Making Hacker News Job Search Less Painful using AI

If you've ever searched for tech jobs on Hacker News' monthly "Who is Hiring" threads, you know the drill. Hundreds of comments to scroll through, Ctrl+F for keywords, and somehow still missing relevant opportunities. After one too many sessions of this tedious process, I decided there had to be a better way.

That's how HiringNewsAI was born - my attempt to make job hunting on HN actually enjoyable (or at least less painful).

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

Every month, the "Who is Hiring" thread on Hacker News gets flooded with 500+ job listings. While it's awesome to have so many opportunities in one place, finding the right ones is like searching for a needle in a haystack. You either spend hours scrolling or risk missing out on perfect matches because they used "JS" instead of "JavaScript" in their description.

My Solution

I built a service that does the heavy lifting for you:

  • Automatically grabs new job posts as they come in
  • Uses OpenAI to extract and understand job details (requirements, location, etc.)
  • Matches jobs to your profile using the Levenshtein distance algorithm (fancy way of saying it catches similar terms like "JS" and "JavaScript")
  • Delivers personalized job matches to your inbox when you want them

Behind the Scenes

The tech stack is pretty straightforward:

  • React for the frontend (because, well, it's React)
  • Convex for the backend (which was a game-changer for real-time updates)
  • OpenAI's APIs to make sense of job descriptions
  • LemonSqueezy for handling payments

Here's a cool discovery I made: I initially thought processing hundreds of job posts with AI would cost a fortune, but using the GPT-4o-mini model turned out to be surprisingly cost-effective. We're talking pennies per post, and the model is incredibly good at extracting the right information. It's one of those "why didn't I try this sooner?" moments.

I handled both the frontend and backend work - setting up the database, making sure everything runs smoothly, and creating a nice-looking interface.

What I Learned

Building this taught me a few things:

  1. AI is amazing for parsing unstructured text (those job posts are wild)
  2. The Levenshtein distance algorithm is surprisingly useful for real-world problems
  3. Building a full-stack app solo in a week is challenging but rewarding

What's Next?

I'm still improving things. The matching could be better, I could add more features, and there's always room for making the UI nicer. But it's already helping me (and hopefully others) find relevant jobs without the usual HN headache, and that's what matters.

If you're tired of manually searching through HN job posts, give HiringNewsAI a try. And hey, if you have ideas for making it better, I'm all ears!