Hacker News "Who Is Hiring": How to Search the Thread

Every month, on the first weekday at 11 a.m. US Eastern time, the Hacker News account whoishiring posts “Ask HN: Who is hiring?”, a thread where people at hiring companies leave one post each. November 2026’s went up on Monday 2 November, and by the next morning it held 132 job posts. This guide explains how the thread works, how to search it properly, and what it leaves out.

What the “Who is hiring?” thread is

Hacker News (HN) is a news and discussion site owned and funded by Y Combinator, according to its own FAQ. The account whoishiring posts the “Who is hiring?” thread automatically, together with a companion thread, “Who wants to be hired?”, in which job seekers describe themselves.

The thread’s own text sets the rules. In short:

• Only people at the hiring company post. No recruiting firms or job boards, and one post per company.
• Say where the job is. Give the location, and mark REMOTE for remote work, a limit such as REMOTE (US) when remote is open in one country only, or ONSITE when it isn’t remote.
• Explain what you do if the company isn’t a household name.
• Only post if you are hiring now and will answer the people who write to you.

Readers are asked not to reply to posts to complain, and to get in touch only about jobs that interest them.

How the posts are laid out

Most posts open with one line of facts separated by vertical bars: the company, the role or roles, the location and the work arrangement, sometimes a pay range. 122 of November’s 132 posts used that line. Below it come a few sentences about the company and how to apply: by email, or through a link to an application page.

Counting the words the posts used on 3 November:

In the post	Posts	Share of 132
A first line with vertical bars	122	92%
Remote	73	55%
Onsite	41	31%
Hybrid	21	16%
A pay figure (a currency sign or code with a number)	60	45%

A post can mention remote, onsite and hybrid at once, for different roles or offices, so those rows overlap.

How to search the thread

Scrolling 132 posts works once. Searching works every month.

1. Your browser’s find. On the thread page, Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) searches the posts loaded on the page. Good for a single word, such as a city or a language.
2. Hacker News search. The Search box at the bottom of every HN page goes to hn.algolia.com, which can search comments as well as stories. Choose Comments, type your words, and add story: followed by the thread’s number to stay inside one thread. The number is at the end of the thread’s address: November 2026’s is 50338728, so story:50338728 remote python finds remote posts that mention Python.
3. Use the thread’s own words. Because posts are asked to write REMOTE, REMOTE (US), REMOTE (EU) or ONSITE, those words make better filters than “work from home”. Add a role word (“backend”, “data engineer”), a language or a country.
4. Find past threads. author:whoishiring in HN search, or the account’s list of threads, shows every month’s thread.
5. For people who code. The HN Search API returns a thread’s comments as data: its documentation shows the form search?tags=comment,story_ followed by the thread’s number.

What the thread leaves out

The thread’s strength is that every post comes from someone at the hiring company, often with a direct way to reach them. It has limits worth knowing:

• One month at a time. A new thread starts each month, and posts in last month’s thread don’t say whether the role is still open.
• Free text. Filters depend on wording. Most posts follow the conventions, but not all: 10 of November’s 132 skipped the usual first line, and a post that writes “work from anywhere” won’t match a search for REMOTE.
• A small, particular slice of hiring. One post per company means 132 companies in November by the morning of the 3rd. Only 3 of them (Blackbird, Datadog and Reddit) are among the 433 tech companies Tideline follows, so the thread and the big company job boards mostly show different employers.
• Pay, about as often as elsewhere. 60 of the 132 posts gave a pay figure, 45%. That is close to the 47% of the 11,691 tech roles on company job boards that Tideline read the same morning, so the thread is neither better nor worse than those boards on pay.

Tideline is independent and is not affiliated with any company or job platform mentioned here. Company names are used only to identify where roles are open.

How Tideline fits alongside it

Tideline reads the public job boards of 433 tech companies on Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby every day, and on 3 November 2026 held 11,691 open tech roles at 424 of them. Each role carries its field, places, work setting when the posting gives one, and the pay range when the employer posts it, so you can filter rather than read: remote roles, roles open from anywhere, or any field and country.

The two complement each other. The thread reaches companies Tideline doesn’t follow and lets you write to someone directly; Tideline covers a fixed set of 433 tech companies, with filters, every day. How those company boards work, and how to find any company’s own, is explained in How to Find Tech Jobs Directly on Company Job Boards.

If a post sends you to an application form, it may be the company’s applicant tracking system. Readback shows your resume the way that kind of software reads it.

Spotted an error or want a listing corrected? Email [email protected].

How these numbers were collected

The counts come from November 2026’s thread, read once through the public Hacker News Search API at 07:11 UTC on 3 November 2026, the morning after it was posted. Only top-level posts were counted (replies were not), and only their words were counted; no post is copied here. The thread keeps growing through the month, so later counts will be higher. “Also on Tideline” means the company name at the start of a post matched one of the 433 companies Tideline follows exactly, so it is a lower bound. Tideline’s figures come from its own data that morning. The rules and posting times come from the thread itself and the whoishiring account’s profile on Hacker News.