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Hacker News “Who is Hiring?” top-level comments over time
- Url23nhn 4y ago
- tjwds 4y agoThanks for hugging my site to death! It's hosted on a $5 DO droplet and I'm honored to have this problem. https://archive.ph/AVbPV https://archive.ph/AVbPV
- anonimou 4y agoHey. Nice post. I was thinking about this same problem for a couple of days. Another question I have is: do we have a higher number of top-level comments on a given number of months or not?
- DeathArrow 4y agoNow you can write another article about how you optimized the site to handle HN traffic. :)
- russellendicott 4y agoI love this idea: "Cheapest way to run a static site that can handle hugs of death".
- eatonphil 4y agoDo you serve static files? Static file server on a $5 DO droplet should handle the HN front page. There's also free tiers on many CDNs like Fastly/Cloudflare. Github Pages is also free.
- tjwds 4y agoI used to use zola hosted on Github Pages, but I wanted to improve the publishing workflow, and WordPress was a good fit for that. (Notes on the migration here: https://blog.joewoods.dev/technology/technical-notes-on-migrating-from-zola-to-wordpress/ https://blog.joewoods.dev/technology/technical-notes-on-migr...)
- eatonphil 4y agoCheck out this thread for recommendations on static site generator plugins on top of Wordpress. Best of both worlds for folks who want high-level publishing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396961
- ushakov 4y agoyou don't even need those a cache with long-enough TTL will do the magic for you https://mish.co/posts/always-cache-your-website/ https://mish.co/posts/always-cache-your-website/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iampims 4y agoA (local) cache is mostly useful for repeat visitors, not for thousands of unique visitors unless you use a CDN.
- ushakov 4y agofunny to hear that i actually migrated from Wordpress to Zola
- tedmiston 4y agoPutting the Cloudflare CDN free plan in front should solve the hug of death problem. https://www.cloudflare.com/performance/ensure-application-availability/ https://www.cloudflare.com/performance/ensure-application-av...
- 4y ago
- spyder 4y agoEven DO has their free tier for static hosting with global CDN and DDoS mitigation: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-deploy-a-static-website-to-the-cloud-with-digitalocean-app-platform https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl... Looks like the free one has only 1GB outbound transfer which wouldn't be enough for a single hug, but the $5/month one has 40GB which might be enough for a hug with text only content.
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoFor simple static sites like this, sticking a default Cloudflare stack in front helps a lot
- coip 4y agoyou’d (I’d) think ~managed cdn serving an s3/blob origin would be a no brainer. Hell, GitHub pages even: BYODomain, + hosting/automation/cdn… Where’s the free lunch in that line of thinking? which cases are a droplet better in?
- coip 4y ago(Now that I’ve tried to RTFA, it seems homie has a runtime dependence (db?) or something colocated on the host failing? OWASP, right? Having a resource limit reached maybe? Nextjs seems like a cool approach to manage partially ~runtime-dynamic systems like this/cms/etc)
- Frotag 4y agoBeing able to recycle the vps for other self-hosted apps is nice (eg vpn, dns-level adblock, etc). Also not having to learn another tech for something you'd only have to set up once every year or few years.
- paxys 4y agoA $5 DO droplet will easily handle peak HN traffic with a bit of optimization. Set cache headers, cache static assets on the server side (or even better, with an external CDN), or even cache the entire page if there's no dynamic content.
- polote 4y agoEven without optimization. Peak HN traffic is in the 20 req per second order of magnitude
- Laforet 4y agoWithout optimization, Nginx defaults to allowing a maximum of one worker process with 512 connections and 60s timeout. 20 unique visitors per second will lead to 500 errors in less than a minute.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoAre you assuming each request takes a second, or how long? A blog should return fast enough that this isn't the case Edit: Yes, even WordPress. Unless there are 50 plugins, an unoptimized theme, zero caching, and a resource constrained server.
- Laforet 4y agoIt does not matter how fast the backend is. A persistent HTTP connection will last 60 seconds following the latest client request, unless the browser goes out of its way to explicitly close the connection. P.S. OP's website uses Apache but the same issue of overly conservative limits still apply.
