hacker news who is hiring may

Introduction：

1、What I've Learned from Hacker News

2、＂Who is Hiring？＂ postings bounce back to twelve month high (May 2024)

What I've Learned from Hacker News ♂

　　February 2009

　　Hacker News was two years

　　old last week. Initially it was supposed to be a side project—an

　　application to sharpen Arc on, and a place for current and future

　　Y Combinator founders to exchange news. It's grown bigger and taken

　　up more time than I expected, but I don't regret that because I've

　　learned so much from working on it.

　　Growth

　　When we launched in February 2007, weekday traffic was around 1600

　　daily uniques. It's since grown to around 22,000. This growth

　　rate is a bit higher than I'd like. I'd like the site to grow,

　　since a site that isn't growing at least slowly is probably dead.

　　But I wouldn't want it to grow as large as Digg or Reddit—mainly

　　because that would dilute the character of the site, but also because

　　I don't want to spend all my time dealing with scaling.

　　I already have problems enough with that. Remember, the original

　　motivation for HN was to test a new programming language, and

　　moreover one that's focused on experimenting with language design,

　　not performance. Every time the site gets slow, I fortify myself

　　by recalling McIlroy and Bentley's famous quote

　　The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special

　　cases.

　　and look for the bottleneck I can remove with least code. So far

　　I've been able to keep up, in the sense that performance has remained

　　consistently mediocre despite 14x growth. I don't know what I'll

　　do next, but I'll probably think of something.

　　This is my attitude to the site generally. Hacker News is an

　　experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. Sites of this

　　type are only a few years old. Internet conversation generally is

　　only a few decades old. So we've probably only discovered a fraction

　　of what we eventually will.

　　That's why I'm so optimistic about HN. When a technology is this

　　young, the existing solutions are usually terrible; which means it

　　must be possible to do much better; which means many problems that

　　seem insoluble aren't. Including, I hope, the problem that has

　　afflicted so many previous communities: being ruined by growth.

　　Dilution

　　Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.

　　So far these alarms have been false, but they may not always be.

　　Dilution is a hard problem. But probably soluble; it doesn't mean

　　much that open conversations have "always" been destroyed by growth

　　when "always" equals 20 instances.

　　But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem,

　　because that means we're going to have to try new things, most of

　　which probably won't work. A couple weeks ago I tried displaying

　　the names of users with the highest average comment scores in orange.

　　[1]

　　That was a mistake. Suddenly a culture that had been more

　　or less united was divided into haves and have-nots. I didn't

　　realize how united the culture had been till I saw it divided. It

　　was painful to watch.

　　[2]

　　So orange usernames won't be back. (Sorry about that.) But there

　　will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the future, and the

　　ones that turn out to work will probably seem just as broken as

　　those that don't.

　　Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is

　　that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior

　　you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out

　　to be surprisingly malleable. If people are

　　expected to behave

　　well, they tend to; and vice versa.

　　Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad

　　people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where

　　they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is

　　gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers.

　　It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to

　　community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad

　　behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of

　　graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I

　　was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that

　　made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was

　　miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened

　　there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.

　　I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. What happened to Reddit

　　didn't happen out of neglect. From the start they had a policy of

　　censoring nothing except spam. Plus Reddit had different goals

　　from Hacker News. Reddit was a startup, not a side project; its

　　goal was to grow as fast as possible. Combine rapid growth and

　　zero censorship, and the result is a free for all. But I don't

　　think they'd do much differently if they were doing it again.

　　Measured by traffic, Reddit is much more successful than Hacker

　　News.

　　But what happened to Reddit won't inevitably happen to HN. There

　　are several local maxima. There can be places that are free for

　　alls and places that are more thoughtful, just as there are in the

　　real world; and people will behave differently depending on which

　　they're in, just as they do in the real world.

　　I've observed this in the wild. I've seen people cross-posting on

　　Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two

　　versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN.

　　Submissions

　　There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs

　　to avoid: bad stories and bad comments. So far the danger of bad

　　stories seems smaller. The stories on the frontpage now are still

　　roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started.

　　I once thought I'd have to weight votes to keep crap off the

　　frontpage, but I haven't had to yet. I wouldn't have predicted the

　　frontpage would hold up so well, and I'm not sure why it has.

　　Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and

　　upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches

　　zero. Or perhaps the frontpage protects itself, by advertising what type of submission is expected.

