SearchYC.com

Where do people that visit Hacker News go to search for jobs?

I realize we're in a community of entrepreneurs but better access to the talent that hangs out around here would be a tremendous resource for hiring managers.

Written out of frustration after spending 2 weeks sifting through bad resumes and monotonous interviews.

I'm about to launch a startup, and plan to acquire users via search ads.

I'm using Google's Traffic Estimator to gauge how many users I can acquire in a month, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Also, I'm not sure if it includes Global or US traffic.

Does anyone have experience with this?

Here's an example of what I'm looking at: https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox?save=save&keywords=hacker%20news%0A%22hacker%20news%22%0A[hacker%20news]%0Ahacker%20newss%0A%22hacker%20newss%22%0A[hacker%20newss]&currency=USD&language=en

I often don't del.icio.us stuff I read on Hacker News because I know where I read it and it pops into my "saved stories" page. However, after being here for a while it's getting increasingly hard to find stuff I want later.

Any chance of a search within your saved stories?

For the past 6 months, I completely abandoned Delicious for Hacker News. I figured the history of my upvotes was basically a replacement for what Delicious was offering me. Someday I figured I would write an app to search my HN history for good material. However, I just realized that I only have access to the past 7 pages' worth of upvotes (210 in total).

I have been losing links I thought were saved! I wrote this mashup extension as a quick solution that enables me to keep a permanent record of links I like here on Hacker News.

The extension works by popping up a save form every time you upvote. I plan to make it more subtle over time, but in the spirit of lean product design, I plan to live with this for a few days and decide what to do later on.

It is only about 15 LoC. Fork it on Github if it's useful to you!

http://github.com/paulrosania/hacker_sync

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbibhedlihcaeocidhj

http://hnwatch.scalien.com

Demo account: demo/demo

Hacker News Watch monitors submissions so you don't miss out on topics, comments and commenters relevant to you.

You add keywords (like a Google search) which are saved as permanent searches. Hacker News submissions and linked pages are monitored for your keywords. Results are delivered to your browser in real-time via a Google Reader type interface.

It's a release-early-release-often type release, so it's still rough around the edges (eg. broken on IEx.x). We'll work on features/bugs based on your feedback.

About the project: When we released Keyspace, our replicated key-value store, we would gladly have payed $10/mo. for a service to monitor the real-time web for comments about us, so we can quickly react and make connections. The existing sites ("social media monitoring") are not very good, so we started building our own. HNWatch is a HN-only toy version of this more general product, which is also our primary use-case for Keyspace development.

Hacker News Watch has been OK'd by pg.

Why not link to HN submissions instead (e.g., from your twitter account, home page, etc.) and rely on Google to rank HN submissions?

The HN front page could be obtained using something like this:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&esrch=FT1&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:d&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+%2Bhacker&aq=f

P.S. It seems that PageRank is not used in Google site queries unless they also include a keyword.

A large fraction of our http requests come from Yahoo crawlers-- almost 20% yesterday. Their crawler seems significantly stupider than Google's. Yesterday we got 12,423 requests from the Google crawler, of which 4148 were for x (= mostly useless) urls, and 43,087 requests from Yahoo crawlers, of which 30,652 were for x urls.

Unlike most sites, I'm looking for ways to constrain our growth. News.YC is deliberately not intended to become a massively popular site. So the thought occurred to me: why not just ban Yahoo crawlers? And MSN too, while we're at it. I don't know anyone who uses either of them for search. I'd just as soon have the site be invisible to them. But what does the community think? Do any hackers use Yahoo or MSN search?

How?

By hiring Don Dodge.

Look at this – 35,000+ mentions on this story in the last 7 days.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3A*%3AIE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7TSHB&tbo=1&tbs=qdr%3Aw&q=%22don+dodge%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g6

People within MSFT recognized Don’s importance, and I am willing to bet that anybody following this story knew immediately that Google would court Don, and turn this into a PR coup over their major competior.

Hacker News is is one of the premier communities for young developers, and Google just bought advertising space all over the tech web by hiring Don, and looking again like the out of touch GIANT that they’re perceived as.

The butchering of this story calls for a housecleaning by MSFT’s management of their PR department, lots of better ways this could have been handled.

I've been thinking for a while of building a domain-specific / "vertical" search engine. I usually end up telling myself it's crazy to think that I can compete with Google, but the recent thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999) on the apparently declining quality of Google search, especially for niche queries, got me thinking that it might not be so crazy after all. What's more, I know of at least one existing search startup in this domain who seem to be doing well, so that's some additional validation of this market.

Although I'm a pretty competent hacker, I'm new to search. I've done some reading on search and information retrieval in general, and picked up a copy of Manning et al.'s "Introduction to Information Retrieval", (http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html) which looks fantastic.

However, I don't want to reinvent too many wheels, at least not until I really have to. I'm planning to dive into Hadoop, Lucene, Nutch, Solr, and other open source tools and see how far those can take me.

I would appreciate any advice on this endeavor -- preferably from your own real world experience -- tips, tricks, pitfalls, resources, etc.

One particular issue that I've pondered is how to do a good "targeted" web crawl -- how to restrict the crawl (or at least indexing) to pages I know are relevant to my domain. It occurred to me to seed the crawler with a set of "authoritative" domains that I know are relevant, then use pages from those domains to train a simple classifier to apply to each page visited, to decide whether to index it and crawl its outgoing links. Any other (simpler?) strategies?

Also, how far can I realistically expect to get with "off-the-shelf" OSS tools like Nutch, etc.? Those of you who've used such tools "in anger", what roadblocks and brick walls can I expect to run into?

Thanks in advance!