (Mid to Senior). We are looking for a web dev to help us release our first public product, a web-based collaborative 3D viewer, built on top of our engine.
Stack: Typescript/React/Postgres. 3D or game dev experience is a plus (Unity/Three.js). Need a solid grasp of networking and web performance tradeoffs.
What we're looking for:
- An experienced builder with code and projects to show for it. You care about code quality and doing things well.
- A product mindset. You have opinions about design, UX and how to build products people love to use.
- A curious nature and a desire to tackle hard problems.
Tell us (or better yet, show us), what you've worked on and what your interests are. Contact me at mark at 3dverse.com
3dverse | Montreal, CAN | Onsite/hybrid (within CAN) | Visa
About us: We are building a real-time cloud-based 3D engine-as-a-Service to reduce the pain in building, collaborating on, and deploying 3D content at scale. We are a team of 11, almost entirely technical. Our stack is a combination of C++, Typescript and sprinkle of Go.
Role: Full Stack Engineer (Mid to Senior Level). We are looking for a web developer to help us release our first public product, a web-based collaborative 3D viewer, built on top of our engine.
Stack: Typescript/React/Postgres. 3D or game dev experience is a plus (Unity/three.js). Need a solid grasp of networking and web performance tradeoffs.
What we're looking for:
- An experienced builder with code and projects to show for it. You care about code quality and doing things well.
- A product mindset. You have opinions about design, UX and how to build products people love to use.
- A curious nature and a desire to tackle hard problems.
Tell us (or better yet, show us), what you've worked on and what your interests are.
3dverse | Real-time Network Engineer | Montreal | Hybrid
We are building a cloud-base real-time 3D engine and are looking for an experienced and passionate network engineer to help us develop network protocols optimized for real-time multiplayer usage. You should have a strong background in high performance C++ and ideally have experience in real-time game networking, such as a networked shooter, RTS, or MMO.
We are currently a team of 10 with an office in Montreal but will consider remote for the right candidate.
I grew up in Racine County (which contains Mount Pleasant). Let me tell you, SE WI is a strange place. Caught between so many sensibilities and hit so, so hard by economic shifts of the last two decades. I think it suffers, like many places in the American Midwest, the phenomenon of an historically working-class population, who, a few decades ago, would have organized for labor and other rights very vocally and outwardly, but who now are radicalized to the right for no understandable reason.
I still like to believe that most of the people around there are good and mean well, but it gets harder and harder every day to believe the willful ignorance they possess of economic, societal, and cultural issues at hand, here and now, will fade. But there's hope. Younger leaders are working their way into local government (hi Greta!), especially over in the formal City of Racine. There's hope that Racine and Racine County might be a leader of progressive values in the area.
As an aside, I think there's oodles of opportunity in the SE WI area for younger folks. It really is a beautiful place, is near to Chicago and Milwaukee, and is inexpensive. You get all four seasons, for better or worse. I think it's better than SF's summer and grey-chillier-summer. Some joke that the four seasons are winter, construction, construction, and construction, but that's an exaggeration. Anyway, I think an influx of more diverse people in background and ideology could really stimulate an area like SE WI. Add to that making it worth young people staying around instead of fleeing to the coasts, and suddenly Racine can be a really cool place.
This whole Foxconn thing just makes me so sad, and angry.
Americans classically derive much of their sense of value from:
1. Work
2. Race (for many white people, especially historically)
...and that's about it. Unlike other cultures our "rugged individualism" means that we don't tend to derive as much sense of worth from family, traditions, organizations we belong to, etc. This is especially true for men who are raised to believe that who they are is what they do.
The economic shift to a service- and knowledge-based economy with many manufacturing and ag jobs being automated or outsourced away has devastated 1. in many communities. The march towards better civil rights and equality is chipping away at 2.
This has left a huge number of Americans feeling that they are worth less than they used to be. People like that are ripe for being exploited. People will buy anything if you tell them you're selling dignity. Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan was really "Make You Feel Like You're Great Again".
> Unlike other cultures our "rugged individualism" means that we don't tend to derive as much sense of worth from family, traditions, organizations we belong to, etc
I agree with the overall premise, but there is a single notable exception to to this, which is the military, which is the intersection of family, traditions, and government organizations. But even there, as we have seen recently, there is a white nationalism problem afoot.
>Americans classically derive much of their sense of value from:
> 1. Work
> 2. Race (for many white people, especially historically)
> ...
> People will buy anything if you tell them you're selling dignity.
All true, and it's important that politicians who hope to actually heal these folks focus their efforts on restoring the dignity that comes from work and community, and dispel the dangerous sort of "dignity" peddled by ethnic/racial nationalists.
> a single notable exception to to this, which is the military
This is a bit of cognitive dissonance I find fascinating among the far right. I have had conversations with many people who clearly simultaneously believe:
1. The government can't do anything right.
2. We have the world's best military.
And yet for most it hasn't seemed to click that the military is a government program.
