

UseTheSource: a job board for hackers - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/usethesource-job-board-for-hackers.html

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charlief
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.

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

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

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dstein
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.

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

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apinstein
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... :)

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

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

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

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

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nandemo
Great.

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

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

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

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

~~~
jgrahamc
I'll fix that myself.

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

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mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
lzm
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.

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VictorHo
Direct link: <http://jobs.usethesource.com/jobs>

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srean
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.

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

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

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

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ghotli
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.

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spydez
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/>

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ericmsimons
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.

~~~
sciurus
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.

~~~
wahnfrieden
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.

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

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kungfooey
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?

~~~
jgrahamc
Fixed.

------
techscruggs
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.

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pyre

      > 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.

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Locke1689
Sorry to be the security weenie, but any chance we can get HTTPS for the login
POST?

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aninteger
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?

~~~
ig1
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 ?

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p4bl0
The magic string should be 8e6eb25da4d3731a6583b81fb39977299bf5475a ;-).

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

~~~
p4bl0
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 ...`).

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

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ltamake
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. :)

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

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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.

~~~
SwellJoe
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.

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svec
Thank you for putting this together!

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

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

Thanks, a great idea.

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Andrex
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.

~~~
lotharbot
> _I absolutely hate serif fonts on any text less than 20px in size._

<https://www.readability.com/>

~~~
Andrex
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.

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

