HN Hiring Trends

io.github.alialtunarv0.1.0Updated Oct 1, 2026

Skill demand trends, salaries and job search from Hacker News Who is hiring threads. No API keys.

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Overview

AI-generated overview

Analyzes Hacker News "Who is hiring?" threads to report skill demand trends, remote and visa shares, salary medians, and searchable job posts.

What it does
Reads every monthly Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread and parses each job post for company, work arrangement, visa sponsorship, salary range, and mentioned skills. Tools include hiring_snapshot for a monthly overview, skill_demand for month-by-month shares of up to ten skills, rising_skills for the biggest gainers and losers among about seventy skills, search_jobs for filtering posts by terms, remote-only, or visa, and hiring_threads for available months. Two prompts generate a monthly hiring report and a skill outlook.
When to use it
Useful when deciding which technologies to learn or hire for, comparing demand for languages and frameworks over time, or finding remote or visa-sponsoring roles in the Hacker News hiring threads without reading hundreds of posts. Best treated as one slice of the market rather than a complete jobs picture.
Requirements
Runs locally over stdio as a PyPI package launched with uvx, so uv must be installed. No API keys or accounts are needed. It calls the public HN Algolia API, so network access is required, and past months are cached on disk under ~/.cache/hn-hiring-trends.
Before you install
Read-only: it queries public Hacker News data and does not post, apply, or modify anything. Salary figures come only from stated yearly ranges, roughly a quarter of posts, and skill matching is keyword-based, so context such as "nice to have" is not distinguished from "required". Results skew toward startups, remote work, and US/EU tech.

Installation

In SourceWeft

  1. Open HN Hiring Trends in the dashboard and add it to a workspace.
  2. Enable the server for the chats that should use its tools.

Desktop only via STDIO. STDIO servers start a local process, so they need the SourceWeft desktop host.

Other MCP clients

Follow the launch instructions in the repository.

README

hn-hiring-trends-mcp

Which skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? An MCP server that reads every Hacker News "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread (one per month, 250–500 job posts each) and turns them into skill demand trends, remote and salary stats, and searchable job posts.

No API keys. One line to install.

You:    Which skills gained the most demand on HN hiring threads this year?Claude: [rising_skills(months=12)]        • "AI agents" went from 11.3% to 14.7% of job posts (+3.4 pts); in          September 2026 alone it was in 17.4% of posts.        • Python +2.5 pts, LLM +2.1 pts.        • Frontend fell 4.3 pts and React 2.7 pts.

Summarized from real tool output: Oct 2025–Sep 2026, 3,788 job posts.

[Rising and falling skills on HN Who is hiring, by hn-hiring-trends]

Why

You want to knowWithout itWith hn-hiring-trends
Is Rust (or Go, or Elixir) worth learning?Gut feeling, hype on Xskill_demand shows its share of job posts, month by month
What's rising in tech hiringRead 400 posts a monthrising_skills ranks ~70 skills by change
Who's hiring remote Rust devs with visa sponsorshipCtrl-F across threadssearch_jobs(["Rust"], remote_only=True, visa_only=True)
What a senior engineer earnsScattered postshiring_snapshot gives median and middle-half salary from stated ranges

How it works

mermaid
flowchart LR    C[Claude / MCP client] -->|tool call| S[hn-hiring-trends-mcp]    S --> A[HN Algolia API: monthly threads + all top-level job posts]    A --> P[Parse: company, remote/hybrid/onsite, visa, salary range]    P --> K[Skill matching: ~70 tuned patterns, or any phrase you pass]    K -->|shares, trends, matching posts| C

A post "mentions" a skill once no matter how often it repeats it, so shares are "% of job posts asking for X". Ambiguous words get tuned rules: Go doesn't match "go-to-market", C doesn't match "Series C", Java doesn't match "JavaScript". Past months never change and are cached on disk (~/.cache/hn-hiring-trends).

Install

Requires uv.

Claude Code

bash
claude mcp add hn-hiring-trends -- uvx hn-hiring-trends-mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.json)

json
{  "mcpServers": {    "hn-hiring-trends": {      "command": "uvx",      "args": ["hn-hiring-trends-mcp"]    }  }}

Tools

ToolWhat it does
hiring_snapshotOne month: post count, remote/hybrid/onsite and visa shares, salary medians, top skills
skill_demand% of posts mentioning each of 1–10 skills, month by month, with the change
rising_skillsBiggest gainers and losers among ~70 skills (recent half vs earlier half of the period)
search_jobsPosts mentioning all your terms; filter remote-only or visa; returns company, header, salary, link
hiring_threadsThe monthly threads available

Prompts: monthly_hiring_report (a shareable monthly summary), skill_outlook ("should I learn X, Y or Z?").

Try these

  • "Should I learn Rust, Go or Elixir? Use 18 months of HN hiring data."
  • "Write this month's HN hiring report."
  • "Find remote Python jobs that mention LLMs and sponsor visas."
  • "What's the median salary in posts that mention Kubernetes?"

Limits

  • One slice of the market: HN skews toward startups, remote work and US/EU tech.
  • Skill matching is keyword-based; context like "nice to have" is not separated from "required".
  • Salaries are parsed from stated yearly ranges only (about a quarter of posts state one).

Part of the keyless MCP series

Open-source MCP servers that answer one market question each, with public data and no API keys.

ServerQuestion it answers
review-miner-mcpWhat do users hate about competitor apps and games? (App Store + Steam reviews)
pricing-time-machine-mcpHow did a SaaS pricing page change over the years? (Wayback Machine)
hn-hiring-trends-mcp (this one)Which skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? (HN Who is hiring)
model-price-radar-mcpWhat does each LLM cost, and did it get cheaper? (OpenRouter + price history)
launch-detector-mcpWhat is a company about to launch? (certificate transparency logs)

Development

bash
uv sync --extra devuv run pytest                          # offline tests with a mocked Algolia APIuv run python scripts/smoke_live.py    # live check against hn.algolia.comuv run --with rich python scripts/demo.py 12   # terminal demo (vhs docs/demo.tape records the GIF)npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv run hn-hiring-trends-mcp   # click-through UI

MIT © Ali Altunar

Source: README.md at commit 1c623b9

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Version history

1
  1. v0.1.0LatestOct 1, 2026