Show HN: Hackjob.io – HN job listings done a bit better

Outside of helping build a startup, you have literally every other job site at your disposal. Go on any of them.

Within the context of building a startup, Sam Altman suggests it is more than 10x easier in SF and SV - however I think it is more like 50x easier. You can talk to 50 people on "startup" terms in FL before you'll find one person who is as qualified and willing to work on a startup, who will actually do it, as you can find in SF.

For better or for worse, HN is a YC property, and it's mostly about startups. In that sense even NY ranks far behind SF.

In fact, you can go farther and say that inside SF, twenty people can build the better part of a billion dollars in value together from nothing. Outside SF, you will get accused of being a thief and trying to take advantage of the same developers. It's a complete non-starter.

I realize most people posting advertisements are somewhat farther along, but the point stands. SF is where they are funded and able to post startup jobs.

But Firebase is a database, and by definition keeps state.

All great ideas! May implement some of these today.

I use HN's Firebase API. This means I need a separate HTTP (XHR) call for every job record. AngJobs has their own database/API. It was my intention to avoid that pattern because I wanted to practice promises in Angular.

Yeah, I build http://hnhiring.me well before the API via scraping. I looked into moving over after it was released but found it completely impractical for this sort of thing.

Hopefully it'll be improved at some point, especially given how bad the HN markup is (fun fact: all comments are at the same level in the dom; the indentation is achieved via a blank gif with a width property).

Firebase dev here, the websocket API would be much faster (less HTTP overhead and connection negotiation) and has the potential for more concurrent requests.

replace lots of these:

  return $http.get('https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/'+name+' + '/.json');

with

  return $q(function(resolve, reject){
    new Firebase('https://hackernews.firebaseio.com/v0/user/').child(name).on('value', function(snap) {
      resolve(snap.val());
    }, /*error handler here too*/)
  })


  https://www.firebase.com/blog/2014-10-07-hacker-news-api-is-firebase.html

  https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$q

(yes the HN API design is a little funky though, but you can definitely improve the loading times with websockets)

Looking at the firebase api docs, I realized how unRESTful, their REST api is. No way to get a list of all stories. You can only get a list of ids and must then query the API with each id to get the content. If you plan on going this route, I def agree you store your results in your own backend db. If you want to stay stateless, look for a better HN job source, e.g., http://hnapp.com/?q=type%3Ajob+|+author%3Awhoishiring. Just one request and you can parse either the json or rss feed.

> Unfortunately, I need to make an HTTP request for every post (that's how the HN Firebase API works)

What's the total size of the jobs data? Would it be possible to grab all the JSON from the API, concatenate it and then self-host it as a single file? I imagine a $5 DO droplet with nginx would suffice for that.

It looks like firebase isn't even gzipping the JSON.

Can't be better than that. Awesome