But, again, I think this gets to my larger point that because the military is such a source of prestige for many Americans (especially poorer ones with few other upward mobility options), they are able to maintain that bit of cognitive dissonance.
(And, to be clear, I absolutely do not think conservatives have a monopoly on cognitive dissonance. I see many different ones all along the political spectrum.)
Hard to process this kind of cynicism, accurate though it is. Not your demeanor, by the way, friend, just the reality of it all. Ironic that I speak of willful ignorance and yet am happy to not think too hard about the very things you've called out here.
I really don't mean this to sound cynical, though I can see how it comes across. I think it's more about understanding human psychology and trying to use that understanding to empathize with and understand why people behave in seemingly irrational ways.
As a tribal primate species are absolutely hard-wired to seek ways to provide value to our tribe. Being worthless to the tribe means being left in the forest, which was a death sentence to our evolutionary ancestors. So our need for social prestige is as fundamental as food and shelter. Perhaps even more so since for most of our ancestors, food and shelter came from the tribe.
The ways we seek out that esteem are determined by our surrounding culture. If esteem is the game we're trying to win, culture determines the board and the moves we're allowed to make. We can push against culture somewhat and it evolves over time, but we're largely stuck with the one we're enmeshed in.
So you get a set of people who need to feel valued. You raise them in a culture that says the main way to do that is by having a well-paying job. Then you take away the jobs. This is a recipe for unrest and strife.
Oh definitely -- I'm not detecting cynicism in you and maybe it's the wrong choice of word. I'm more feeling a sense of disappointment in what you're saying being true. It's tragic, in truth.
I lived and worked in the area for four years, working in Pleasant Prairie, living in Kenosha and then Oak Creak. Parent is right, it's a strange place because of the mixture of so many influences: the proximity of Chicago and Milwaukee, a former industrial powerhouse region, access to great education but full of people who've never been to Chicago or Milwaukee (let alone further than them).
My sysadmin had a hobby of creating frankenstein cars. He put the powertrain of a Camaro into the body of Gremlin, for which he needed a second Gremlin to lengthen the chassis by a foot. It was so overpowered he needed a couple hundred pounds of sandbags in the back to give it any traction at all. This sort of thing wasn't that weird either.
You claim to not understand how that group of people can swing right and then proceed to attribute ignorance to that group of people. This doesn't compute. Very partisan and ignorant of you.
Hi friend, thanks for your response. I appreciate the criticism and the opportunity to re-evaluate my point. That said, after thinking about it, I don't believe there's a contradiction in what I've written. Point in fact is that I do not understand--in a personal sense of it "computing" (as you put it) to me--the forces at work that push people to be, as I said, wilfully ignorant of real issues facing the area and planet at large. It's not that I don't understand the people at all and simultaneously attribute ignorance to them, it's that how the ignorance comes to be is a mystery to me. An observer can see an effect without knowing the cause. That's usually how we begin to learn anything. There's a comment adjacent to yours that puts words to a gut feeling about it that takes a big step toward understanding, I think. Discourse is great!
Why is it partisan? Let’s pretend OP said “swing left”. Being against the left isn’t how partisan is normally defined. It’s usually the bias of being for a specific cause/political party. What would be the cause here? Not being pro American politics left? That does not give much info about what causes the person is biased for.
Very cool. Genuine question: is using the URL as the encryption key considered secured enough for most usecases?
I imagine most people share these links via email, and if you or your recipient use a non-secure email provider, we should expect it to be parsed.
Very nice. Any plans on open-sourcing this? I'm a newbie at blackjack and have been wanting to build a similarly minimalistic version adding a "strategy feedback" mode to help me memorize basic strategies.
I've got a simple blackjack program[1] in bash that I occasionally play; it's ugly code, but it's pretty straightforward.
More directly, I wrote (perl) a blackjack tester[2] to quiz myself, as well as a simple output of basic strategy[3]. I haven't touched these in half a decade, but seem to work fine!
One obvious step that seems to be missing is having governments acknowledge this as a top priority. Make carbon-based energy production expensive enough that these technological innovations are the only alternative.
It seems like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma[1]. We are so economically dependent on carbon fuels that the incentives to develop and adopt renewable energies are not yet strong enough. Shouldn't governments do more to speed up that adoption curve?
> One obvious step that seems to be missing is having governments acknowledge this as a top priority.
It is missing because it's not possible!
Any government who doesn't have economy at its top priority will be overthrown. Economy can at most be slightly slowed down in order to push green policies, but that's it: anything more, and next government will be voted on the promise to restart coal mines!
To build on this discussion, what are some highlights in that book that you found useful?
I ask because I've read some systems thinking books (e.g. Systemantics) that were difficult to apply in real life. I come from the perspective of someone with a systems/theory builder personality. The only systems thinking book that I found remotely practical was The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge.
The most useful piece of short writing on systems thinking that I've come across is "How Complex Systems Fail" [1, 2], which talks about designing systems for resiliency, and not for rigid notions of reliability.
