20 ms·

Show HN: Rabbits – Send an email to get any grunt-work programming job completed

256 points by brandonhsiao 12y ago

corbinpage 12y ago
I would love a way to join the "supply side" of this company aka pickup some quick scraping/scripting tasks for cash.
- thethinker1032 12y ago
  Agreed. This sounds like a fun thing to do when you have some spare time or are bored.
- mbrutsch 12y ago
  I suspect they'd get more applications for suppliers than requests for work.
  - otoburb 12y ago
    Once corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams realize that the definition of "simple, grunt-like programming task" could probably include Excel munging (e.g. VBA macros), I'm sure request volume will hockey-stick. Might need another example on their website, since the current ones are very developer-centric, which may not reflect their true positioning intent for the service.
    - jordanb 12y ago
      I'm friends with a business analyst at a bank. They use their Bangalore office to do data or excel munging tasks all the time. But it's an offshore office staffed by company employees. There's no way he'd be able to send his data tasks to an outside party. And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the bank to pay for it.
      - peteretep 12y ago
        > And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the > bank to pay for it. You're thinking about this wrong. Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects". No-one bats an eyelid when you expense $150 of programming help on your corporate card. Big companies have people use unofficial resource channels to get stuff done all the time.
        raghava 12y ago
        > Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects". Interesting. I would really like to know more about those 'strategic projects'.
        peteretep 12y ago
        They're any projects scheduled by someone more senior than you.
        webbrahmin 12y ago
        Good one :)
        kej 12y ago
        That still leaves the problem of sending internal data to outside parties. The accountants may be fine with the programming help, IT certainly shouldn't be.
    - huhtenberg 12y ago
      "Corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams" will quickly lose their jobs if they start handing out their precious in-house data to some random people on the Internets.
- Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
  At the bottom of the website: "Get in touch (we're hiring!)" Which is a mailto link for hello@ilikerabbits.com.
designml 12y ago
This looks like its good for a quick prototype for inexperienced devs (or non technical people or people who want to experiment). Depending on what work you can do, college students may ask you to do their homework.
- totoroisalive 12y ago
  And that is OK.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Hi, could you solve this thing called "n queens problem" for me within 3 hours? Thanks. Hmm.
mtimjones 12y ago
Remember, you get what you pay for. Check out the fine print for what you're giving away here.
- foxhedgehog 12y ago
  I don't see anything in the fine print about release of data, are you seeing something different?
  - coderdude 12y ago
    I feel like both of you are arguing for the same point.
ntalbott 12y ago
Love this: like 99designs for code. Bet you'll get a lot of pushback on this "devaluing coding" just like 99designs has for design, which just means you're on the right track. Of course it doesn't; it just commoditizes basic coding skills, and more importantly makes the accessible to a wider set of people. I especially liked the example that was scraping data off a bunch of pages and returning a spreadsheet/csv of the results; that's a great example of something a smart business person that thinks algorithmically can identify, but can't/won't implement themselves. I actually wonder if it would work well to target this service specifically at algorithmically minded business folks. Hope this works well for you - great idea, and looks well executed so far.
- wingerlang 12y ago
  This doesn't seem like 99designs does it? As far as I understand, 99designs pins 100s of designers against each others making many logos of which to choose from, which means that most of them works for free. This website is one team making what the client asks for, there's no competition. Unless that's what's happening behind the scenes.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    > Unless that's what's happening behind the scenes. I think something like that is what's happening behind the scenes. Maybe not the competition/spec work aspect, but certainly they're going to be outsourcing to loads of the cheapest workers they can find.
larrys 12y ago
The idea is good but they need to have both an "about" page, contact info, and remove the privacy on their whois. [1] If they aren't willing to disclose who they are I would have a problem with hiring them. [2] There is no reason for the business that they are in that they can't act like a business. [1] Use a business address, a po box, a relatives address or anything "legitimate". Cloaking in this case is just a turnoff. [2] I hire people to do things that I could use this for.
- adventured 12y ago
  I don't quite get the thinking behind not revealing that information for a commercial service. It's really not ok, regardless of if it's an mvp product, there are still minimum requirements. Two days of effort would get you to a basic presentation polish (privacy policy, terms, about, and more elaboration on the financial / payment side of things), along with a PO Box.
  - larrys 12y ago
    Many registrars have sold people on using whois privacy to "protect yourself against hackers and spammers". [1] Many end users either buy this argument or simply parrot what they see others doing (or not doing). There are legitimate reasons for privacy but as a general rule if you are a business it's a big mistake. On this page [1] it states that you will also "protect yourself from telemarketer". Well I am here to tell you (I also run a registrar that doesn't even offer privacy btw) that with thousands of domains under management we get perhaps 1 or 2 phone calls per week. And if we were to use a google voice number that wouldn't even be an issue. (Yes, thousands of domains ...) [1] https://www.name.com/whois-privacy https://www.name.com/whois-privacy
