I scraped every "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread from January 2025 to May 2026 plus 5 other public job boards, then ran a full analysis on what the dataset actually says — vs what you think it says. Below: 13 sections, every chart sourced, every number reproducible.
Counted across every JD in the tech-filtered subset (n=6,539). Python is #1 — but TypeScript + React together describe a frontend stack present in roughly 1 in 4 postings, comparable in scale to Python.
Tracking 16 languages, only showing those with non-zero presence. The Python lead is 7 percentage points over TypeScript, and the gap widens further from there. Rust has firmly overtaken Java in HN-flavored hiring.
React appears in 22.0% of tech postings. Vue+Angular+Svelte combined account for less than half of that. Next.js shows up in 5.5%, which is striking — it means roughly 1 in 4 React jobs explicitly mention the Next.js stack.
Tailwind appears in twice as many postings as it did a year ago. Stack inertia is real, but at the trend level the CSS-in-JS era looks over.
AWS appears in 15.0% of postings. GCP 5.9%. Azure 3.0%.
That's roughly a 3:1 ratio of AWS to GCP and 5:1 AWS to Azure in HN-tier hiring. The "multi-cloud" narrative doesn't show up in JDs — postings strongly bias toward a single provider.
PostgreSQL appears in 15.0% of postings — the same share as AWS. MySQL barely registers; the gap to Postgres is ~5x. Redis dominates caching; MongoDB still hangs around but is shrinking year-over-year.
Tracking 15 markers of the modern AI/ML stack. LLM shows up in 11.5% of all tech postings — meaning roughly 1 in 9 tech jobs now explicitly touches LLMs. Anthropic mentions narrowly beat OpenAI in the dataset (3.24% vs 2.86%), which is a notable shift from 2024 when OpenAI dominated 5:1.
PyTorch appears in 133 postings. TensorFlow in 39. That's a 3.4× margin in favor of PyTorch across 17 months.
The contrarian wrinkle: TensorFlow is the fastest-trending framework in the most recent 3-month window (+120% vs prior 3). Real comeback or sampling noise? Open question — but worth watching.
Note: covers explicit framework mentions in JD bodies. Doesn't capture "we use X internally" job-board categories or roles where ML is implied but unstated.
Of roles with "Senior" in the title that explicitly state YoE requirements, 65% ask for 5 years or less.
The median for "Senior" is 5 years. For "Staff": 10. The big jump is Senior → Staff, not Mid → Senior. If you have 5 YoE and aren't applying to Senior roles, you're underselling — by 2-3 years' worth of compensation.
Of the 418 postings with an explicit minimum YoE, the largest bucket is 3-5 years by a clear margin. Only ~7% ask for 10+ years.
Translation: if you're 3-5 years in and feel "junior," the market disagrees. The HN-tier hiring band is overwhelmingly mid-senior, not staff+.
Skill mention frequency in the most recent 3 HN months vs the prior 3. Positive = rising. Filtered to skills with ≥5 prior-period mentions to avoid noise.
956 postings (~15% of dataset) include an explicit USD comp range — a major shift from the "competitive salary" era of 3 years ago.
Median band: $150K – $210K. 25th-75th percentile band: $120K – $250K.
53% of postings are remote, keeping US-equivalent salaries in play for globally distributed teams.
For each of the top 15 skills: the 5 most common partner skills, plus how often each partner appears in the same JD as the primary. The percentages are conditional — given the JD mentions the primary, what % of the time does it also mention the partner?
326 postings mention "founding engineer" / "founding software" / "founding member" — that's 5% of the entire dataset.
The stack is heavily TypeScript + React + Python. LLM shows up in nearly 1 in 4 founding-engineer postings — the AI wave is the dominant story behind the founding-engineer hiring boom.
Tracking 30 well-worn phrases. The good news for HN: "self-starter" appears in only 0.6% of postings — about an order of magnitude below typical corporate JDs. HN posters write meaningfully better JDs.
% of postings on each source that mention each of the top 5 skills. HN over-indexes massively on the modern stack (Python, TypeScript, React, AWS) — Arbeitnow (Europe-heavy) and The Muse (corporate-heavy) skew differently.
./run_pipeline.sh. Open-source under MIT for the code.
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