Show HN: HN Match Maker – Matching "Who Wants to Be Hired?" With "Who's Hiring?"

nrmitchi · 2026-09-01T22:02:11.000000Z

> If you've submitted a post to this month's 'Who Wants to Be Hired?", you can find your matching job listings at https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/:user_name, for example https://hnmatchmaker.com/user/G4Vi

I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.

Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.

Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.

Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.

usui · 2026-09-01T22:16:11.000000Z

The users in question are posting on a public forum under a username of their choosing, and it's still an invasion of privacy to read those posts and play pretend matchmaker?

probably_wrong · 2026-09-01T23:03:08.000000Z

For starters, it breaks two rule of the thread: "Agencies, recruiters, job boards, and so on, are off topic here" and "please only email these addresses to discuss work opportunities".

Not that you don't get spammed anyway, but still.

joshribakoff · 2026-09-02T03:38:22.000000Z

He didn’t post in the thread or email any candidate. He copied a public comment from one public site to another.

MrGilbert · 2026-09-02T07:11:31.000000Z

   > The users in question are posting on a public forum under a username of their choosing, and it's still an invasion of privacy to read those posts and play pretend matchmaker?

Yes it is. There is an aggregation happening, that is not available on Hacker News per se. To make this aggregation easily available to anyone else is some kind of privacy invasion. To make matters worse, usernames can be traced back to IRL individuals, depending on the information they put into their "About" page on Hacker News. So yes, this is indeed an issue.

LadyCailin · 2026-09-01T22:20:01.000000Z

I go out in public sometimes, but don’t want someone following me around live-streaming everything I do to twitch.

Yes, it can be done in full view in public, and still be an invasion of privacy. why do you think they’re called glassholes and pervert glasses?

usui · 2026-09-01T22:28:35.000000Z

I think it's naive to be bothered by the scenario you describe just because it's visible to you and yet it's still being done everywhere you go whether you like it or not. Similarly, just because this Show HN is visible to the user it becomes a privacy issue, whereas hundreds of web scrapers are doing the same to HN every day and you don't know about it.

We are living in the Wild West of privacy. If you don't like it, you can share your grievance with the people running the public space or disengage entirely. It's still going to happen.

shikshake · 2026-09-02T00:37:01.000000Z

A third option is to air your grievances on that same public space and find people who feel similarly and care enough to raise their voice, and hopefully spread awareness and affect change. Which is also totally valid and what these users are doing.

mixmastamyk · 2026-09-01T23:39:34.000000Z

Doesn’t matter how many times it happens, it is still rude and creepy.

linkjuice4all · 2026-09-02T03:23:05.000000Z

You hung up a “services offered” flyer on every town square around the world and want to control what people do with the information after you’ve shouted it into the void? Don’t post if you don’t want every tom, dick, or jAIne reading your stuff.

all2 · 2026-09-02T00:28:09.000000Z

> I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.... this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy. If you did it privately, or authenticated people in some way, sure, but as is it feels like you're putting people on blast.

It's public information on a public forum. I'm not sure what the big deal is. There are lots of tools that do essentially what I've done here for various purposes.

> Also this sounds way more like an advertisement for "abacus.ai" than a side project announcement.

I have an account with them. I figured it was fair to say "I used this tool for vibe coding the idea". I suppose I could have left that out.

> Your post also starts a list of "things" ("Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:") with no list.

Yup. I got distracted before I finished writing the post. I'll enumerate those things in another comment here in a minute. Life prevails.

> Actually, nothing about this really feels good faith, or real.

I'm not sure what you mean. I made a thing, I shared it. I dunno what else you want from me.

Foobar8568 · 2026-09-02T06:56:06.000000Z

I post once with a fake/hidden email address to be contacted. I received thousands of DocuSign emails...

schmookeeg · 2026-09-01T22:08:51.000000Z

I don't see the blast. The endless non-job-related spam from "who wants to be hired?" posts is real, though, and actually creepy IMO. Looking at you today, pivotpaper.us

OsrsNeedsf2P · 2026-09-02T00:01:54.000000Z

> I'm sure you mean well but as someone who has considered posting on who wants to be hired in the past.