    - reustle 12y ago
      > Many registrars have sold people on using whois privacy to "protect yourself against hackers and spammers". I simply don't want to put my home address on the internet, and have no office address to use.
deleted 12y ago
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jordanb 12y ago
The examples don't seem very plausible (except perhaps the python one). In the case of website scraping, why not just pay Mechanical Turk? You apparently just need the data so why try to order it as a script? In the case of express.js, why would a programmer pay someone to follow a tutorial? You can't use the outcome (a completely unstyled blank website) for anything. The third example clarifies that building a themed website is out of scope. The python module is something I could maybe see somebody ordering, if they were a student trying to get their homework done by someone else, or maybe a programmer who isn't competent to do their job but needs to deliver some code now and again and is probably being given very basic assignments.
- rpedela 12y ago
  Mechanical Turk doesn't always produce great results for something like web scraping. It really depends on the particular website and data that is being scraped. Usually there is also significant setup involved so that MTurk produces good results regardless of the task. If Rabbits really can do web scraping cheap, fast, and well then it might be worth the money.
  - notastartup 12y ago
    Mechanical Turk gets expensive fast, and isn't very accurate, usually with any type of service, there's an overhead. What this seems like is a quick way to get grunt work done. I can see how web scraping can fit nicely. However, some student with a lot of free time won't value their time as much so they will write a scraper but someone like a manager with a busy engineering team can save a lot of time outsourcing tasks like this. Another solution is to use web scraping tool like https://scrape.it https://scrape.it to scrape a website even for complicated AJAX websites. After you know how to use it, it's way faster than writing a scraper from scratch. Disclaimer: I wrote scrape.it
  - icinnamon 12y ago
    If you need to scrape, check out Kimono... https://www.kimonolabs.com/ https://www.kimonolabs.com/
  - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dyadic 12y ago
"You should have it by 7:05 pm PST." -- From one of the examples. I have uneasy feelings about this. I know that you're targeting grunt-jobs and it's easily estimateable. But I also know that things happen and they can't always be met. If I'm going to send out a grunt-job then more often I care more about it being done well than being on time. If you're targeting quick turnaround over correctness then I imagine that I need to spend more time verifying the work, exactly what I don't want to be doing.
- siddboots 12y ago
  I had the same reaction to the examples. Even for "grunt-jobs", I would be extremely sceptical of anyone who can give me an ETA after thinking about the problem for less than five minutes.
- drawkbox 12y ago
  Agreed, these services or even outsourcing can sometimes lean towards getting done just to have it done by the date than by actually being complete with the task. I have actually worked with people before that turn in projects incomplete just to have it in by the business due date, then later say sorry it has this or that bug. They do the pretend it is working dance. Services like this tend to be the done rather than complete type of programmers unless it is an easily verifiable task. Any programmer knows, there are many stages of done and only one complete. Is your developer you get a done type of doer or someone who completes something?
sergiotapia 12y ago
So I have something you guys may be able to help with. I own SmiteCamp[0] and we're having trouble with our server status checker for months now because I just can't seem to find what IP address the game launcher pings to check if the server is up. I'm sure a complete novice with Wireshark or similar could find this out instantly, but I'm a complete newbie when it comes to things of that nature. Is this something you guys could help me with? Deliverables would just be a simple IP (or collection of IP's) so I can just ping it using Ruby in our Rails app. --- [0] - http://www.smitecamp.com http://www.smitecamp.com
- jedberg 12y ago
  I went to your site but I can't figure out how to download your game (it's a game right?). The "tips for new players" is lorem ipsum so I assume you're still building it? Regardless, if you can run the game on a Mac or Linux box, just open a shell and run this 'sudo tcpdump'. You'll see a bunch of background traffic and then you should see the connections to your hosts.
  - sergiotapia 12y ago
    I've tried that before and there's just so much traffic popping up that I can't make heads or tails of it. As for the game, we're just a fansite for a game we enjoy playing. Think: Wowhead.com -> World of Warcraft. SmiteCamp -> Smite
    - jedberg 12y ago
      Ah I got ya. Sounds like the other guys have you covered!
- brandonhsiao 12y ago
  Sounds like a well-defined task, so we've got you covered :) Send us an email and mention you're from HN in the subject line, and I'll take care of you myself.
- pki 12y ago
  There are different clusters (and a lot of them). 63.251.64.33 is one of the NA gameservers
icinnamon 12y ago
I emailed them a task to test it out, no response so far. Curious how "involved" of a task they're willing to do. It seems from their site speed is the top priority, which makes sense given the context of "I just need ___ built/working ASAP".
- malditojavi 12y ago