　　The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy

　　to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by

　　the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon

　　takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero,

　　because people vote it up without even reading it.

　　Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site,

　　the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take

　　specific measures to prevent it.

　　Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most

　　common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of

　　kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This

　　keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff,

　　in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.

　　There's no single solution to that. If a link is just an empty

　　rant, editors will sometimes kill it even if it's on topic in the

　　sense of being about hacking, because it's not on topic by the real

　　standard, which is to engage one's intellectual curiosity. If the

　　posts on a site are characteristically of this type I sometimes ban

　　it, which means new stuff at that url is auto-killed. If a post

　　has a linkbait title, editors sometimes rephrase it to be more

　　matter-of-fact. This is especially necessary with links whose

　　titles are rallying cries, because otherwise they become implicit

　　"vote up if you believe such-and-such" posts, which are the most

　　extreme form of fluff.

　　The techniques for dealing with links have to evolve, because the

　　links do. The existence of aggregators has already affected what

　　they aggregate. Writers now deliberately write things to draw traffic

　　from aggregators—sometimes even specific ones. (No, the irony

　　of this statement is not lost on me.) Then there are the more

　　sinister mutations, like linkjacking—posting a paraphrase of

　　someone else's article and submitting that instead of the original.

　　These can get a lot of upvotes, because a lot of what's good in an

　　article often survives; indeed, the closer the paraphrase is to

　　plagiarism, the more survives.

　　[3]

　　I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide

　　a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps

　　editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident

　　they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do

　　this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.

　　[4]

　　Comments

　　Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions.

　　While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed

　　much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat.

　　There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and

　　stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean

　　comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but

　　the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is

　　easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean,

　　and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.

　　Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is

　　not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know

　　they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being

　　stupid.

　　The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but

　　mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments

　　are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between

　　comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality

　　of comments on community sites, average length would be a good

　　predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything

　　specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity

　　more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones.

　　Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since

　　it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the

　　amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them

　　instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments

　　is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are

　　the easiest form of humor.

　　[5]

　　So one advantage of forbidding

　　meanness is that it also cuts down on these.

　　Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have

　　much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new

　　submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions

　　don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a

　　thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply

　　to dumb jokes with dumb jokes.

　　Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to

　　a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional

　　to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow

　　slower.

　　[6]

　　People

　　I notice most of the techniques I've described are conservative:

　　they're aimed at preserving the character of the site rather than

　　enhancing it. I don't think that's a bias of mine. It's due to

　　the shape of the problem. Hacker News had the good fortune to start

　　out good, so in this case it's literally a matter of preservation.

　　But I think this principle would also apply to sites with different

　　origins.

　　The good things in a community site come from people more than

　　technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that

　　technology comes into play. Technology certainly can enhance

　　discussion. Nested comments do, for example. But I'd rather use

　　a site with primitive features and smart, nice users than a more

　　advanced one whose users were idiots or trolls.

　　So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the

　　kind of people it wants. A site trying to be as big as possible

　　wants to attract everyone. But a site aiming at a particular subset

　　of users has to attract just those—and just as importantly,

　　repel everyone else. I've made a conscious effort to do this on

　　HN. The graphic design is as plain as possible, and the site rules

　　discourage dramatic link titles. The goal is that the only thing

　　to interest someone arriving at HN for the first time should be the

　　ideas expressed there.

　　The downside of tuning a site to attract certain people is that,

　　to those people, it can be too attractive. I'm all too aware how

　　addictive Hacker News can be. For me, as for many users, it's a

　　kind of virtual town square. When I want to take a break from

　　working, I walk into the square, just as I might into Harvard Square

　　or University Ave in the physical world.

　　[7]

　　But an online square is

　　more dangerous than a physical one. If I spent half the day loitering

　　on University Ave, I'd notice. I have to walk a mile to get there,

　　and sitting in a cafe feels different from working. But visiting

　　an online forum takes just a click, and feels superficially very

　　much like working. You may be wasting your time, but you're not

　　idle. Someone is wrong on the Internet, and you're fixing the

　　problem.

　　Hacker News is definitely useful. I've learned a lot from things

　　I've read on HN. I've written several essays that began as comments

　　there. So I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like

　　to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster

　　that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that

　　caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure

　　that's not a description of HN.

　　I feel like the addictiveness of games and social applications is

　　still a mostly unsolved problem. The situation now is like it was

　　with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new

　　things, and we haven't yet evolved ways to protect ourselves from

　　them. We will eventually, and that's one of the problems I hope

　　to focus on next.

