Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2 (gautiersblog.blogspot.com)

I was very obsessed with hiring great people for my company. The last two of my startups failed pretty much because of having a bad team, ignoring things about people at the start. I’m trying to solve this problem. If you have faced this in your work, it would be very helpful if you could help me shape a solution for this. Its pretty obvious for the first few people : hire friends, or friends of friends or through personal referrals. But things start taking a different turns after a point of like a series A or seed round when you start hiring rapidly to scale operations. Controlling the quality of people becomes a problem. And not doing that leads to a sinking ship. I talked to a few people. I realised that companies find it hard to find great people, remove the noise from the process and finally hire the right ones.

PaulHoule · 3h ago

I don't know how another waitlist is going to solve this problem.

arush007 · 3h ago

The waitlist is optional. I was trying to identify in which process, there is fundamental problem in hiring and how are people solving it at the present

17ai · 3h ago

I only hire friends or friends of friends for like the first 100 people. Like expand through the network of the existing people.

arush007 · 3h ago

Nice this, that's like a recursive solution for it. Would try this time

msgodel · 3h ago

Interns are probably the best way to hire juniors at least. That way you can see how they work for months for very cheap and then make your decision.

It's odd adults don't do internships, that seems like a great solution on both sides to the current stalemate we seem to have.

al_borland · 1h ago

For adults (or non-students) contract-to-hire is generally what is used and offers the same thing.

Bring in some people on a 6 month contract, if they are good, hire them. If they are no good, contractors are easy to let go and swap out.

arush007 · 1h ago

Yes, figures this out while talking to a few people. Some others also pointed out that finding great people is often a challenge. If we do find them, we can contract-to-hire.

arush007 · 3h ago

Very true indeed. I guess that is why we have a culture where university students go for internships. I guess a 'work trial' for a few weeks might be a similar one for adults.

Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale (derwiki.medium.com)

Office on HP-UX and Unix (openpa.net)

Toothpaste made from hair provides natural root to repair teeth (kcl.ac.uk)

The Raft Consensus Algorithm (2015) (raft.github.io)

Tversky Neural Networks (gonzoml.substack.com)

Good system design (seangoedecke.com)

Pfeilstorch (en.wikipedia.org)

Show HN: Lue – Terminal eBook Reader with Text-to-Speech (github.com)

Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way (pudding.cool)

PuTTY has a new website (putty.software)

Dyna – Logic Programming for Machine Learning (dyna.org)

James Baldwin's Apotheosis (hudsonreview.com)

A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping (science.org)

Payment Processor Fun 2025 – Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider (voidfox.com)

Writing a competitive BZip2 encoder in Ada from scratch in a few days – part 2 (gautiersblog.blogspot.com)

Traps to Developers (qouteall.fun)

Rust in 2025: Targeting foundational software (smallcultfollowing.com)

The future of large files in Git is Git (tylercipriani.com)

Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person' (daringfireball.net)

One person was able to claim 20M IPs, or 9% of all IPv4 hosts (lists.nanog.org)

AI is different (antirez.com)

Pirate Library Operator Arrested, Study Canceled for 330K Members (torrentfreak.com)

Ashby (YC W19) Is Hiring Design Engineers in AMER and EMEA (ashbyhq.com)

I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer (drobinin.com)

Show HN: Edka – Kubernetes clusters on your own Hetzner account (edka.io)

Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library (openculture.com)

Dokploy is the sweet spot between PaaS and EC2 (nikodunk.com)

How randomness improves algorithms (2023) (quantamagazine.org)

The electric fence stopped working years ago (soonly.com)

ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes (bmj.com)

OpenBSD is so fast, I had to modify the program slightly to measure itself (flak.tedunangst.com)

Solving the Nostr web clients attack vector (fiatjaf.com)

Seagate spins up a raid on a counterfeit hard drive workshop (tomshardware.com)

Do Things That Don't Scale (2013) (paulgraham.com)

Living with 12 Strangers to Ease a Housing Crunch (bloomberg.com)

Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation (latentintent.substack.com)

Launch HN: Embedder (YC S25) – Claude code for embedded software

Princeton NuEnergy's battery recycling tech recovers 97% of lithium-ion material (energy-reporters.com)

Deep-Sea Desalination Pulls Fresh Water from the Depths (scientificamerican.com)

Low-latency, high-throughput garbage collection (danglingpointers.substack.com)

Compiler Bug Causes Compiler Bug: How a 12-Year-Old G++ Bug Took Down Solidity (osec.io)

Bullfrog in the Dungeon (filfre.net)

China Is Run by Engineers, and the US by Too Many Lawyers (bloomberg.com)

ARM adds neural accelerators to GPUs (newsroom.arm.com)

Show HN: Prime Number Grid Visualizer (enda.sh)

Vaultwarden commit introduces SSO using OpenID Connect (github.com)

Is air travel getting worse? (maximum-progress.com)

TextKit 2 – The Promised Land (blog.krzyzanowskim.com)

A Race to Save a Signature American Tree from a Deadly Disease (nytimes.com)

A privacy VPN you can verify (vp.net)

Ask HN: How to Prevent Bad Hires?

Comments (9)