Warren Seen

I’ve just pushed the initial version of Hash#Jobs live. The site is a quick and dirty twitter filter to pull out all the job-related tweets from the twitter stream.

from the about page:

Hash#Jobs aggregates tweets that contain the following tags from twitter:
#job, #jobpost, #NAJ, #HAJ, #employment, #recruiting, #hiring
If you want your tweet to appear here, simply add one of those tags.

Some day, in the future, Hash#Jobs might be smarter, through the wonders of bayesian classifiers and other cool things like text clustering. No promises.

I built Hash#Jobs initially for myself, since I’m looking for new gigs, but figured, what the hell, for $12 bucks worth of domain registration, I might as well share it with the world. If one person gets a job out of it then it will have been worthwhile. It was also a fun excuse to play with Sinatra, I think someone said it’s like camping, but without the magic mushrooms. I’d have to agree…

I haven’t considered whether I could or should make money off something like this… I doubt I’d turn over more than the cost of the DNS or hosting, so not sure if it’s worth the effort.

I’d like to improve the system over the coming days to include clustering, as re-tweets show up and can very quickly fill a single page with repetitive information. I’m also toying with the idea of a Bayesian classifier to try and weed out what is and isn’t a genuine job post. It remains to be seen if 140 chars will be enough to get a meaningful result out of a Bayesian tool.

So anyway, there you have it, if you find it useful, feel free to drop me a comment and let me know. Also, please pass it on to someone who’s looking for a job if you think they can use it.

I’ve forked the Rails auto_complete plugin to add support for the following usage:

<% form_for(@foo) do |f| %>
  <%= f.text_field_with_auto_complete :bar %>
<% end %>

This fork also supports nested fields_for calls:

<% form_for(@foo) do |f| %>
  <% f.fields_for(@foo.baz) do |baz_f| %>
    <%= baz_f.text_field_with_auto_complete :quux %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

You can find my fork on Github, here.