It is real. I am the CTO and co-founder of Aha!, and also personally interview every engineer we hire.
A human reviews every job application we get, but unfortunately we can't respond to them all - we get thousands - but most of the applications are not related to the position requirements at all. I can tell you that if your resume matches what we are looking for then we typically schedule an interview within a few days. I see that you posted this same comment previously. Commenting was already locked by HN by the time I saw it then.
Why do I keep posting on HN? It works. The profile of engineers we have hired for our team, and the sorts of engineers who read HN has a great overlap. There are other things we look at too. Your Github profile is really important: people who contribute to open source have demonstrated their ability to work on a distributed remote team, but even more importantly it gives you a way to show that you can tackle interesting problems in interesting ways.
A human reviews every job application we get, but unfortunately we can't respond to them all - we get thousands - but most of the applications are not related to the position requirements at all. I can tell you that if your resume matches what we are looking for then we typically schedule an interview within a few days. I see that you posted this same comment previously. Commenting was already locked by HN by the time I saw it then.
Why do I keep posting on HN? It works. The profile of engineers we have hired for our team, and the sorts of engineers who read HN has a great overlap. There are other things we look at too. Your Github profile is really important: people who contribute to open source have demonstrated their ability to work on a distributed remote team, but even more importantly it gives you a way to show that you can tackle interesting problems in interesting ways.