- harikb 4y agoI can’t imagine a case where the browser wouldn’t do the decency of closing a connection.
- mobilio 4y agoAnother link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220608222735/https://blog.joewoods.dev/technology/hackernews-who-is-hiring-top-level-comments-over-time/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220608222735/https://blog.joew...
- soheil 4y agoIt's a static site, no reason for the server not to be able to handle thousands of connections at once with almost no configuration changes with some like Nginx or Apache. Or even a domain which points directly to a S3 bucket. Hope you're not looking at devop roles on who is hiring posts.
- robjan 4y agoIt's a WordPress blog
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lamontcg 4y agoSo the "pullback" seems similar to the one that was seen in pre-pandemic 2019. That about correlates to my impression that this is not the recession.
- mountaineer 4y agoI run https://www.hntrends.com https://www.hntrends.com on a $5/month box and never had a problem with spikes. Generated, static resources all the way.
- jasfi 4y agoThen you need a faster web framework or CMS. Nexus is made with Nim and is designed to be fast (https://github.com/jfilby/nexus https://github.com/jfilby/nexus). But most problems like that can be solved with caching no matter which tech you're using.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThey were grateful the thing got so much attention, and deferred to other hosts to supplement serving that attention. Not looking for uptime solutions.
- jasfi 4y agoFaster software will always save you time, money and effort.
- kodah 4y agoI like this. I'd also love to see the venn diagram of "Who is Hiring?" top-level comments and a mix of the best and worst feedback about those companies and their hiring processes during that time. I want to see if companies are getting better or worse. I just wasted over a month with a company only to get feedback like, "The CTO wanted you to know the Bitcoin whitepaper more". Companies, as the market gets more competitive, are only doing shadier and shadier things with their time and communication.
- jqbx_jason 4y agoFront page! Way to go Joe!
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoVery cool! Would be interesting to try to control for hacker news popularity - something like total upvotes or total comments as a denominator might make this look even worse.
- minimaxir 4y agoA reminder that all Hacker News posts and comments are available on BigQuery and can be queried for free: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... (the `full` table is up-to-date; ignore the others) Here's a query for a rough reproduction of what's asked in the title: WITH whoishiring_threads AS ( SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE `by` = "whoishiring" AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, "Ask HN: Who is hiring?") ) SELECT FORMAT_TIMESTAMP("%Y-%m", `timestamp`) as year_month, COUNT(*) as num_toplevel_posts FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` WHERE parent IN (SELECT id FROM whoishiring_threads) GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1 Which results in something like this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdoOZdo5H2cY_VyiSMXeFSQfBo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo... Still a bit of room to clean up the query, though, and there are some differences from the chart in the post.
- psnehanshu 4y agoGoogle is infamous for breaking backward compatibility, and sunsetting things, so I will not advice anyone to use this to build any products. However it is fine for one-off tasks, like fetching data for this blog post.
- pm90 4y agoI just want to say, in a comment that furthers the discussion in no way, that having something like this available for free is just incredible.
- tedmiston 4y agoI suppose that massive spike is the beginning of the pandemic. It's interesting to see March 2020 (the highest month of all time) and April 2020 (the lowest month since early 2016) back to back.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hrpnk 4y agoThanks for formatting the timestamp, which I missed in the original post.
- speakspokespok 4y agoYour blog post starts by discussing posts being down this month (June 2022) but the graph provided starts in 2011. For the sake of the discussion, a second graph that starts June 2021 to current, and in monthly increments would be more enlightening. Because ultimately I think that's what we all want to know. In your copious free time would you mind adding that? Thank you for writing this.
- tjwds 4y agoSure: https://dev.joewoods.dev/img/june-to-present.png https://dev.joewoods.dev/img/june-to-present.png But my website seems to have disappeared, so I'll have to update the post later!
