Salary is just a part of the cost like other people hinted at. Benefits, recruitment, capacity management, health and safety, performance management, training, all other sorts of HR processes.
How about mentioning in the who's hiring post that people can email HN if they think someone posted in bad faith. The slight inconvenience should turn off people who complain just for the sake of it, and other readers won't be discouraged by seeing the complaints. The downside is extra admin for you, of course.
I don't think I can handle many more emails*. But beyond that—what would we do? We don't have the cycles to arbitrate these things; nor the skill; nor the interest.
* was going to make a Mr. Creosote reference but thought better of it
Hn/jobs may not have the interest, sure. Job posters in general may not have an interest. I think monetization here comes from candidates. As a job seeker I would be willing to pay for access to a job board where listings/posters are somehow vetted to protect me from filling out ghost applications.
I built a Google Sheets add-on that makes it easy to produce forecasts on time series datasets directly inside your spreadsheet.
Story behind it - more than a year ago, a friend of mine asked me to produce some forecasts on some (legal) drug sales data. I don’t have the Office suite on my machine, so I tried using Google Sheets. But Google Sheets’ built-in FORECAST function didn’t work because the data had seasonality. I checked out other Google Sheets add-ons, none did the job well either (please correct me if I’m wrong!).
The only way I could make it work is by creating the forecast in Python. I found it a hassle, but had other projects so I set the idea aside.
One year later, I decided to look into building add-ons for Google Workspace, and remembered this idea. There was a lot of trial and error, as the documentation can be quite confusing sometimes. Nevertheless, the add-on's finally been listed on the Google Workspace Marketplace: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/forecastsheets/...
(I put the link to my landing page in the Show HN because I find the marketplace listing UI hard to read).
The add-on is very basic at the moment. The prediction algorithm uses the Holt-Winters exponential smoothing method, with an additive trend component and an additive seasonal component. There are no other options for the model, and no other models either.
The add-on's free, but to be fully transparent I'll probably have a premium version, subscription-based, where you can do more stuff in the add-on.
In terms of who might use this - I'm thinking mainly that it's people in data analytics, marketing, maybe high-volume sales. I've kept it fairly generic in case I discover other applications.
I'm looking for feedback so I know whether it's worth developing it further. Totally fine if not. Either way, let me know what y'all think of it!
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