　　Notes

　　I tried ranking users by both average and median comment

　　score, and average (with the high score thrown out) seemed the more

　　accurate predictor of high quality. Median may be the more accurate

　　predictor of low quality though.

　　Another thing I learned from this experiment is that if you're

　　going to distinguish between people, you better be sure you do it

　　right. This is one problem where rapid prototyping doesn't work.

　　Indeed, that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating

　　between various types of people. The reason not to do it is not

　　that everyone's the same, but that it's bad to do wrong and hard

　　to do right.

　　When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url

　　with that of whatever they copied. Sites that habitually linkjack

　　get banned.

　　Digg is notorious for its lack of transparency. The root of

　　the problem is not that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky,

　　but that they use the wrong algorithm for generating their frontpage.

　　Instead of bubbling up from the bottom as they get more votes, as

　　on Reddit, stories start at the top and get pushed down by new

　　arrivals.

　　The reason for the difference is that Digg is derived from Slashdot,

　　while Reddit is derived from Delicious/popular. Digg is Slashdot

　　with voting instead of editors, and Reddit is Delicious/popular

　　with voting instead of bookmarking. (You can still see fossils of

　　their origins in their graphic design.)

　　Digg's algorithm is very vulnerable to gaming, because any story

　　that makes it onto the frontpage is the new top story. Which in

　　turn forces Digg to respond with extreme countermeasures. A lot

　　of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had

　　to resort to in the early days, and I suspect Digg's is the extent

　　to which the top stories were de facto chosen by human editors.

　　The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of

　　these, and when I read comments on really bad sites I can hear them

　　in their voices.

　　I suspect most of the techniques for discouraging stupid

　　comments have yet to be discovered. Xkcd implemented a particularly

　　clever one in its IRC channel: don't allow the same thing twice.

　　Once someone has said "fail," no one can ever say it again. This

　　would penalize short comments especially, because they have less

　　room to avoid collisions in.

　　Another promising idea is the stupid

　　filter, which is just like a

　　probabilistic spam filter, but trained on corpora of stupid and

　　non-stupid comments instead.

　　You may not have to kill bad comments to solve the problem. Comments

　　at the bottom of a long thread are rarely seen, so it may be enough

　　to incorporate a prediction of quality in the comment sorting

　　algorithm.

　　What makes most suburbs so demoralizing is that there's no

　　center to walk to.

　　Thanks to Justin Kan, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,

　　Alexis Ohanian, Emmet Shear, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of

　　this.

　　Comment on this essay.

＂Who is Hiring？＂ postings bounce back to twelve month high (May 2024) ♂

　　Tech

　　Rank

　　Last Month

　　Change

　　Last Year

　　Remote

　　1

　　0

　　Senior

　　2

　　Full Stack

　　3

　　AI

　　4

　　5

　　11

　　Onsite

　　6

　　Back End

　　React

　　7

　　8

　　Python

　　TypeScript

　　9

　　10

　　Hybrid

　　13

　　Front End

　　Machine Learning

　　12

　　AWS

　　18

　　Cloud

　　14

　　15

　　Staff

　　20

　　Postgresql

　　16

　　17

　　golang

　　Security

　　19

　　Open Source

　　Rust

　　22

　　23

Related questions

The Hacker News "Who's Hiring" thread for July 2019 was posted on July 1, 2019. You can find the thread here:
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2019)

Key Details:

• Posted by: The HN account whoishiring (a bot that creates monthly hiring threads).
• Format: Companies post job openings in the comments, typically including:
  • Job Title/Role
  • Company Name
  • Location (or "Remote" if applicable)
  • Job Type (Full-time, Contract, etc.)
  • Visa/Relocation Support (if offered)
  • Brief Description of the role and company.

How to Navigate:

1. Visit the link above to browse all job postings.
2. Use your browser's search function (Ctrl+F/Cmd+F) to filter by keywords like:
   • Remote (for remote-friendly roles)
   • Location (e.g., "SF", "Berlin")
   • Tech Stack (e.g., "React", "Python", "Blockchain").

Pro Tips:

• Check the "Who wants to be hired?" and "Freelancer?" threads (also posted monthly) if you're seeking work.
• Use third-party tools like hnhiring.com to search and filter past hiring threads more efficiently.

Let me know if you need help parsing specific roles or companies from the thread! 馃殌