- pcthrowaway 4y agoHere's a bar chart comparing "Who is hiring" with "Who wants to be hired" over the last year: https://jsfiddle.net/9d1f534b/ https://jsfiddle.net/9d1f534b/
- ryandrake 4y agoI started and abandoned a little side project a while ago where I wanted to see which employers tended to have the exact same (or fuzzy-the-same) "Who's Hiring" post month after month. Goal would be to find some signal about which posts were actually resulting in hiring (in other words, the company didn't come back with the same posting) and which ones were just trawling for the same job month after month without actually hiring anyone. Was going to call it "Who's Not Hiring?"
- jeffbee 4y agoYou know I've wondered that about companies that post hiring announcement here constantly, in particular Tesorio ( https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tesorio.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=tesorio.com ) which as far as I can tell post every time the rate limit permits them to do so. After 7 years are they a healthy successful company or is it just endless spam?
- leet_thow 4y agoTheir last funding round was a Series A nearly 3 years ago.
- cwkoss 4y agoWe tend to hire multiple developers in bursts, and recycle our text between months. We only remove the role-specific blurb if we hit capacity for that role. So, not sure this methodology identify quite what you're looking for.
- thedufer 4y agoCompanies posting every month could just as easily be continuously growing (or, I suppose, have consistent attrition problems). Most of the places I've worked at have had a perpetually-open listings for SWEs, despite regularly hiring them.
- LukeShu 4y agoYeah. I know the ~same text as the post that became my current job kept getting posted many months after I was hired.
- dekervin 4y agoSince I spent a lot of time looking at "Who is hiring post" for fun anyway, I was looking for a way to make it productive and came up with a different idea [0]. I was wondering if you could detect the slow rise of a new technology and profit from it. Either by retraining or more directly, in the case of crypto, by trading on that info. I put together something, focused on a couple of crypto technologies and as luck would have it, it's still online ! [0] https://datum.alwaysdata.net/static/data-hnjob-trends/index.html https://datum.alwaysdata.net/static/data-hnjob-trends/index....
- jpablo 4y agoCan we overlay this with the nasdaq or some other stock index/other economic indicators?
- larwent 4y agoAsk and you shall receive https://i.imgur.com/fN5EoIB.png https://i.imgur.com/fN5EoIB.png
- soared 4y agoIf you started that chart in 2020 it would be pretty eerie. If I worked at motley fool I’d regurgitate this as a blog post, Reddit dd thread, and so much more. But really if I knew finance I’d be interested to see - since who’s hiring is posted the first day of the month, using month over month/etc post volume to inform trades.
- paradite 4y agoI suspect the hiring stats would be a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laggingindicator.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laggingindicator.asp
- seizethecheese 4y agoIn economics data, they tend to do seasonal adjustments. I would be curious to see if there’s seasonality here.
- soared 4y agoGood thought, though fiscal year v calendar year probably messes that up. Oracle did budgeting in FYQ1 and so tended to not hire much during that quarter, but then hired a lot in Q2, then slightly less Q3/4.
- ianai 4y agoForgetting which bit of macroeconomics this comes from, but the labor market is one of the slowest to settle (i.e. find equilibrium). Capital (real estate/manufacturing investments, stuff used to make stuff) are the slowest. So the capital unemployment rate should generally be greater than the unemployment rate, for instance. The anecdote of Tesla posting a bunch of jobs just before the 10% reduction was announced comes to mind. Lagging indicator stuff.
- LanceH 4y agoI find it matters a lot with what sort of tech work you're doing. If you are operations, a big company needs to keep their current stuff up and running. Exploratory new programs shrivel up when things get tight, though.
- dryd 4y agoAnother way to interpret these results is that HN has gotten more popular as a place to source talent. It would be interesting to see top-level comments by number of total users on the site (as a proxy for popularity).
- jbigelow76 4y agoMeta-side question I've had since being part of this community for awhile, how come when a YC staked company posts they are hiring comments are disabled? As I post this "Generally Intelligent" (YC S17) is hiring for ML people (spot 15 per my last refresh.)
- dwaltrip 4y agoThose are ads. It’s a perk that YC companies get. Otherwise, HN and YC are fairly independent, from what I understand.
