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Comment by nrmitchi | Hacker News Reader

> If you've submitted a post to this month's 'Who Wants to Be Hired?", you can find your matching job listings at https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/:user_name, for example https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/G4Vi

I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.

Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.

Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.

Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.

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The users in question are posting on a public forum under a username of their choosing, and it's still an invasion of privacy to read those posts and play pretend matchmaker?

I go out in public sometimes, but don’t want someone following me around live-streaming everything I do to twitch.

Yes, it can be done in full view in public, and still be an invasion of privacy. why do you think they’re called glassholes and pervert glasses?

I think it's naive to be bothered by the scenario you describe just because it's visible to you and yet it's still being done everywhere you go whether you like it or not. Similarly, just because this Show HN is visible to the user it becomes a privacy issue, whereas hundreds of web scrapers are doing the same to HN every day and you don't know about it.

We are living in the Wild West of privacy. If you don't like it, you can share your grievance with the people running the public space or disengage entirely. It's still going to happen.

Doesn’t matter how many times it happens, it is still rude and creepy.

A third option is to air your grievances on that same public space and find people who feel similarly and care enough to raise their voice, and hopefully spread awareness and affect change. Which is also totally valid and what these users are doing.

You hung up a “services offered” flyer on every town square around the world and want to control what people do with the information after you’ve shouted it into the void? Don’t post if you don’t want every tom, dick, or jAIne reading your stuff.

For starters, it breaks two rule of the thread: "Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here" and "please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities".

Not that you don't get spammed anyway, but still.

He didn’t post in the thread or email any candidate. He copied a public comment from one public site to another.

   > The users in question are posting on a public forum under a username of their choosing, and it's still an invasion of privacy to read those posts and play pretend matchmaker?

Yes it is. There is an aggregation happening, that is not available on Hacker News per se. To make this aggregation easily available to anyone else is some kind of privacy invasion. To make matters worse, usernames can be traced back to IRL individuals, depending on the information they put into their "About" page on Hacker News. So yes, this is indeed an issue.

> I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.

It's public information on a public forum. I'm not sure what the big deal is. There are lots of tools that do essentially what I've done here for various purposes.

> Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.

I have an account with them. I figured it was fair to say "I used this tool for vibe coding the idea". I suppose I could have left that out.

> Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.

Yup. I got distracted before I finished writing the post. I'll enumerate those things in another comment here in a minute. Life prevails.

> Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.

I'm not sure what you mean. I made a thing, I shared it. I dunno what else you want from me.

> this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy

People have been building HN job listing scrapers for years. Heck, I built one over a decade ago[1] (though it's offline now). This is a very common "Show HN:" project, and the argument that it's somehow bad faith and creepy is just absolutely nuts when posting on a public forum, specifically to get more exposure.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob

That's not what this is though. This is not (just) scraping job postings; the public-facing interface of this is "Greg, who I don't know, wants a job. Here are the jobs that I think would be good for Greg, who again, I don't know".

My claim of "bad faith" was specifically because the post, between 1) explicitly pointing to a "full stack ai dev platform" ("So I had abacus.ai whip one up"), and 2) the entire missing list of "observations" (mid post), came off more as a shadow advertisement for an ai dev tool than an actual project.

I did the exact same thing[1] (minus the AI matching)—in fact, using the public HN firebase API, as you can see. So I fundamentally reject this premise. I had it running for years and no one complained and it scored me a few contracts because I also did a "Show HN:" and some folks liked it.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob/blob/master/assets/app/compon...

You seem to have ignored the second half of my response. In your case... you did it. This project, based on the current date, no data older than today, and the posters own statements, is "I asked gen-ai platform to make it for me, then pointed a domain at gen-ai-company hosting, and called it a thing I made."

As of the current moment, the domain is just pointing to an IP owned by "Abacus.AI, Inc.". The entire platform is "describe the app you want and we'll generate it and host it for you".

Might just be my opinion, but I consider a Show HN that is "look at the thing AI entirely made for me" to not really be aligned with good faith sharing of work/projects.

Of course <arguably creepy thing> tends to be built by people who don’t find it creepy, not really changing anyone’s mind with that line of argument. And you just found plenty of people who consider it creepy and will complain today.

I don't see the blast. The endless non-job-related spam from "who wants to be hired?" posts is real, though, and actually creepy IMO. Looking at you today, pivotpaper.us

> I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.

Ever since I posted once 6+ months ago, I've been getting random emails from people who found my "posting" on a bunch of different listing websites. I feel bad for them, some of them are even tailoring the resume. The position is no longer available..

I post once with a fake/hidden email address to be contacted. I received thousands of DocuSign emails...

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