HN Who Is Hiring Monitor — new job posts by keyword

Watch Hacker News' official monthly threads — "Who is hiring?", "Who wants to be hired?" and "Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?" — and get only the NEW posts matching your keywords since your last run.

The "Who is hiring?" thread gets hundreds of high-quality job posts spread across the whole month. Everyone reads it on day 1, then stops checking — but a third of the posts land later, when almost nobody is looking. Watching the tail is the edge, and nobody re-reads a 600-comment thread every two days. This monitor does.

What it does

1. Finds the latest official monthly thread of the type you choose (posted by the whoishiring account — imitator threads are excluded).
2. Reads every top-level post and keeps the ones matching your keywords (e.g. remote, react, europe, video).
3. Remembers every post it has already seen (per thread type + keywords, in a persistent state store) and outputs only the NEW ones on every later run. When a new month's thread starts, it rolls over automatically.

Input example

{
  "threadType": "hiring",
  "keywords": ["remote", "typescript"]
}

The defaults work as-is.

Output example

{
  "postId": "48748100",
  "postUrl": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48748100",
  "firstLine": "Paris, France | VideoLab | Senior Video Editor (freelance welcome) | Remote EU",
  "text": "Paris, France | VideoLab | Senior Video Editor (freelance welcome) | Remote EU\nWe need a creative editor for AI-generated brand films. Contact: jobs@…",
  "postedAt": "2026-07-01T16:00:00.000Z",
  "threadTitle": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)",
  "matchedKeywords": ["remote"],
  "isNewSinceLastRun": true
}

A SUMMARY record in the run's key-value store gives the counts: posts in thread, matching, new, total known.

The three thread types

• hiring — companies posting jobs. For job seekers and freelancers hunting warm openings.
• wants-to-be-hired — candidates posting availability. For recruiters and founders sourcing talent.
• freelancer — the monthly gig-matching thread, both "seeking work" and "seeking freelancer" posts. For agencies and independents.

How to use it

• Schedule it every 1-2 days during the month with your keywords → you catch the late posts everyone else misses.
• Pipe the dataset to Slack/email via an Apify integration — each item's firstLine is a ready-made notification.
• Run one monitor per keyword set (each gets its own memory via the monitor key).

Fair use & data

• Reads only Hacker News' public API (Algolia). No login, no scraping.
• Poster usernames are deliberately dropped — the post text already contains whatever contact info the company chose to publish.
• Replies under posts are not collected; only the top-level job/availability posts.

FAQ

What happens at month rollover? The monitor always targets the latest official thread; new month = new posts = they appear as new. Memory of past posts is kept 60 days, so nothing is double-reported.

First run floods me. That's the baseline (flagged isBaseline: true); disable includeBaselineInOutput to start silent.

How do I reset the memory? Set a new monitorId.