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Ask HN: Is there a Stack Overflow clone that pays money for answers?

22 points by dzek69 4y ago

I'm having a problem with StackOverflow - it's usually about basic programming stuff. Sometimes I work on a kind of niche this and asking questions about those gives you no answers (or weird off topic answers). From what I know I can't offer money for solution there, but I think that's the only way I could attract someone and actually get an answer. I feel that more poeple may share the same feeling. I'm not looking for a job offering websites, it's not about doing the whole project for me - it's about letting me just skip the part I can't solve. It's also not about trying to monetize answers for trivial questions. I helped hundreds of people already in the past and I understand the value of knowledge sharing. An example: I need to run Lua compiler (not Lua VM or something) in a browser. I'm totally not experienced with c++, emscripten, wasm, etc and I'm not interested right now. I just want to embed this solution into my frontend app. Not a whole project taking days/weeks/months, not a trivial question about centering images in a box. Is there something like that already? Do you feel that is something you want to exist? (BTW: If you feel brave - feel free to steal this idea and make it into reality if it not exist.)

uberman 4y ago
Did you check out: https://fengari.io/ https://fengari.io/ by any chance?
- dzek69 4y ago
  never seen that before. It seems nice, I may use it some day. It doesn't solve my Lua issue unfortunately - I need several versions of lua - and fengari seems to implement lua 5.3. Also the lua thing is just an example. I had many of such "not trivial, not too much" + "i don't really care, i need an answer and never go back to it" situations. I still long for StackOverflow with money offer for a solution.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I used to work for HackHands where you could get assigned to help people out with programming problems in real time and get paid. It was mostly fun but also a bit sketchy. Frequently I'd wind up helping students with their CS homework which is questionable but usually pleasant work. Occasionally I'd run into a "hard case" such as the person who wanted me to make changes to the production SQL Server database where it wasn't clear to me that he had permission to make the changes and I didn't want to be responsible for messing the system up. (Which would have been a risk no matter what but I hadn't admined a SQL server database in years at that point.)
- dzek69 4y ago
  Such website would surely require a good terms of service and some kind of moderation to avoid any shady events from happening. HackHands was acquired, I will take a look at what PluralSight is about, but it's not definitely a QA website with a price listed near the topics.
tgflynn 4y ago
I would think a platform for some kind of micro-consulting would be more interesting, rather than just question answering, because such questions may be so niche that you're unlikely to find someone who can just answer off the top of their head, but you might find someone who could provide a reasonable answer with a few hours of research and investigation. As for your specific question, why would you assume that "running a Lua compiler in the browser" is an easy thing to do ? I would say that unless someone has already developed that integration and made it available chances are that it would actually be a significant project to implement. Perhaps fengari, as suggested by another commenter, would do what you need. Presumably it must include a Lua byte compiler, so the question is whether it provides access to the byte compiled code (though why anyone would need to byte compile Lua in the browser but not run that code is beyond me).
- marek_leisk2 4y ago
  Micro-consulting sounds like hell. Sales are a huge drag on any expert trying to capitalise. By the very nature of their business they need fewer but larger deals.
  - jononor 4y ago
    So the "sales" part is what the platform has to provide, in order for it to be valuable.
- dzek69 4y ago
  I may be wrong but I think finding a person for micro consulting should be quite easy even now. And for LUA issue and why I think it's easy thing to do. I found at least few solutions for running Lua VM in a browser with emscripten. I read about running ffmpeg in browser. It's all about changing some configuration and compiling the code to be used with web assembly. The solution for what I need is a single command. But knowing nothing about c++ I find it hard to compile lua compiler instead of lua VM. And because I need several versions of lua - fengari is not an option, but it's sure an interesting project I may use somewhere else.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
ccvannorman 4y ago
try using Upwork or another Contracting Platform and post a job of "Expert Lua compiler consultant needed" with a one-time job fee of $250 (or pick your number). Then, filter their available talent by Lua and reach out to 20-50 contractors with Lua in their description, asking if they're interested in this job.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  It sounds like more work than doing the implementation yourself.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
I own a software consultancy[1], and work with Lua. It sounds like you want to run different versions of luac(1) in the browser, but not lua(1). Correct? On a separate note, marek_leisk2 is correct. I have clients who I can bill for 15 minutes at a time, but it's because they are already established clients with me. Edit: Sounds like this was just one example. Feel free to email andrew@andrewmcwatters.com or reply here and we can talk through that problem further if you want. No charge. As a quick reply and to be honest, unless you absolutely need this running in a browser, I'd just take a $12/yr VPS[2], pipe source to luac, then return its output to your users. It's less than maintaining luac builds with JavaScript integration points of multiple versions of Lua. [1]: https://www.andrewmcwatters.com/ https://www.andrewmcwatters.com/ [2]: https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502 https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502
hbcondo714 4y ago
I think you are looking for something like Experts Exchange: https://go.experts-exchange.com/ https://go.experts-exchange.com/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
GuB-42 4y ago
I have seen several websites where you can attach a bounty to a question. StackOverflow does that with reputation, but I have seen some sites do it with money. First relevant result on Google (not a recommendation): https://bountyquestion.com/ https://bountyquestion.com/
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
I think Quora or CodeMentor might be a good place to ask that kind of question. ISTR that CodeMentor has a way that you can pay to get short-term help like you need.
ontouchstart 4y ago
I think you might want to change your perspective a little bit and think about what value this system could offer for the problem solvers other than compensate for their time and attention. (Why would I spend 15 minutes reading your post and writing this comment if I am not getting paid?)
throwaway81523 4y ago
There have been a few times when I answered someone's question on usenet or irc, and it turned into a more in-depth discussion where they hired me for small consulting engagements. I don't think there needs to be any middleman web site for informal things like that to pop up. I had thought Stack Overflow itself let people note in their profiles that they were available for hiring or consulting. I believe Github also does that. Regarding your specific Lua question, maybe you could just offer a bounty. I also have to wonder why you want Lua in the browser since you already have Javascript.
shudza 4y ago
Codementor
throwaway675309 4y ago
I use codementor for this exact situation, usually when I'm exploring something new and I wanna get insight and advice into best practices. You hire somebody at a certain rate per hour then you set up a joined zoom session and go from there.
aaron695 4y ago
pajko 4y ago
The closest I know is https://issuehunt.io/ https://issuehunt.io/

