UseTheSource: a job board for hackers | Hacker News Reader

UseTheSource: a job board for hackers

blog.jgc.org

193 pointsjgrahamc54 comments

How are filled/cancelled jobs handled?

What is the planned intention for an upvote? Is it (1)I'm interested, (2)I applied, or (3) just keeping it ambiguous for now/undecided.

How are you finding/tweaking the ranking function? Most posters will probably not try to game significant support, but could for an additional one or two votes to gain a relative advantage. I imagine potential applicants will scan the whole list anyways, but did you consider a solely time-based ranking with no voting -- what HN seems to do for YC job postings currently?

EDIT: For example, I noticed someone submitted < 1 minute ago with a default score of 1. The posting, although submitted most recent, is ranked last and is on the second page.

Also, there are a couple times where a single company is posting separately for each position instead of consolidating to one thread. Is there any concern about a top-tier tech company owning most of the first page with many different postings? My apologies if these questions are a little premature -- perhaps we need a "Feature Requests" thread.

These are all really good, useful questions. Charlief, can I get your feedback the next time I launch something?

Absolutely. I love digging and brainstorming, although I am sure there are many people who are much more experienced/talented on http://hnofficehours.com

As far as handling filled positions, I think only direct links to job openings should be allowed and the posts should go down when the provided URL 404s.

As far as upvoting is concerned, I don't think it should be allowed. Promoting a job is only a useful task to the person hiring for the position, and helpful people who aren't applying for jobs. It would actually be in the applicants best interest to downvote jobs they find interesting, because that would lead to fewer applicants to said job.

Please add a whole separate category for remote jobs. When remote jobs aren't separated it's too much effort for remote job seekers to filter through to find them. Basically every job board ever invented fails at this.

Maybe a flag for filtering? I think most places that hire remote employees also hire local ones.

Oh man I'd love to try this right now, I've got an interesting opportunity. Not being an HN company I've always wanted a way to access the crowd here for recruiting purposes.

Unfortunately I am at only 454 karma. Either I need to be a karma whore or get an exception from you. Crossing my fingers... :)

You should be able to use it since you've been a member here for more than a year.

Oof I cannot read. Moving a bit too fast this morning. Thanks!

Is this intended to include contract work / freelance projects, or only jobs in the traditional sense?

I'm happy for freelance/contract work to be there as well.

Great.

I hope Tokyo startups start posting; they seldom come up in the "Who's hiring" threads.

Are you concerned about using an old news.arc, with its somewhat-easy-to-steal auth token?

Are you talking about the timing based attack or the cookie in vote URL?

No, about using the user identification cookie value as the "auth" parameter for voting. http://xach.livejournal.com/228481.html

I'll fix that myself.

Guys, i know most people will be aware of this, but since its forcing the same username as HN, please choose a DIFFERENT password.

I managed to submit one posting without the magic string in place in my profile, but I needed it the second time.

I'm reporting this here in case it's a bug. ;)

Thanks for building this. I hope it proves useful to everyone.

I fear this website will be forgotten after a few days.

It may have a chance if people keep posting links to jobs there on their profiles or relevant comment threads.

Direct link: http://jobs.usethesource.com/jobs

Probably not the best place to ask, but if time permits can we have the original UseTheSource please. For a brief moment the title gladdened my heart as I thought UseTheSource is up again. The stories there were fascinating to read.

EDIT: Meant the board where one contributed interesting articles about pieces of code. We really dont have many of those. I am sure maintaining it is painful, so only if time permits.

Do you mean the original circa-1999 UseTheSource which was my original blog, or the reboot as a sort of StackOverflow?

Pretty sure he means the reboot, but I would enjoy seeing both. :)

It's a real shame the code focused HN didn't take off :-(

I mentioned this in the previous thread but if you want this to stick around you might want to get a link to this put in the monthly whoishiring threads. Those should also be scraped for seed data to get this thing rolling.

Any chance of adding a 'save' feature? I clicked through from your blog to the board, saw an interesting job or two, and now I either have to email myself the links, or hope I remember when I get home from work.

