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Ask YC: Hacker News Feature Request - Gigs Page
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 19y agoif 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
- PStamatiou 19y agoin that case, if it's solely for karma, it wouldn't deteriorate the community imo.
- tonyvt2005 19y agoI agree, but personally I wouldn't mind it going both ways (karma or $).
- deltapoint 19y agoThat brings up how much is a karma point worth in monetary terms?
- aneesh 19y agoexactly zero dollars. if you tried to fix an exchange rate, you'd run into problems, because the supply of karma is infinite.
- PStamatiou 19y agoif karma is stored as an integer..
- paulgb 19y agoThat'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.
- PStamatiou 19y agoMaybe if postings were limited to users with > 50 karma or something so it couldn't be gamed.
- noodle 19y agoeven better, limit the ability for the job postings to even be viewed to only people with X karma. that would keep both the gig postings and respondents to people within the community. (i've seen it done elsewhere with reasonable success)
- danw 19y agoI dont think karma is related to coding ability. There are plenty of smart developers who simply dont waste time posting or commenting, whilst those with higher karma might have high karma because they are unproductive
- noodle 19y agothis is true, karma doesn't necessarily relate to coding ability. but that isn't the point. the point is to grow and develop a community.
- mechanical_fish 19y agoif 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.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- rms 19y agoOh 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 19y agoNext think you know we'll have a currency exchange of karma points for dollars.
- joshwa 19y agowrites business plan
- aneesh 19y agoagain, 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.
- cstejerean 19y agoyou don't fix the exchange rate, you let the market determine it. As the amount of karma increases it's possible for a value to decrease. But given how the dollar is doing, who knows what would happen.
- aneesh 19y agohere's a game theoretic explanation of why that's no good: okay, fine, let's have an exchange rate where karma gets less valuable as the amount of total karma increases. then me and my friend will upmod each other 1 karma, because we're each gaining 1 whole karma, but the devaluation we're causing is only losing us a fraction of a karma. With these incentives, everyone will upmod ... and the value of a karma point will tend towards zero.
- earle 19y agostammy, you used to just IM me! what happened? ;)
- PStamatiou 19y agohaha, will keep you in mind next time.
- bap 19y agoAt 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 19y agothank you for injecting good sci fi references into this boring business discussion
- Spyckie 19y agoI 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 19y agoI 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 19y agocereal? :P
- TrevorJ 19y agoSure would change the face of the site. Personally, I enjoy the focused nature of the discussion here.
- catgen 19y agotry www.assembla.com you can post gigs there.
- suboptimal 19y agoI'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.