Ever since I posted once 6+ months ago, I've been getting random emails from people who found my "posting" on a bunch of different listing websites. I feel bad for them, some of them are even tailoring the resume. The position is no longer available..

dvt · 2026-09-02T02:07:05.000000Z

> this is creepy AF and feels like a giant invasion of privacy

People have been building HN job listing scrapers for years. Heck, I built one over a decade ago[1] (though it's offline now). This is a very common "Show HN:" project, and the argument that it's somehow bad faith and creepy is just absolutely nuts when posting on a public forum, specifically to get more exposure.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob

nrmitchi · 2026-09-02T02:19:30.000000Z

That's not what this is though. This is not (just) scraping job postings; the public-facing interface of this is "Greg, who I don't know, wants a job. Here are the jobs that I think would be good for Greg, who again, I don't know".

My claim of "bad faith" was specifically because the post, between 1) explicitly pointing to a "full stack ai dev platform" ("So I had abacus.ai whip one up"), and 2) the entire missing list of "observations" (mid post), came off more as a shadow advertisement for an ai dev tool than an actual project.

dvt · 2026-09-02T02:24:55.000000Z

I did the exact same thing[1] (minus the AI matching)—in fact, using the public HN firebase API, as you can see. So I fundamentally reject this premise. I had it running for years and no one complained and it scored me a few contracts because I also did a "Show HN:" and some folks liked it.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/hackjob/blob/master/assets/app/compon...

nrmitchi · 2026-09-02T04:29:26.000000Z

You seem to have ignored the second half of my response. In your case... you did it. This project, based on the current date, no data older than today, and the posters own statements, is "I asked gen-ai platform to make it for me, then pointed a domain at gen-ai-company hosting, and called it a thing I made."

As of the current moment, the domain is just pointing to an IP owned by "Abacus.AI, Inc.". The entire platform is "describe the app you want and we'll generate it and host it for you".

Might just be my opinion, but I consider a Show HN that is "look at the thing AI entirely made for me" to not really be aligned with good faith sharing of work/projects.

oefrha · 2026-09-02T10:09:13.000000Z

Of course <arguably creepy thing> tends to be built by people who don’t find it creepy, not really changing anyone’s mind with that line of argument. And you just found plenty of people who consider it creepy and will complain today.

all2 · 2026-09-02T00:45:54.000000Z

I left an incomplete section in the post body, then went shopping.

So here it is:

---

Some observations when looking at the matches pair up right now:

- individuals looking for jobs have extremely general postings

- companies looking to hire have extremely specific postings

- generally, match scores are very low (<50%) because of this mismatch

- individuals don't typically mention domain knowledge in any specific way

- individuals don't typically mention prior work history beyond time-in-industry (this makes sense on a public forum)

- individuals typically list technologies used

I don't have any conclusions to make right now, no advice for job posters or job seekers. It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.

e12e · 2026-09-02T00:59:19.000000Z

> It'll take two or three more of these before I've seen enough to start gelling the domain problems in my head.

I don't understand - there's years of historical data to look at?

all2 · 2026-09-02T01:00:42.000000Z

I suppose I could look backwards instead of forwards.

Tbf, at this hour, it hadn't even occurred to me.

coherentpony · 2026-09-02T01:25:48.000000Z

> Tbf, at this hour, it hadn't even occurred to me.

I am refreshed when I such honesty like this.

No defensive quip. No snarky response.

A gentle reminder that we are all human and we get tired and miss things.

