brusic/hacker-news-who-is-hiring-posts

Context

This dataset contains all first-level comments to Hacker News Who Is Hiring posts from April 2011 in various formats. All data is derived from the official Firebase API and no data cleansing has occurred with the exception for removing SEEKING FREELANCER from the start of such comments..

Who wants to be hired? and Seeking Freelancer posts are included. For privacy reasons, job seeker posts will not be included. Although the data is public, do not want to create an easily accessible permanent record.

Content

Each row contains the content for a single month which includes:

• —month: the month in mmmm yyyy format)
• —parent_id: the submission id
• —comments: list of comments for the given month.

A single row for each month so that the data can be easily appended to with new data. Threads are closed to new comments after two weeks so a new row can be appended to the start after the middle of the current month.

Updates

• —November 2025 Freelancer posts have been possibly removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45808797 All historical posts remain

• —May 2025 Seeking freelancers are now being saved in their own row. The data is interlaced by months, so the most recent posts will be in the first two positions.

• —April/May 2025 Starting with the May 2025 update (second half of the month), both hiring and seeking freelancer posts will be part of the dataset. The dataset with data up until April 2025 has been updated and the begining of the May 2025.

Formats

Data is available in compressed parquet, feather, pickle or uncompressed pickle formats

The data frame can be easily converted into a row-for-comment format

import pandas as pd

hiring_df = pd.read_parquet('hiring.parquet')

exploded_df = hiring_df.explode('comments').dropna().reset_index(drop=True).rename(columns={'comments': 'comment'})

comments_df = exploded_df.join(pd.DataFrame(exploded_df['comment'].tolist())).drop('comment', axis=1)