I agree that both of them were not very rigorous, e.g. in terms of making predictions or presenting falsifiable claims. But I enjoyed parts of both.
From Thinking in Systems, I got 2 main things out of it:
- Many systems can be modelled in terms of resources and flows.
- If you want to affect a system, find the leverage points.
But both claims could have been justified more. It feels like the author states them as a given.
Specifically, she doesn't talk much about modelling error. OK, so I came up with a set of resources and flows to model a system. How do I know if it's good? Will it work in some cases and wildly mispredict in others?
I think they just did computer simulations? How did you check it against the real world? I think that was entirely missing from the book. I'd be happy for a correction.
Overall, the book felt like it was incomplete (which is not surprising, given the back story of its publication).
I think I read this book because Bill Gates recommended it. I can understand why he would have liked it. I'm not sure there is much that's actionable for a programmer or software designer, though.
I'd be interested in other takes on it too. Did I miss something? I also wonder why it's so highly thought of. I think it does have a unique point of view, and raises interesting questions, but it also made me wonder if that view is true! It's perhaps too vague to be true or false.
----
I enjoyed Systemantics, to a point. The negative view of systems tends to be the more accurate one in my experience ;-)
If you found Peter Senge's book practical you would probably like Thinking in Systems. It takes a few systems archetypes and explores them in reasonable detail and has charts of simulations. I browse through my copy every once in a while when thinking about a problem, and it often sheds some light on the problem.
Before reading this book, I did not think much about delays but now I try to identify them as soon as possible.
(On mobile) If I grabbed the right link that’s chapter 6 (maybe edited a bit?) of Thinking in Systems. If it interests you you’ll probably like the rest of the book.
I really enjoyed "Business Dynamics: Thinking and Modelling for a Complex World" by John Sterman. It's an older book, but it answers all of the questions that you ask. The book starts out by giving a high level overview of how systems modelling (and iteration on these models) occurs in practice, along with case studies and models that represent those case studies. The book talks about stocks and flows and real life examples on how stocks and flows work. While I wouldn't say this book is as rigorous as an engineering math text, it has a section on nonlinear dynamical systems and the math that these models represent in some sparse detail, so you can try to apply rigor to the models presented.
I know "me too" kind of comments are frowned upon in HN, but to anyone thinking "Should I read that book?" I want to add another "it's one of my favourite books", is a book I recommend to almost anyone.
It's actually _hard_ to explain why, I have tried several times (IRL) and it's really hard to get to the point. Funnily enough, soon after reading it I happened to be at an unconference where there was a Thinking in Systems session. And the speaker likewise tried his best to get us (I was in the audience, and tried to give a hand as well when I saw issues) to get the point, but didn't succeed either. I suspect I would need to read it 4 or 5 times before I can get to that point, but it's a book I'm actually looking forward to re-reading soon.
There's a way to the analysis of a system or a model that you can get on an intuitive level (or even, on a formal level, given where most of the HN readership works or has interests), but the exposition in TiS goes further, and tries to make you think not only on all the sources acting on a system, but how you could get to build or adapt a system for a specific objective.
See? What I wrote above makes just marginal sense. It's not a complicated book, it's an enjoyable read but the concepts inside go deeper than what I could get into something that makes much sense.
Cheers! I hope you didn't take my original comment as a criticism, which wasn't at all it's intent. I meant it as a prompt or prod, and at a general audience, rather than you specifically.
No, I didn't at all, it encouraged me to figure out something to prod people to read the book, which I was a tad too lazy in my previous comment :) Appreciated!
Could you describe what makes this book your favourite? I read it this year because it was recommended in another thread. I didn't find anything interesting in it but maybe I missed something obvious.
If you already have a decent foundation in systems dynamics and thinking, the most valuable part of the book is Chapter 6 (Leverage Points) which is about how to change systems (not control them, but actually drive changes to their structure).
The value of the book, beyond that, is that it's a good introduction to systems dynamics and thinking for people who aren't systems thinkers yet (or nascent systems thinkers who don't have the vocabulary yet). Trying to explain systems thinking to others is hard, surprisingly so. This book serves either as something to give them to read (for those who are motivated to better themselves, surprisingly few in my office) or provides a good set of examples when trying to discuss system dynamics and thinking with those who don't want to (either ever or yet) read something themselves.
The examples aren't esoteric or abstract, they're things that most people can relate to. Which is very helpful. A high level system dynamics book might try and talk too much about the math or structure but using labels like A and B, rather than Oil Reserve or Car Inventory. Leaving out the math (or enough of it) also makes this approachable even to the most math-phobic (and the equations behind the models are all available in an appendix so they're not missing, just shifted to let people focus on the structure and nature rather than formulas and numbers).
I added a comment below, but I find it very hard to describe. Some of the points in the book, and the way of analysing/deconstructing systems was different to how I approach problems (I'm a "trained mathematician"), and that was enough to make me see the world in a very slightly different shade. That's enough for me to make it a great book.
[1] 3dverse.com