Hacker News

I've been helping a few companies recruit founding engineers. After doing a lot of screens I have a rough idea for what to look for. For others that have done a lot of hiring what do you look for specifically besides their technical ability?

Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.

However, its availability on flights is patchy and hard to predict. So we built a database of all airlines that have rolled out Starlink (beyond just a trial), and a flight search tool to predict it. Plug in a flight number and date, and we'll estimate the likelihood of Starlink on-board based on aircraft type and tail number.

If you don’t have any trips coming up, you can also look up specific routes to see what flights offer Starlink. You can find it here: https://stardrift.ai/starlink .

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I wanted to add a few notes on how this works too. There are three things we check, in order, when we answer a query:

- Does this airline have Starlink?

- Does this aircraft body have Starlink?

- Does this specific aircraft have Starlink?

Only a few airlines at all have Starlink right now: United, Hawaiian, Alaskan, Air France, Qatar, JSX, and a handful of others. So if an aircraft is operated by any other airline, we can issue a blanket no immediately.

Then, we check the actual body that's flying on the plane. Airlines usually publish equipment assignments in advance, and they're also rolling out Starlink body-by-body. So we know, for instance, that all JSX E145s have Starlink and that none of Air France's A320s have Starlink. (You can see a summary of our data at https://stardrift.ai/starlink/fleet-summary, though the live logic has a few rules not encoded there.)

If there's a complete match at the body type level, we can confidently tell you your flight will have Starlink. However, in most cases, the airline has only rolled out a partial upgrade to that aircraft type. In that case, we need to drill down a little more and figure out exactly which plane is flying on your route.

We can do this by looking up the 'tail number' (think of it as a license plate for the plane). Unfortunately, the tail number is usually only assigned a few days before a flight. So, before that, the best we can do is calculate the probability that your plane will be assigned an aircraft with Starlink enabled.

To do this, we had to build a mapping of aircraft tails to Starlink status. Here, I have to thank online airline enthusiasts who maintain meticulous spreadsheets and forum threads to track this data! As I understand it, they usually get this data from airline staff who are enthusiastic about Starlink rollouts, so it's a reliable, frequently updated source. Most of our work was finding each source, normalizing their formats, building a reliable & responsible system to pull them in, and then tying them together with our other data sources.

Basically, it's a data normalization problem! I used to work on financial data systems and I was surprised how similar this problem was.

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Starlink itself is also a pretty cool technology. I also wrote a blog post (https://stardrift.ai/blog/why-is-starlink-so-good) on why it's so much better than all the other aircraft wifi options out there. At a high level, it's only possible because rocket launches are so cheap nowadays, which is incredibly cool.

The performance is great, so it's well worth planning your flights around it where possible. Right now, your best bet in the US is on United regional flights and JSX/Hawaiian. Internationally, Qatar is the best option (though obviously not right now), with Air France a distance second. This will change throughout the year as more airlines roll it out though, and we'll keep our database updated!

I've been building a browser-based multiplayer strategy game called Borderhold.

Matches run on large maps designed for hundreds of players. Players expand territory, attack neighbors, and adapt as borders shift across the map. You can put buildings down, build ships, and launch nukes.

The main thing I wanted to explore was scale: most strategy games are small matches, modest maps, or modest player counts, but here maps are large and game works well with hundreds of players.

Matches are relatively short so you can jump in and see a full game play out.

Curious what people think.

https://borderhold.io/play

Gameplay:

https://youtu.be/nrJTZEP-Cw8

Discord:

https://discord.gg/xVDNt2G5

pano is an internet archiving tool that lets you save links into shelves that you can organize and share.

the problem for me was never finding things. it was keeping them. research papers, recipes, old blog posts, repos, tutorials, and random sites i found late at night would end up scattered across tabs, bookmarks, screenshots, saved posts, and pdfs. a few weeks later, they were effectively gone.

what i wanted was one place where saved links stayed organized, easy to navigate, and easy to share as a collection.

a lot of the work went into two things: metadata extraction and interface design. saved links are much less useful if they decay into unlabeled bookmarks, so pano tries to pull structured info like title, description, author, date, and type, with native handling for sites like youtube, github, reddit, substack, spotify, and others. i also spent a lot of time on the design, because i wanted saved links to feel browsable and worth returning to; more like a shelf than a utilitarian list of urls.

there’s also a chrome extension for one-click saving and a bulk import path for existing bookmarks.

i’m especially interested in whether the “shelf” model feels better than traditional bookmarks, and where the save / organize / share flow still feels clunky.

it’s free right now: panoit.com