  I sent a request too. Not answer yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - malditojavi 12y ago
    24 hours later, never heard back. Great idea + bad execution = 1 lost potential client.
Animats 12y ago
I once tried "freelancer.com" on a simple job - I had a small Python program which would standardize WHOIS data from a domain registrar, with modules for about two registrars. I needed modules written for each of about a hundred registrars; they all have different formats. Three people crashed and burned on that. Nobody ever delivered.
- ejstronge 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what would you do with the data? I could help if you're still looking to have this done. My email is in my profile.
  - bramgg 12y ago
    Good luck with rate limit issues, I've been there.
    - anewhnaccount 12y ago
      Also been there with Nominet. Ended up implementing something with their special Domain Availability Checker only to find that it couldn't handle a single domain spanning two ip packets/tcp segments (wtf?!). After asking them about it a few time the official answer turned out to be: don't do that then.
    - troels 12y ago
      Proxies to the rescue. And take your time - whois data don't change that often and you can know in advance when it might (E.g. expiry date).
- pcthrowaway 12y ago
  Do you have to pay when people crash & burn? Either way, this kind of thing sounds like a bad proposition for someone.
- troels 12y ago
  If it's still relevant, I've found the Ruby whois lib (https://github.com/weppos/whois/tree/master/lib/whois/record/parser https://github.com/weppos/whois/tree/master/lib/whois/record...) to be quite comprehensive.
weixiyen 12y ago
Someone should make Magic for complicated tasks and more long-term projects. This will solve 3 of the biggest problems with freelancer sites 1) Not knowing who to choose for the job, I'd rather a good matchmaker just get me someone who can do my task 2) Lack of instant communication, clients get uneasy when programmers don't respond. 3) Negotiating a price point takes too long because of the infrequency of interaction
- woah 12y ago
  Sounds like a consultancy
- rattray 12y ago
  Have you looked into Toptal.com ? My experiences with them have been great on all these metrics. I've worked with them as a dev and referred a few happy friends. Email's in my profile if you'd like to hear more.
  - emilburzo 12y ago
    I wanted to interview with them (as a developer), but was turned off by their 'expectations' page, it sounded way too controlling/strict. How are they in that regard, and overall?
    - mgkimsal 12y ago
      I did interview, and found the tests far too difficult and not remotely like anything I've ever hit in 20 years of doing software development. Everything was rather computer-science-algorithmicy, and there was no ability to ask for clarification on aspects of the puzzle-questions that seemed ambiguous. Couple that with somewhat short time lines, and it was frustrating. In my 20 years, I've never not been able to ask a client or PM or end user for clarification on what they mean, but what I took from toptal is that you'll be expected to work under those conditions. It certainly weeds people out, and the whole "we'd rather weed good people out than let bad people in" mentality is probably understandable, it just rather felt like a "one size fits all approach". Interestingly, looking at their site now, I read "we do not tolerate sub-par work or poor communication for any reason." Except, of course, when taking their entrance tests - no communication for clarification there. FWIW, tests were from codility.com
frik 12y ago
How does it work? Do you use AI techniques in combination with US based human knowledge workers/students? Or do you outsource the task to Mechanical Turk / Asia based outsourcing company? Do you work together with a recruiting company? One can imagine that work seeking programmer have to deliver "homework exercises" that could be anonymised tasks of your site.
paolomaffei 12y ago
Would be interested to see the actual prices for the examples
timepiece 12y ago
More commoditization for the profession. You can't blame the capitalist for trying to make a buck here. According to them, pricing might be a bit imbalanced in favor of the programmers and then they would love to see a bigger piece of the pie taken from us and transferred to them the brokers and a small chunk back to clients.
- nmyk 12y ago
  Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. The ability to code is a commodity. By working class, I mean "not the capitalist class." There is still a big difference between programming and say, boilermaking. But in 2015, tech companies are the factories of last century. (We even call them software shops!) There is a spectrum of quality of course, and a lot of people take a lot of pride in their craft, especially when they do it well, noting the beauty of good code, etc. but at the end of the day, most people who make chairs, for example, are not the highly-paid turtlenecked Danish guy whose work is basically art that you can sit on...most people who make chairs work in factories and churn them out on an assembly line. So it is with programming. To your point, it certainly is in the interest of those who hire programmers to pay them as little as possible, given the nature of the economic system we find ourselves in. Consider also the trend of startups paying sub-market salaries and compensating with equity. The startup route certainly looks like a way to do programming while freeing yourself from the will of The Man (I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but you understand the vibe, I hope), but when you get right down to it, it's more of the same. Instead of corporate execs, you have investors. Instead of middle management, you have founders. The programmer is still just the programmer.
  - timepiece 12y ago