Reddit has a nice little link below every post that says 'save'. Click it and that post goes into a page of saved links [0] I can skim through when I get home. It'd be nice if you had this too.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/saved/

I love the idea, but doesn't HN make its money from the job listings on the front page? If this gains traction HN might have to figure out other ways to monetize.

Why was this downvoted? Although I don't think that PG has any need to monetize HN, he's said that 'job listings are the ads here'. I assumed that meant they brought in revenue that helped cover the cost of running HN.

I think the ads here are only YC-funded companies, and so they're just a way to promote his investments, rather than a way to charge companies to list here.

Ahh gotchya. For some reason I thought there was a rule against posting jobs as submissions on HN.

Well, I made a typo in my job post, and I can't edit it. Now I must shame myself in front of the community. Woe is me.

Any chance we can edit the title later?

Fixed.

I am curious of its success rate. Of those of you who have posted, have you heard from any candidates yet?

I posted 4 hours ago and have had no replies yet. While I don't expect to receive any responses this quickly, I am curious what other people are experiencing.

  > 2. Have a Hacker News karma of greater than 500 or
  > have been a user for more than 1 year

I predict that this filter will only last a year from the time that it takes recruiters/etc to notice it.

Sorry to be the security weenie, but any chance we can get HTTPS for the login POST?

Speaking of job boards, I kinda wish someone would build a scraper that scraped dice and/or monster and excluded all CyberCoders and other recruiters submissions. Is there anything like that out there?

Most job boards provide XML feeds to aggregators/search engines, so you don't even need to scrape it. Filtering out recruiters is the tricky part, how would you do it ?

The magic string should be 8e6eb25da4d3731a6583b81fb39977299bf5475a ;-).

I don't get the reference, and google doesn't help.

The magic code from the linked post is sha1 for "usethesource\n", the one I gave is for the same string without the trailing "\n" (which is here probably due to a `echo usethesource | sha1sum` instead of `echo -n ...`).

It's the SHA-1 hash of "usethesource"

Related discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660737

Very nice job. Once I hit 500 karma or my account is a year old, I might be able to get some use out of this. :)

No point having the magic string polluting your profile here for the time being. You only need it the first time you submit.

Nitpick mode:

Beyond "pollution", the magic string is subject to race conditions. If someone puts it in the profile, and then waits a while to register, anyone could claim that username.

Sure, it's a somewhat unlikely scenario...but pretty easy to exploit if someone forgets they have the magic string in their profile but haven't yet registered. A unique magic string per-user would be the solution to that.

Not really, it's public. If someone wants your username, they can just look at the magic string in your profile and register it if you haven't.

That's true, but Google can find profiles with the magic string, and one could even go so far as script finding the names that haven't been registered. A unique magic string, only generated during account creation, at least means you have to crawl HN yourself, and pull out those strings via some regex (which could be thwarted by making the magic string unpredictable in length and format), and do so in a very small period of time.

I'm sure it's not really likely that any of those scenarios would happen...but it seemed an odd bit of security theater, which could at least be made a bit more secure by adding a dose of randomness.

I reserved my name.

Thank you for putting this together!

It's dead simple to use, and hits a great niche market.

Would it be possible to add jobs location in the RSS feed?

Thanks, a great idea.

Just an aside, I absolutely hate serif fonts on any text less than 20px in size.

Cool idea though. Can't help but think it's been tried before but sites like http://hnhackers.com, etc.

> I absolutely hate serif fonts on any text less than 20px in size.

https://www.readability.com/

I'm pretty sure on computer monitors, sans-serif produces better readability, but on paper it's the opposite.

"Numerous studies have been done on the readability of serif vs. sans serif typefaces. Studies indicate that serif typefaces may be more readable in print. Studies of on-screen use are more ambiguous, suggesting that low screen resolutions make serifs more difficult to discern, with a resulting erosion of readability compared to sans serif fonts." -Wiki, so feel free to cite a better source.

"Readability" (linked above) is an app that allows you pick your own fonts on the web.

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