WIH comments are the public/API-visible comment counts on the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” post, fetched from the HN Algolia Search API. Dead comments are excluded, so logged-in HN users with showdead enabled may see higher counts on Hacker News.

HN comments are all public/API-visible comments across Hacker News in that month (any post), estimated via the HN Algolia Search API.

Normalize means: WIH comments ÷ total HN comments, shown as “comments per 10k HN comments” to make month‑to‑month comparisons fairer.

Categories are assigned by keyword matching on top-level job comments only. Each job comment is assigned to the first matching bucket, otherwise “Other.”

Other includes comments that do not match a named category, including cryptography-specific terms.

• We select one “Who is hiring?” post per month (highest comment count if duplicates).
• We drop the first matching month from 2013 to avoid a partial historical boundary. The latest month is included, so it may be partial until month end.
• Monthly HN comment totals are computed by summing 2‑day buckets, and falling back to 1‑day buckets when Algolia marks a result as non‑exhaustive.
• The smoothing line is a 12‑month moving average over the selected series (raw or normalized).
• The category chart is a 100% stacked area (each month sums to 100%).

These are the exact regex/keywords used to assign categories, in order:

• Crypto/Web3: \bblockchain\b, \bweb3\b, \bdefi\b, \bnft\b, \bcrypto-?currency\b, \btoken(s)?\b, \bstablecoin(s)?\b, \bsmart contract(s)?\b, \bsolidity\b, \beth(ereum)?\b, \bbitcoin\b, \bbtc\b, \bcoin(s)?\b, \bon-?chain\b, \bwallet(s)?\b, \bexchange(s)?\b
• AI/ML: machine learning, \bml\b, deep learning, \bllm\b, nlp, computer vision, \bcv\b, gen ai, generative, transformer, diffusion, \bai\b
• Hardware/Robotics: hardware, firmware, embedded, \biot\b, robot, robotics, fpga, pcb, sensor, mechatronics, autonomous, drone
• Security: security, infosec, secops, \bsoc\b, threat, vulnerability, pentest, penetration, zero trust, \biam\b
• Fintech: fintech, payments, payment, card, banking, lending, mortgage, insurtech, trading, brokerage
• Health/Biotech: health, healthcare, medtech, biotech, clinical, pharma, genomics, lab
• Climate/Energy: climate, energy, renewable, solar, wind, battery, grid, carbon, sustainability
• Gaming: game, gaming, unity, unreal
• Mobile: \bios\b, android, mobile, react native, swift, kotlin
• Data/Analytics: data engineer, data science, analytics, \betl\b, warehouse, \bbi\b, \bsql\b, spark, big data
• Devtools/Infra: devops, \bsre\b, platform, kubernetes, \bk8s\b, cloud, \baws\b, \bgcp\b, \bazure\b, infra, observability, ci/cd, terraform