    Yeah, programmers/coders/hackers/developers are "proletarians" and not bourgeoisie since they trade their labor for monetary compensation. I don't know from where in my reply did you get this notion that I was implying that we developers are/should be classified as capitalists. Anyway, what's important is for you to distinguish between the concepts of labor as a commodity and the commoditization of labor. These marketplaces start out as facilitators in the market to bring more efficiency and vibrancy, increase overall transaction volume and value but over time they tend to get parasitical and feed off every "host" they could infect. So, basically my comment was a protest and critique of this specific business model of marketplaces and not to debate whether programmers have to join ranks with the bourgeoisie or not. But if you wanna debate capitalist societies, technological unemployment and the alarmingly increasing income inequality and the overhoarding behavior of resources by and with the aid of the bankers worldwide, that's a whole new thread to engage in.
jameshart 12y ago
Calling a task-oriented service 'Rabbit' seems worrying. Either you're unaware of the existence of TaskRabbit, in which case you haven't done basic market research and don't understand enough about this market to participate, or you know about TaskRabbit but don't understand the concept of trademark, in which case you may be fuzzy about other aspects of intellectual property - which is a red flag when you will be dealing in code, too.
- coderdude 12y ago
  Because they have "rabbit" in the name, everything they're doing is called into question? Ridiculous.
  - TylerE 12y ago
    Try launching an online auction site called "The Bay" and see how long it takes for you to get sued. My guess is hours.
    - danielsamuels 12y ago
      Possibly the worst comparison you could have made.
      - TylerE 12y ago
        Umm. How exactly? The original comparison n was Rabbits vs Taskrabbit.
  - notthemessiah 12y ago
    The last person who hired me as a consultant confused Square with Squarespace. The confusion is real, but not as much to us because we deal with keeping track of namespaces every day as programmers.
- bornabox 12y ago
  You're being overly harsh. TaskRabbit is about cleaning and handyman stuff, Rabbit is about programming jobs. Different areas, no chance to get the two confused. And calling a task-oriented service Rabbit, seems common sense, it's a very obvious choice and doesn't imply all the negative stuff you're mentioning.
xorcist 12y ago
These things are hard. If you can describe a simple programming task in non-ambiguous language, then that's your program right there. It might be in pseudocode, but transcribing it into a "real" language is trivial compared to describing the problem in the first place. If it's not, there is probably a programming tool closer to your problem domain that makes it easier. The biggest business opportunity here is probably helping out with office automation, because not all business minded people can code, not helping professional programmers with boring grunt work.
- netcan 12y ago
  These sorts of mediation services pop up often, so I understand where you;re coming from. I don't know anything about this one, so I'm talking generally: I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this service is really trying to solve the (impossible) problem that you lay out. This is more about hiring human labour in an efficient way than it is about making software. From the homepage, I think this is the most interesting example: Ok, so I can (1) scrape all the pages; (2) grab the name, address, and phone number of every listing; and (3) put all the listings into a CSV spreadsheet. This will be <price redacted> and take three hours. Is that ok?* Programming is is a useful skill for this task. For the right person, it's 3 hours work. For the "wrong" person, it could be 3 weeks. This type of exchange is a kind of economic fundamental. Economies are a long, long way from efficiencies and one of the biggest elements limiting them is what economists term "transaction costs." These are sometimes literal, like paying an attorney to write a contract. More often, it's a general communications difficulty. Solving those communication problems produces. Programming-oriented-tasks is not necessarily a bad place to explore.
  - mbesto 12y ago
    > For the right person, it's 3 hours work. For the "wrong" person, it could be 3 weeks. > How much do you charge? We never go over $300 One of these things is not like the other.
    - netcan 12y ago
ing33k 12y ago
is the pricing negotiable ?
brandonhsiao 12y ago
Hiya everyone, OP here. If you reached out to us in the last 14 hours, I'm sorry to say we probably haven't gotten back to you. We didn't anticipate this many responses-- we were expecting under 10 offers, and instead we got over 100-- and our management system is still really shoddy. For example, we're still copy and pasting your email into our admin dashboard to get your signup link. We're working on fixing/scaling things, but in the meantime I didn't want to insult everyone with an automated message, so hopefully this message can catch you before that frustrated comment! Also, we do intend to get back to everyone eventually. Just since we're on HN, if you have any thoughts to share feel free to reach out to me directly - bh at slimetree dot com
- kayge 12y ago
  >For example, we're still copy and pasting your email into our admin dashboard to get your signup link. Sounds like you need a grunt-work programming job completed! Sorry, couldn't resist... :) Good luck with your product, and congrats on launching!
dEnigma 12y ago
According to the Qualys Lab SSL Test[1] there are some problems with your https configuration (mainly POODLE vulnerability) [1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ilikerabbits.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ilikerabbits....
evertonfuller 12y ago
I gave this a try and first delivery was good. Sent another job and was promised delivery the other night, but haven't heard anything since and they don't reply to emails.

