Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Astra for Law(openai.com ↗)
    77comments
  2. Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep(github.com/asciimoo ↗)
    110comments
  3. Bend(bend-lang.com ↗)
    13comments
  4. Everybody's Lost Their Minds(netmeister.org ↗)
    49comments
  5. Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA(global.fujitsu ↗)
    163comments
  6. Wax motor(wikipedia.org ↗)
    21comments
  7. CrowdSec Source Code Leak(crowdsec.net ↗)
    30comments
  8. Towards Self-Driving Codebases(detail.dev ↗)
    62comments
  9. Infinite-Parameter LLMs: Generating and Adapting Weights from Live Data(arxiv.org ↗)
    22comments
  10. Rate limits on GitLab.com are changing(about.gitlab.com ↗)
    96comments
  11. André Weil and the Hodge Conjecture(jiahao116.github.io ↗)
    4comments
  12. Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter(gowers.wordpress.com ↗)
    219comments
  13. The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities(newyorker.com ↗)
    258comments
  14. Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet(vhaudiquet.fr ↗)
    13comments
  15. Zettascale (YC S24) Is Hiring ASIC/FPGA Engineers to Build Chips for ASI(zscc.ai ↗)
    discuss
  16. How GLM built its own inference infrastructure(z.ai ↗)
    248comments
  17. TSMC revealing details about next gen A14 node(mapyourshow.com ↗)
    19comments
  18. T. Rex Had a Body Temperature of 97 Degrees(nytimes.com ↗)
    59comments
  19. Canto: A speech model built for the real world(wisprflow.ai ↗)
    5comments
  20. Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents
    41comments
  21. One year of sponsored Servo development(servo.org ↗)
    133comments
  22. How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?(mathoverflow.net ↗)
    12comments
  23. CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3(ccc.de ↗)
    164comments
  24. Don't Make Job Referrals Public(melashri.net ↗)
    12comments
  25. Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?(joecmarshall.com ↗)
    83comments
  26. Grand MS-DOS Gaming General MIDI Showdown(johnnovak.net ↗)
    8comments
  27. Show HN: Share your AI Setup, Learn from others(mysetup.ai ↗)
    77comments
  28. The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind(gcaptain.com ↗)
    118comments
  29. LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering(minimallysufficient.com ↗)
    16comments
  30. Vinix – A modern operating system written in V(vinix-os.org ↗)
    55comments

Don't Make Job Referrals Public

23 pointsby 3h agoblog.melashri.net
12 comments
2h agoHN ↗

People checking in code they've never looked at.

People employee-referring other people who they've never worked with, and don't even know at all on a personal level.

Ya'll are fucking crazy.

1h agoHN ↗

Can't believe this wasn't already a problem pre LLMs.

1h agoHN ↗

It was, it was just hard to do at scale by a lot of different people.

LLMs and other automation tools make things that used to be annoying but uncommon to a steady part of life.

1h agoHN ↗

It was, but in a different form. This is the first I've heard of a random recruiter bonus.

Companies often work with more than one job search agency but there they hired people to find someone - and they often found the same people. There was some incentive to find a good candidate as a bad reputation means you don't get hired to find the next.

I did have recruiters yell at me because I applied for the same job via multiple different recruiters. As if it was my problem to figure that out.

Finding a job when you don't know someone already there has always been a mess for both sides.

1h agoHN ↗

I wouldn’t personally refer anyone I’ve not worked with. What’s the point? Someone being smart isn’t enough, they have to be actually sane and normal to work with. You can be friends with people you wouldn’t want to work with. Someone I’ve not met would be a totally unknown quantity.

1h agoHN ↗

I would refer someone I'm friends with if I know them well, understand what they would be like to work with, and understand the job/company well enough.

After all, I've lived with some people that I never worked with. Surely I know them well enough to recommend them for jobs, even though I have not ever worked alongside them.

26m agoHN ↗

I wouldn't trust a referral from someone I don't work with either. Your reputation is on the line, if you don't have one to lose why should anyone care.

1h agoHN ↗

A referral program can have two very different purposes:

1. A trusted employee vouches for a potential employee they know personally or worked with before.

2. A way to collect applicants as an alternative or to complement job ads on page. This has the risk as other public referral programs, where it encourages affiliates to advertise the job in spammy and unethical ways, tarnishing the company's reputation.

A public referral program like targets the second purpose, while the author and many posters here assume it aims for the first.

1h agoHN ↗

What about a referral program + 5-10 interviews with no intent to hire?

36m agoHN ↗

This isn't a consequence of job referrals being public. It's a consequence of them being anonymous. If you saw the same referrer on all the referrals, it would be obvious that something is wrong. It should be obvious to the company that pays the referrals. Same problem as spam - if you can spam anonymously, spam gets out of hand.

Anyone seeing this from the hiring side?

32m agoHN ↗

I get a lot of these messages via LinkedIn. They say I'm a good candidate for a job, write something, and tell me if I'm interested to apply via <link>. If a recruiter wants a cut, I expect them to work for it. Me filling out a form isn't that.

Unsure if they are real recruiters, or bots. Most of the ones contacted me were based in either Nigeria or Pakistan.

24m agoHN ↗

I know it's prejudice, but anytime I click on a Profile and see either of those 2 countries, I immediately hit back and never ever respond/contact that person ever again. It sucks to be an actual good person from those countries, but I don't wanna be scammed