- NickRandom 4y agoOG link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767253 by Dan G " If job ads were threads, each thread would be a generic referendum on the company. Worse, it would be the same referendum over and over. Job ads are boring, so there wouldn't be anything to discuss other than how one feels about the company, and that's boring except to people who have strong feelings on the topic, and strong feelings on the internet tend to be negative, so the threads would fill up with negative generic comments. I believe that the hivemind resents boring things, such as submissions where the only new information is "X is hiring", so it gets cranky and fills the vacuum with indignation, basically as the only way to amuse itself in the absence of anything interesting to discuss. It doesn't want to, it just doesn't know any better way to have fun in a vacuum. In practice, what this would look like in a job thread is "I applied in 2015 and never heard back", plus—if there has ever been a negative story X about the company—every variation of X, X, X, repeated increasingly snarkily. Actually, it's worse. Building a business is a long hard slog. One needs to hire far more often than one has scintillating new information for the community to have fun discussing. Therefore, each successive job ad would be even more boring than the previous one, leading to monotonically increasing resentment. Repetition is the enemy of curiosity. Launch posts don't suffer from this dynamic because by definition, the startup is new, so there's something new to discuss. " HTH
- langsoul-com 4y agoI wonder if you could find out how many positions from HN get filled up. Say by comparing with an employees official job site and the HN post role.
- mountaineer 4y agoHad a similar thought a few years ago and added a total posts chart to go along with the technology trends, https://www.hntrends.com/2022/may.html https://www.hntrends.com/2022/may.html Looks like you have June 2021 as the all time high as well. Doesn't look like June 2022 is going to get even close, which makes sense based on current freezes/layoffs.
- swyx 4y agothe real number you want to see is the one you cant get - number of applicants per job posting is surely going up
- TameAntelope 4y agoThere’s a similar “Who wants to be hired?” thread each month!
- endymi0n 4y agoAnecdotally, after two years of literally just looking at tumbleweed in the application inbox, as a still-hiring company I have rarely felt as swamped with really interesting candidates and annoying recruiters as in the past four weeks. The tide has turned for sure.
- gopher_space 4y agoSenior dev with my own anecdote. There are more open positions with interesting companies than there is time in the day to apply for them. I’m able to filter them by turn around time on hiring and interview process because I’m spoiled for choice.
- classified 4y agoOuch. White diagrams on a black background. Someone needs a lesson in design.
- IshKebab 4y agoAm I supposed to see a dip at the end? Hmm maybe if you squint quite a lot!
- gombosg 4y agoHaha, I had fun making this a week ago, to learn more about the inverse: "Number of 'layoff' posts on HN vs NASDAQ" https://imgur.com/a/v4qPut5 https://imgur.com/a/v4qPut5
- storedsun 4y ago
- mcemilg 4y agoFrom another point I would like to check who wants to be hired posts by comparing who is hiring. I can see that hundreds of ML engineers and Data Scientists looking for a job but on the other side there are not that many jobs for ML folks.
- svara 4y agoUh, so, HN predicted the pandemic? :) Curious what's going on there.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoBefore anyone in the West was aware of the virus, much less taking it seriously, information was leaking out around the East. Given how much connection there is between Silicon Valley and China, it's possible some tech companies were hearing non-specific dangers from their partners in the East. Or it could be entirely coincidental. Probably will never know for sure.
- madeofpalk 4y agoThere was the infamous Vox.com mini-drama of them thinking VCs/SV were overreacting in Feburary 2020 https://twitter.com/recode/status/1227927319920205824 https://twitter.com/recode/status/1227927319920205824
- wcedmisten 4y agoVery cool to see this data analyzed! I wonder if the number of posts could be normalized against some other measure of HN popularity. Maybe total number of posts?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bella22231 4y agoHacking your spouse is not exactly fair nor is it legal. This is why you have to get yourself an experienced hacker like I did when I could not take my husband's infidelity no more. Now we are seperated due to all i found out, could not stomach it all. The hacker was so discreet, calm and collected,no leaks. Reach him via wisetechacker @gmail com Thanks
- Ava4312 4y ago
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