SoftTalker · 2026-09-02T03:16:45.000000Z

I wouldn't bother unless you just want to try to compile stats. The active job seekers and the open positions from more than a month ago probably aren't valid today.

jaggederest · 2026-09-02T10:10:07.000000Z

It's a bit like backtesting, in finance. Quite useful to establish whether your algorithm is sane and coherent, no use at all in determining if it is actually useful, to my understanding.

bob1029 · 2026-09-02T08:57:08.000000Z

I think building a matching engine for this particular market is a cursed mission.

These two flavors of recurring thread read like oil and water to me.

lellow · 2026-09-01T22:56:45.000000Z

Did the same experiment sometime ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48764151

herbst · 2026-09-02T07:22:46.000000Z

It would be more useful if next to "remote" it also shows where the company actually is. I am sure many people don't want to work for us companies. Otherwise cool project

Eastmill · 2026-09-02T06:47:36.000000Z

Been manually sifting those 'Who's Hiring?' threads for a while. If this saves me some time, that'd be awesome.

jmutex · 2026-09-02T06:35:26.000000Z

Always dreaded diving into those massive 'Who's Hiring' threads. This tool sounds like a much-needed shortcut for both sides.

dvt · 2026-09-02T02:05:09.000000Z

This is neat! What I would do is I would have a list of tags and make sure every post gets pigeonholed into those because otherwise it might be hard to match tags if extracted on a per-post basis (e.g. I see `large-scale data systems` for a job listing, which will rarely match a candidate because it's so wordy).

Cool product though.

all2 · 2026-09-02T02:14:32.000000Z

This is something I'm considering. I was thinking we could probably hum it in with plain old vector embeddings, maybe?

ellis0n · 2026-09-02T08:59:30.000000Z

Great! It's working!

rgbrgb · 2026-09-01T21:17:50.000000Z

this is cool! incidentally we do a similar motion internally for members on https://www.hedgy.works

how did you think about evaluating quality when designing your ranker / fit scoring?

all2 · 2026-09-02T00:38:25.000000Z

"quality" here is such an abstract thing.

There's a few metrics: seniority, salary range, enumerated skills (as requirements or as a person's skill set), and domain specific knowledge.

These are far from perfect, and I think in the future I will probably tweak how matches are scored, because how job postings are written and how 'Who Wants to Be Hired?" posts are at odds.

The former is one-to-many, where the job posting enumerates very specific requirements in order to filter that 'many' down to as few eligible candidates as possible.

The latter is one-to-many, where the 'I'm for hire' posting seeks to match as many of the 'many's as possible. This means down playing domain experience or specific technologies in order to appeal to as many possible viewers as possible.

Trying to pair 'precise and specific' with 'as general as humanly possible' is ... hard. Here we use 'tags' extracted from postings to match the domains and skills together. It isn't perfect. From what I've seen in this first run there aren't any matches that make it over 50% -- where 50% is a heuristic for the metrics mentioned above. This just means there's room for improvement.

The other side is the old game of 'tailor your resume to the job', which isn't in the spirit of 'Who Wants to Be Hired?' posts. You could very easily game this by just dumping a bunch of keywords into your post.

YCisDead · 2026-09-01T22:50:42.000000Z

Can you add a switch for:

• Disable illegal university recruiter pipelines that label all other candidates as “external” which gives them entirely different recruiters and is also illegally shown to the interviewer drastically lowering the chance of the candidate moving forward making it far easier for university and Ivy League grads to get hired over anyone else with the same or better credentials

singleshot_ · 2026-09-01T23:25:12.000000Z

Is it illegal for an interviewer to know what university you attended? I better change my resume.

orangelight · 2026-09-02T10:20:28.000000Z

What if it was illegal to have extremely low reading comprehension lol you’d be fucked

syngrog66 · 2026-09-01T21:42:41.000000Z

are you paying the original post authors for republishing their content?

all2 · 2026-09-02T00:39:39.000000Z

I'm confused. How do you figure this is a thing that needs to be done?

I guess this boils down to the Copyright of posts on HN, and what is considered to be fair use.

No, I'm not paying anyone. The compute is on my own dime and I'm not making any money off of this.