256 points by brandonhsiao 12y ago

corbinpage 12y ago

I would love a way to join the "supply side" of this company aka pickup some quick scraping/scripting tasks for cash.

thethinker1032 12y ago
Agreed. This sounds like a fun thing to do when you have some spare time or are bored.
mbrutsch 12y ago
I suspect they'd get more applications for suppliers than requests for work.
- otoburb 12y ago
  Once corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams realize that the definition of "simple, grunt-like programming task" could probably include Excel munging (e.g. VBA macros), I'm sure request volume will hockey-stick. Might need another example on their website, since the current ones are very developer-centric, which may not reflect their true positioning intent for the service.
  - jordanb 12y ago
    I'm friends with a business analyst at a bank. They use their Bangalore office to do data or excel munging tasks all the time. But it's an offshore office staffed by company employees. There's no way he'd be able to send his data tasks to an outside party. And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the bank to pay for it.
    - peteretep 12y ago
      > And even if he could, he wouldn't be able to get the > bank to pay for it. You're thinking about this wrong. Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects". No-one bats an eyelid when you expense $150 of programming help on your corporate card. Big companies have people use unofficial resource channels to get stuff done all the time.
      - raghava 12y ago
        > Bangalore office is busy today with "strategic projects". Interesting. I would really like to know more about those 'strategic projects'.
        peteretep 12y ago
        They're any projects scheduled by someone more senior than you.
        webbrahmin 12y ago
        Good one :)
      - kej 12y ago
        That still leaves the problem of sending internal data to outside parties. The accountants may be fine with the programming help, IT certainly shouldn't be.
  - huhtenberg 12y ago
    "Corporate business analysts, business intelligence or banking teams" will quickly lose their jobs if they start handing out their precious in-house data to some random people on the Internets.
Sir_Cmpwn 12y ago
At the bottom of the website: "Get in touch (we're hiring!)" Which is a mailto link for hello@ilikerabbits.com.

designml 12y ago

This looks like its good for a quick prototype for inexperienced devs (or non technical people or people who want to experiment). Depending on what work you can do, college students may ask you to do their homework.

