Photo by Supermuch

One of the hardest things about the recruiting process is having to turn down great potential hires because they're not a good fit with the positions we have. Most of my time at Jetpac these days is spent doing recruiting, so I've ended up with quite a few job-seekers I've been really impressed by, but that I can't hire myself. I've been sending them on piecemeal to friends, but I decided to set up something a bit more organized, so here's a mailing list you can join to see them:

https://groups.google.com/d/forum/youreallyshouldhire

Here's how the group works:

 - You must have a candidate's permission to post their details!

 - Anyone can post candidates, I just ask that you've at least emailed or spoken to them on the phone, to do the initial "Is she a serial killer?" screening.

 - There's no blind resumes, every post should give the full contact details for the candidate. 

 - This is focused on Bay Area tech startups. Feel free to start your own for other areas and industries, with my blessing.

 - This will only add value if it's mostly folks who are actively hiring at their companies, so I'll be moderating the list, hopefully with a very light touch.

If you're a jobseeker and want to be shared with some interesting tech startups, contact me through our jobs page and mention 'youreallyshouldhire'!

The 'Freedom Burger' I ate in Sitka, AK last week – a bacon cheeseburger between two grilled cheese sandwiches!

Heritrix – The open-source web crawler created by the Internet Archive, source is here. It's easy to get started writing a crawler, but there are a lot of deep issues you have to wrestle with if you want sophisticated features, so it's great to have production-tested code to reference.

The animals of O'Reilly – A wonderful initiative to highlight worthwhile wildlife projects, a lot of them involving fascinating technology hacks.

What makes Paris look like Paris? – Automatically extracting the visual elements that define a place.

MangoDB – MongoDB has been fine for the applications I've used it on, and the support has been top-notch, but some frustrated person has put way too much thought into this open-source parody.

Solr vs ElasticSearch – A good overview of how the two big open-source search frameworks stack up against each other. This quora thread has some informed opinions too.

Picture by Pete Kaminski

Dancing with handcuffs – the changing geography of trust in China - There's a lot to chew on in Tricia Wang's talk and notes, but it's fascinating to watch state censorship collide with social media, even if technology isn't a silver bullet against repression.

An archive of quotes – My friend Drew has put up a collection of quotes he's gathered by scraping news for download. I'm fascinated by hacks like these that rely on human conventions around the way we produce text, in this case looking for the formatting signatures that indicate that something's a quote.

Why are Americans so… – Another beautiful hack, this time using the data from Google's auto-complete to map the adjectives that are paired with different US states.

The free CDN – A little-known feature of Google's App Engine setup that gives you a content-delivery network for no extra charge!

Craigslist blocks search bots – I've been following the PadMapper/CL case closely, because it's putting the implicit bargain that publishers make with search engines under the spotlight. It's still unclear what's going on with the latest developments, but obviously Craig wants to keep the site showing up in search results but avoid handing over all his data to third parties. There's a whole long post I need to write with my thoughts about this.