startupfreak's comments

startupfreak | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What do you listen to while you code?

Silence. As much silence as possible. I want to drown in it.

startupfreak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do agencies manage employee downtime between projects?

I think it's a combination of:

- Build assumptions about down time into your pricing model - Aim for big projects where adding or removing 1 developer to smooth your resourcing isn't a problem - Always be taking on more projects than you can staff, and use freelancers to fill the gap - Use the down time to to reskill your developers - Have a homegrown product that gets worked on in down time

startupfreak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson.

The list of people covered starts at Ada Lovelace and covers Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Tim Berners-Lee and a bunch more

startupfreak | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to hire early engineers?

Agreed. Your options are:

1) Beg and borrow from the people who love and trust you in the hope that either (a) you'll repay them or (b) they'll forgive you - this is known as a friends and family round.

2) Find some rich people and convince them that they will make lots of money (in tax-efficient ways) if they lend it to you - this is known as an angel round.

3) (In some countries this is still possible) Go to the bank and explain to them the viability of your idea.

startupfreak | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: What jobs will exist in 10 years that don't exist now?

"Premium User Interface" - you know how when you ring up a bank and essentially they're just reading you stuff on screen and typing your answers in? They're basically just an extra layer of UI. AI and text-to-speech will increasingly make that redundant, but it'll mean the UX will get demonstrably worse. So some companies will pride themselves on retaining those real humans as the front end of the UI, even though all they're doing is relaying information to and from the computer.