totoroisalive 12y ago
And that is OK.
Dewie 12y ago
> Hi, could you solve this thing called "n queens problem" for me within 3 hours? Thanks. Hmm.

mtimjones 12y ago

Remember, you get what you pay for. Check out the fine print for what you're giving away here.

foxhedgehog 12y ago
I don't see anything in the fine print about release of data, are you seeing something different?
- coderdude 12y ago
  I feel like both of you are arguing for the same point.

ntalbott 12y ago

Love this: like 99designs for code. Bet you'll get a lot of pushback on this "devaluing coding" just like 99designs has for design, which just means you're on the right track. Of course it doesn't; it just commoditizes basic coding skills, and more importantly makes the accessible to a wider set of people. I especially liked the example that was scraping data off a bunch of pages and returning a spreadsheet/csv of the results; that's a great example of something a smart business person that thinks algorithmically can identify, but can't/won't implement themselves. I actually wonder if it would work well to target this service specifically at algorithmically minded business folks. Hope this works well for you - great idea, and looks well executed so far.

wingerlang 12y ago
This doesn't seem like 99designs does it? As far as I understand, 99designs pins 100s of designers against each others making many logos of which to choose from, which means that most of them works for free. This website is one team making what the client asks for, there's no competition. Unless that's what's happening behind the scenes.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  > Unless that's what's happening behind the scenes. I think something like that is what's happening behind the scenes. Maybe not the competition/spec work aspect, but certainly they're going to be outsourcing to loads of the cheapest workers they can find.

larrys 12y ago

The idea is good but they need to have both an "about" page, contact info, and remove the privacy on their whois. [1] If they aren't willing to disclose who they are I would have a problem with hiring them. [2] There is no reason for the business that they are in that they can't act like a business. [1] Use a business address, a po box, a relatives address or anything "legitimate". Cloaking in this case is just a turnoff. [2] I hire people to do things that I could use this for.

adventured 12y ago
I don't quite get the thinking behind not revealing that information for a commercial service. It's really not ok, regardless of if it's an mvp product, there are still minimum requirements. Two days of effort would get you to a basic presentation polish (privacy policy, terms, about, and more elaboration on the financial / payment side of things), along with a PO Box.
- larrys 12y ago
  Many registrars have sold people on using whois privacy to "protect yourself against hackers and spammers". [1] Many end users either buy this argument or simply parrot what they see others doing (or not doing). There are legitimate reasons for privacy but as a general rule if you are a business it's a big mistake. On this page [1] it states that you will also "protect yourself from telemarketer". Well I am here to tell you (I also run a registrar that doesn't even offer privacy btw) that with thousands of domains under management we get perhaps 1 or 2 phone calls per week. And if we were to use a google voice number that wouldn't even be an issue. (Yes, thousands of domains ...) [1] https://www.name.com/whois-privacy https://www.name.com/whois-privacy
  - reustle 12y ago
    > Many registrars have sold people on using whois privacy to "protect yourself against hackers and spammers". I simply don't want to put my home address on the internet, and have no office address to use.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jordanb 12y ago

The examples don't seem very plausible (except perhaps the python one). In the case of website scraping, why not just pay Mechanical Turk? You apparently just need the data so why try to order it as a script? In the case of express.js, why would a programmer pay someone to follow a tutorial? You can't use the outcome (a completely unstyled blank website) for anything. The third example clarifies that building a themed website is out of scope. The python module is something I could maybe see somebody ordering, if they were a student trying to get their homework done by someone else, or maybe a programmer who isn't competent to do their job but needs to deliver some code now and again and is probably being given very basic assignments.

rpedela 12y ago
Mechanical Turk doesn't always produce great results for something like web scraping. It really depends on the particular website and data that is being scraped. Usually there is also significant setup involved so that MTurk produces good results regardless of the task. If Rabbits really can do web scraping cheap, fast, and well then it might be worth the money.
- notastartup 12y ago
  Mechanical Turk gets expensive fast, and isn't very accurate, usually with any type of service, there's an overhead. What this seems like is a quick way to get grunt work done. I can see how web scraping can fit nicely. However, some student with a lot of free time won't value their time as much so they will write a scraper but someone like a manager with a busy engineering team can save a lot of time outsourcing tasks like this. Another solution is to use web scraping tool like https://scrape.it https://scrape.it to scrape a website even for complicated AJAX websites. After you know how to use it, it's way faster than writing a scraper from scratch. Disclaimer: I wrote scrape.it
- icinnamon 12y ago
  If you need to scrape, check out Kimono... https://www.kimonolabs.com/ https://www.kimonolabs.com/
- 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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dyadic 12y ago

