The Hacker News curation looks fine to me.
> Another kind of job ad is reserved for YC-funded startups. These appear on the front page, but are not stories: they have no vote arrows, points, or comments. They begin part-way down and fall steadily. Only one is on the front page at a time. The rest are listed at jobs.
[A few years ago, the algorithm to determine the position was public. It was something like starting at the 4th position and dropping 4 places each hour, but I may be misremembering. Perhaps now they changed the details, but my guess is that it would be something similar and easy to guess if you track them for one or two days.]
Btw if you want to take a look at the instructions we give to the startups about these ads, they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/jobguide.html.
I’m not really invested in what Jerry or BuildZoom do for their business, so I gloss over them when I see them.
I don’t think “Jerry is hiring” is meaningful when the company name is Jerry. Like, I can work out that BuildZoom must be some kind of property mumble something, and that Flexport is doing “port” work with shipping logistics, but I honestly can’t imagine what Jerry does.
I think, then, that my objection is that “Jerry is hiring” is a bad headline, if that’s the actual headline they used. They’re not informative, they don’t explain to me what’s unique, they just say “hiring”. Yay, I guess, but not really the right spirit. Frequency isn’t the problem, useless headlines is.
Here’s an example from two minutes that talks about this:
“Meticulous (YC S21) Is Hiring #2 Founding Engineer in London”
None of this is “curious”. I mean, sure, it’s useful to know, and it makes their job add stand out from the pack of job ads. But HN isn’t a pack of job ads.
What does Meticulous do? Why do they matter? YC must have invested in them because of something, but that’s absent from this headline.
I looked them up and from their search blurb, here’s a made up headline:
“Meticulous is hiring: We analyze browsing sessions to find website bugs”
Is this a fully accurate summary of Meticulous? No. Is it enough to tell me whether I want to consider working there? Yes.
What does Jerry do?
EDIT:
Here’s example downthread of a zero-curiosity headline:
“Why Hive Is Such A Uniquely Dope Place To Work”
It’s clickbait, sure, but my point is that it doesn’t tell me why Hive deserves customers, and without that, I don’t know how to evaluate whether I’m a good fit for them. Especially compared to what I remember from a Flexport headline, reconstructed from memory:
“Flexport is hiring: Help us solve the shipping logistics crisis”
That tells me what they do, and why they deserved YC funding. That lets me consider whether I would be a good fit for their business. It’s absent from most hiring ads and so I openly ignore most hiring ads.
I think it's clear to me at this point that it's not just Jerry, other people seem to notice other ones more. Maybe it just depends on what times you're more likely to visit the site or which headlines you pattern match on more.
One tip to Jerry though: I'm usually very resistant to replying through consolidators like lever.co or angel.co. I'd rather deal with the company directly. I don't know how common that is.
But generally I find it pretty easy to ignore.