overview 4y ago
Genuinely very interested to hear an instance where you were able to cut weeks off development time.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Many instances, and in some cases it was more like months or even years. One large government department struggles to hire skilled application architects, because they can only pay public service rates in a highly competitive market. The only hires they can get are 6 month contracts for relatively inexperienced architects who use the job to pad out their resume and then immediately move on to private industry. To make their resumes look good, they throw the kitchen sink at every design. A recent project was a simple web app that's an extension to an existing web app. It implements trivial things such as adding sign-in to an otherwise static site, some email notifications, mobile push, reporting, and the like. Nothing fancy. They were a couple of months into development, and they already had: - Multiple web apps - Multiple API apps - A "mid-tier" behind the above - Dozens of lambdas/functions - Logic apps and workflow apps - Multiple databases - Multiple Kubernetes clusters despite most of the above running on a different PaaS platform already. - ETL jobs for copying data between databases that can directly access each other. - All of the above stretched across both Azure and AWS, just for funsies. Etc... It looks really impressive on a high level architecture diagram! Fantastic in a resume. But it's a ton of work for a developer to implement, and achieves nothing. Microservices and lambdas/functions have their place, but not for a single-person web dev project! Throwing out 90% of the "moving parts" from the design probably saved a year or two all by itself. Then I started demonstrating how to use storage emulators for local development, how to manage dev/tst/uat/prd configurations, how to get logs and debug dumps from the PaaS environments in the cloud, etc... That workflow stuff alone would save weeks or months, easily. All this took was just a couple of hours of chatting. Another meeting was less than an hour, and while the guy was scrolling through his code I yelled "Stop!" because I saw a reference to a low-level cryptography primitive. He had started trying to implement authentication and authorisation "from the ground up". I suggested using a popular JWT library instead. Just showing a developer how to use an APM tool like Application Insights or New Relic can cut weeks off the troubleshooting time over the lifetime of a project.