"You should have it by 7:05 pm PST." -- From one of the examples. I have uneasy feelings about this. I know that you're targeting grunt-jobs and it's easily estimateable. But I also know that things happen and they can't always be met. If I'm going to send out a grunt-job then more often I care more about it being done well than being on time. If you're targeting quick turnaround over correctness then I imagine that I need to spend more time verifying the work, exactly what I don't want to be doing.

siddboots 12y ago
I had the same reaction to the examples. Even for "grunt-jobs", I would be extremely sceptical of anyone who can give me an ETA after thinking about the problem for less than five minutes.
drawkbox 12y ago
Agreed, these services or even outsourcing can sometimes lean towards getting done just to have it done by the date than by actually being complete with the task. I have actually worked with people before that turn in projects incomplete just to have it in by the business due date, then later say sorry it has this or that bug. They do the pretend it is working dance. Services like this tend to be the done rather than complete type of programmers unless it is an easily verifiable task. Any programmer knows, there are many stages of done and only one complete. Is your developer you get a done type of doer or someone who completes something?

sergiotapia 12y ago

So I have something you guys may be able to help with. I own SmiteCamp[0] and we're having trouble with our server status checker for months now because I just can't seem to find what IP address the game launcher pings to check if the server is up. I'm sure a complete novice with Wireshark or similar could find this out instantly, but I'm a complete newbie when it comes to things of that nature. Is this something you guys could help me with? Deliverables would just be a simple IP (or collection of IP's) so I can just ping it using Ruby in our Rails app. --- [0] - http://www.smitecamp.com http://www.smitecamp.com

jedberg 12y ago
I went to your site but I can't figure out how to download your game (it's a game right?). The "tips for new players" is lorem ipsum so I assume you're still building it? Regardless, if you can run the game on a Mac or Linux box, just open a shell and run this 'sudo tcpdump'. You'll see a bunch of background traffic and then you should see the connections to your hosts.
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  I've tried that before and there's just so much traffic popping up that I can't make heads or tails of it. As for the game, we're just a fansite for a game we enjoy playing. Think: Wowhead.com -> World of Warcraft. SmiteCamp -> Smite
  - jedberg 12y ago
    Ah I got ya. Sounds like the other guys have you covered!
brandonhsiao 12y ago
Sounds like a well-defined task, so we've got you covered :) Send us an email and mention you're from HN in the subject line, and I'll take care of you myself.
pki 12y ago
There are different clusters (and a lot of them). 63.251.64.33 is one of the NA gameservers

icinnamon 12y ago

I emailed them a task to test it out, no response so far. Curious how "involved" of a task they're willing to do. It seems from their site speed is the top priority, which makes sense given the context of "I just need ___ built/working ASAP".

malditojavi 12y ago
I sent a request too. Not answer yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- malditojavi 12y ago
  24 hours later, never heard back. Great idea + bad execution = 1 lost potential client.

Animats 12y ago

I once tried "freelancer.com" on a simple job - I had a small Python program which would standardize WHOIS data from a domain registrar, with modules for about two registrars. I needed modules written for each of about a hundred registrars; they all have different formats. Three people crashed and burned on that. Nobody ever delivered.

ejstronge 12y ago
Out of curiosity, what would you do with the data? I could help if you're still looking to have this done. My email is in my profile.
- bramgg 12y ago
  Good luck with rate limit issues, I've been there.
  - anewhnaccount 12y ago
    Also been there with Nominet. Ended up implementing something with their special Domain Availability Checker only to find that it couldn't handle a single domain spanning two ip packets/tcp segments (wtf?!). After asking them about it a few time the official answer turned out to be: don't do that then.
  - troels 12y ago
    Proxies to the rescue. And take your time - whois data don't change that often and you can know in advance when it might (E.g. expiry date).
pcthrowaway 12y ago
Do you have to pay when people crash & burn? Either way, this kind of thing sounds like a bad proposition for someone.
troels 12y ago
If it's still relevant, I've found the Ruby whois lib (https://github.com/weppos/whois/tree/master/lib/whois/record/parser https://github.com/weppos/whois/tree/master/lib/whois/record...) to be quite comprehensive.

