Ask HN: Don't paginate Who's Hiring thread | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Don't paginate Who's Hiring thread

38 pointscottonseed13 comments

Can we turn off pagination on the Who's Hiring post? It makes search much less useful. The search tool linked from the post only searches a single page.

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Since no user can change this, its best to e-mail those that could:

> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Instead, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com. (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Thanks for pointing this out. Emailed.

I got the following reply from hn@ycombinator.com:

> Unfortunately those are the threads where we need pagination most because they overwhelm the server otherwise. It's temporary, though—we're working on a long term fix for this. In the meantime HN runs on a single core, so we have to use every trick we can. Sorry for the inconvenience - I know it's annoying!

I’m impressed that it runs so well on a single core. Has HN posted traffic stats in the past?

Related, Here's a script I wrote a year ago when I was looking for a position pretty aggressively. Used like `python hiring.py [-l LOC] [-s SKILL] [-o OTHER] *.html`, where you've saved each page to your cwd. It outputs the comments that have at least one of the specified skills, locations, and others, which is really just a dumb substring test for each. Specify however many of each. Thoughtbot and the guy who demands a format for his job site (don't know if he's still here) are excluded by hardcoded `EXCLUDED`. Sorted by date descending. You have to paginate quickly when saving the HTML files of course, so that time/votes don't shift the pages. It's not pretty, especially robust, or meant to impress anybody; I wrote it in a hurry. Requires Python 2.6-2.7 (haven't tested in Python 3) and lxml.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/2cc6184ede4348a7233052d10e...

I just created this JavaScript script that you can paste in your browser console (F12) to fetch all comments from all pages (using AJAX); just execute it before the search script. Cheers.

https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/ba60581bdd2c9023a7ea1ecdaef36...

There is already a javascript snippet that is linked from the post itself.

That snippet (hn_seach.js) is to search not to fetch all pages; or what snippet are you talking about?

Agreed.

I always forget the pagination and simply ctrl+F for "physics" and "Seattle" and act accordingly. If there are no hits of interest, then I move on.

Very helpful post, even if it was done wrongly. I was just wondering why I couldn't find my comment on this months thread. Didn't realize it was paginated.

If you're really interested in digging into the Who's Hiring posts on HN, check out https://whoishiring.io It scrapes the HN whos hiring posts and makes it easier to sift through.

It's not really easier, though. It makes it really hard to scan visually for key words because only the title/company/location is visible, until you click the box to reveal the post detail. In the 'native' HN view, I can scan the whole post quickly and decide if I want to move on or investigate further.

The 'whose hiring' thread already includes instructions on how to search the whole thing in the post body.

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