cjbarber

1. Twitter: Founders and employees of early stage startups are often on twitter.

2. Portfolios of great angel investors and VC firms.

3. Emailing people you admire, eg investors, founders, or engineers.

4. Write down your friends and past and current colleagues who you think are a) most likely to be successful and b) you’d most enjoy working with. Or even just who you most like, trust, and admire. Then see where they work. And ask them about other companies they know. The simplest version of this is go on LinkedIn, and browse your network, and click to check out the companies all of your past classmates and colleagues work at.

5. Go to events that would have interesting technologists in your field (ie the areas where you have skill and taste, so you can pick who you admire), and ask them where they work, and which startups they’ve been impressed by. Talks, conferences, meetups, maker spaces.

6. Biased self-promotion: I’m kind of obsessed with interesting startups and sometimes share lists of startups, eg https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957834156794343730 and https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1957446016950816866

7. HN who is hiring thread: there are lots of interesting ones there, you’ll just want to dig through to find them.

8. Look up university career fair company lists to see which companies are hiring, if they’re hiring new grads and interns then they’re very likely hiring senior engineers too.

9. Podcasts: some technologists have great podcasts, so do some investors and VC firms.

10. Search for startups founded by alumni from your school, you’re more likely to have alumni second degree connections there.

I’ll note that investors get many bets, employees get one at a time. So you need a higher bar. Meeting in person is particularly high signal.

My tip for filtering companies is to spend as much time as possible in person with the team before accepting an offer, ideally at least on 3+ separate occasions, with 3+ separate people. If there’s doubt, skip. This is also why it’s so good to start by identifying your most impressive friends and colleagues and see where they work, because you start with that high trust filter.

Yes! There'll be different key traits for different customers. Like you say for F1, might be speed for some, prestige for others. So perhaps you might need to focus most of your things on both, or some things on prestige and some on speed. Generally there'll be a relatively small set of truly key traits.

This reminds me of a principle I like: Once you understand your key traits and the key things customers come to you for, it's good to embody them everywhere!

F1 is largely about speed. (I fondly remember going to various races as a child with my grandparents, in Melbourne. Everyone seemed in awe of Schumacher). So of course your website should be about speed!

This could then apply to everything: ticket turnstiles that measure themselves on time per guest scanned, food vendors that do the same thing, websites that measure and rank on speed.

Me too. Do you mean USA cities or worldwide? I'm told that some of the most walkable cities worldwide are: Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Barcelona. Which other ones should be on there and which ones from USA?

Devon also made this list: https://airtable.com/appcoaCeTbl22Few2/shrWJYzc04FQZIkP5

> "Here's what people said:" before the actual list was super annoying.

Updated now

Indeed, kinda unfortunate! I was told by one of the people who helped that it varies quite a bit by state, this one is more indexed to California and a few others

Invest in yourself somehow - fly to a city full of opportunity and rent an airbnb, a few outfits you like, host a small event every week, hire tutors, that kinda thing.

Seems like the high order bit impacting results here might be how difficult the PR is?

The network effects/moats of places! There needs to be a Kickstarter for coordinating groups of people to move to the same place all at the same time.

FWIW I'm confused about what the product is. I think it's a reddit scheduling tool? But this post and the hero part of the website would be more helpful to me if they were clearer what it does

I wished for photos! Anyone know if there are some of this boat and journey?

Happy reader for a while. For HN readers, if you want to have a setup where you live near friends and/or family, check their posts: https://supernuclear.substack.com/archive?sort=top

The interesting question to me is how far these reasoning models can be scaled. With another 12 months of compute scaling (for synthetic data generation and RL) how good will these models be at coding? I talked with Finbarr Timbers (ex-DeepMind) yesterday about this and his take is that we'll hit diminishing returns – not because we can't make models more powerful, but because we're approaching diminishing returns in areas that matter to users and that AI models may be nearing a plateau where capability gains matter less than UX.

Thanks James! What's your email?

Also, I'd like to talk with anyone actively trying to shift from being a software engineer full-time to being a software consultant. Or anyone trying to grow a new consultancy. I'm exploring starting a business that makes it easier for engineers to successfully transition to consulting. I'm just at the early pre-product stage, and am still trying to better understand the new or prospective software consultant perspective. I seem to get along well with people from HN so if anyone here is happy to help and jump on the phone with me, that'd be hugely appreciated! My email is in my profile.

Yes!

For people like the OP seeking high quality resources with an emphasis on the networking/sales/marketing skills required to succeed as a tech/dev/software consultant, I'd recommend starting with "Getting Starting in Consulting" by Weiss.

Then if you'd like more after finishing that, others to check out are:

* This PDF on sales processes https://www.entrepidpartners.com/how-to-sell-guide

* "An Insider's Guide to Building a Successful Consulting Practice"

* "The Software Engineer's Guide to Freelance Consulting"

But start with the Weiss book first because it gives a good and tactical overview.

Excited to see this launch. The Zero Fraud guarantee is particularly excellent!

> Eh, I still think the best thing for the gov't to do in regards to SS numbers is just publish them all in an open database accessible to anyone.

They basically are available to any business that needs them. Just takes a few months to go through the compliance process for an identity verification company. See https://cognitohq.com/docs

Regarding it being a password, yeah that is pretty bad. Some friends of mine are working on Bloom (https://hellobloom.io/) which is trying interesting things that hook into the real world (necessary) while also trying to create a better system eventually. Basically, an ID you control with a private key is approved by identity verification services. Your friends basically vouch for the ID being correct. Your identity is tied to that ID. If you lose the private key then you have your friends invalidate the old ID and transfer their vouch to your new ID. Way better than just a secret number.

I'm very excited about this.

Skills that would be useful as governor:

* Learning new things quickly

* Running and improving existing organizations

* Hiring great people and building teams

* Identifying the most important and undervalued things to work on or invest in

Sam:

* Learning new things - e.g. with nuclear power, see comments by nuclear power founder https://blog.ycombinator.com/jacob-dewitte-oklo-interview/

* Running and improving existing organizations - see YC since 2014

* Hiring great people and building teams - YC since 2014, https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire, YC Research organizations like OpenAI

* Identifying the most important and undervalued things to work on or invest in - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Angel_Investing

I'd certainly like these attributes in my governor!

Don't let the homepage confuse you -- after playing around for a bit, it seems like this is basically a nicer (IMO) and definitely simpler (less featured) version of Squarespace, also currently free. And looks like it works with custom domains too.

Peter Roberts is fantastically helpful, for what it's worth. I expect that this will be great.

The (current) lack of 'swipe to snooze' is unfortunate with Nylas. Looks great otherwise though.

This seems especially relevant now that Mailbox is officially being shut down on Feb 26.

Yep

Clickables:

http://www.buildcampus.com/

https://quip.com/SerKA2wVqgQl

I didn't build this, but I think it's pretty cool.

Who designed this? I really like the design.

Was it you awwstn/austin?

Ironic that this is posted on Medium.com.

I expected an humorous article about Medium being the better WordPress. I think Medium might just be the better WordPress (for most, not all).

Mel is awesome.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing :)