Ask YC: Hacker News Feature Request - Gigs Page

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=139461

by PStamatiou • 18 years ago

33 41 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I think it would be nice to have a "gigs" section where people could post small gigs/scripts they need coded/help with and people post a price they're willing to pay.. or even transfer of karma.

Seems like a good way to help out the community and get money to the smart hackers here. I hate going down my AIM list when someone is looking for something quick done but I just don't have the time or know how.

Thoughts?

That being said I have a gig ready to post from a prominent web guy.. involving a database, opml/rss and some categorization.

tbx• 18 years ago

if it is about money, it can become easily into a (yet another) "rent-a-coder" startup...

but the idea is good, if you can keep the hacker's quality up

PStamatiou4• 18 years ago

in that case, if it's solely for karma, it wouldn't deteriorate the community imo.

tonyvt2005• 18 years ago

I agree, but personally I wouldn't mind it going both ways (karma or $).

paulgb• 18 years ago

That's the thing - there are a tonne of rent-a-coder clones, but I have a feeling the quality of coders on YC News is much higher than that of rent-a-coder. The problem is, if you start listing jobs here, people will come for the jobs, possibly bringing the quality down.

Perhaps limiting it to LISP, Haskell and Python jobs would work. Most of these sites target Java or PHP or Rails developers, so it's hard to find work in other languages.

PStamatiou4• 18 years ago

Maybe if postings were limited to users with > 50 karma or something so it couldn't be gamed.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

if you start listing jobs here, people will come for the jobs, possibly bringing the quality down.

Even worse, recruiters will spam us with thousands of lousy jobs, bringing the quality down even faster.

rms3• 18 years ago

Oh man... I'd love to pay karma to have people do programming jobs for me. Hell, if anyone wants to do a decent size but not particularly challenging job, I'll give you my account permanently.

Also, I think you're fine to just submit a cash job as a normal story.

dkasper• 18 years ago

Next think you know we'll have a currency exchange of karma points for dollars.

joshwa• 18 years ago

writes business plan

aneesh3• 18 years ago

again, you can't do this. it wouldn't work because karma is infinite. the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them.

if you did fix an exchange rate of karma to USD or whatever currency, you and a friend could just upmod each other's comments to get free money.

rms3• 18 years ago

I'm ready to sell my account on ebay and donate the proceeds to charity. Apparently karma is very important to some people. I have realized it is just a measure of how much I post here.

I'm very curious what the karma->cash conversion rate is. The only reason I haven't put the auction up yet is I feel the rms username is damaged because of my disenfranchisement. If 30 days from the original incident pg won't restore my voting rights, I'll ebay my account anyways.

earle• 18 years ago

stammy, you used to just IM me! what happened? ;)

PStamatiou4• 18 years ago

haha, will keep you in mind next time.

bap• 18 years ago

At the risk of interjecting fiction into a business discussion.

This whole thing 'karma vs cash' reminds me of the intersection between the way Cory Doctorow describes the 'Whuffie' reputation based currency in 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' and the way the the protagonist of Charlie Stross' 'Accelerando' makes his living in the first chapter or so of the book.

hooande• 18 years ago

thank you for injecting good sci fi references into this boring business discussion

Spyckie• 18 years ago

I think monetary transactions should stay out of hacker news because money attracts a crowd that is less than desirable and it is hard to keep them out.

Also, I don't think opening it up for help is a good idea either. The only kind of help that I would care about is high level design or algorithm/memory/time efficiency help. However, the only help most people ask for is "my code doesn't run" help. If there was a way to effectively minimize this, then maybe...

webwright• 18 years ago

I will offer 703 karma (plus whatever anyone will upvote this comment with) for another rails developer for RescueTime. I also cook breakfast for the entire team every day!

immad• 18 years ago

cereal? :P

TrevorJ• 18 years ago

Sure would change the face of the site. Personally, I enjoy the focused nature of the discussion here.

catgen• 18 years ago

try www.assembla.com you can post gigs there.

suboptimal• 18 years ago

I'm assuming deals already get done here on an informal basis, and that's probably a good way to go. Why not search previous posts (on one of the search sites), contact anybody who seems interesting or relevant, and in general just network with the coderati? Anyone interested probably has an e-mail address posted in his profile.

Ask YC: Hacker News Feature Request - Gigs Page

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