weixiyen 12y ago

Someone should make Magic for complicated tasks and more long-term projects. This will solve 3 of the biggest problems with freelancer sites 1) Not knowing who to choose for the job, I'd rather a good matchmaker just get me someone who can do my task 2) Lack of instant communication, clients get uneasy when programmers don't respond. 3) Negotiating a price point takes too long because of the infrequency of interaction

woah 12y ago
Sounds like a consultancy
rattray 12y ago
Have you looked into Toptal.com ? My experiences with them have been great on all these metrics. I've worked with them as a dev and referred a few happy friends. Email's in my profile if you'd like to hear more.
- emilburzo 12y ago
  I wanted to interview with them (as a developer), but was turned off by their 'expectations' page, it sounded way too controlling/strict. How are they in that regard, and overall?
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    I did interview, and found the tests far too difficult and not remotely like anything I've ever hit in 20 years of doing software development. Everything was rather computer-science-algorithmicy, and there was no ability to ask for clarification on aspects of the puzzle-questions that seemed ambiguous. Couple that with somewhat short time lines, and it was frustrating. In my 20 years, I've never not been able to ask a client or PM or end user for clarification on what they mean, but what I took from toptal is that you'll be expected to work under those conditions. It certainly weeds people out, and the whole "we'd rather weed good people out than let bad people in" mentality is probably understandable, it just rather felt like a "one size fits all approach". Interestingly, looking at their site now, I read "we do not tolerate sub-par work or poor communication for any reason." Except, of course, when taking their entrance tests - no communication for clarification there. FWIW, tests were from codility.com

frik 12y ago

How does it work? Do you use AI techniques in combination with US based human knowledge workers/students? Or do you outsource the task to Mechanical Turk / Asia based outsourcing company? Do you work together with a recruiting company? One can imagine that work seeking programmer have to deliver "homework exercises" that could be anonymised tasks of your site.

paolomaffei 12y ago

Would be interested to see the actual prices for the examples

timepiece 12y ago

More commoditization for the profession. You can't blame the capitalist for trying to make a buck here. According to them, pricing might be a bit imbalanced in favor of the programmers and then they would love to see a bigger piece of the pie taken from us and transferred to them the brokers and a small chunk back to clients.

nmyk 12y ago
Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. The ability to code is a commodity. By working class, I mean "not the capitalist class." There is still a big difference between programming and say, boilermaking. But in 2015, tech companies are the factories of last century. (We even call them software shops!) There is a spectrum of quality of course, and a lot of people take a lot of pride in their craft, especially when they do it well, noting the beauty of good code, etc. but at the end of the day, most people who make chairs, for example, are not the highly-paid turtlenecked Danish guy whose work is basically art that you can sit on...most people who make chairs work in factories and churn them out on an assembly line. So it is with programming. To your point, it certainly is in the interest of those who hire programmers to pay them as little as possible, given the nature of the economic system we find ourselves in. Consider also the trend of startups paying sub-market salaries and compensating with equity. The startup route certainly looks like a way to do programming while freeing yourself from the will of The Man (I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but you understand the vibe, I hope), but when you get right down to it, it's more of the same. Instead of corporate execs, you have investors. Instead of middle management, you have founders. The programmer is still just the programmer.
- timepiece 12y ago
  Yeah, programmers/coders/hackers/developers are "proletarians" and not bourgeoisie since they trade their labor for monetary compensation. I don't know from where in my reply did you get this notion that I was implying that we developers are/should be classified as capitalists. Anyway, what's important is for you to distinguish between the concepts of labor as a commodity and the commoditization of labor. These marketplaces start out as facilitators in the market to bring more efficiency and vibrancy, increase overall transaction volume and value but over time they tend to get parasitical and feed off every "host" they could infect. So, basically my comment was a protest and critique of this specific business model of marketplaces and not to debate whether programmers have to join ranks with the bourgeoisie or not. But if you wanna debate capitalist societies, technological unemployment and the alarmingly increasing income inequality and the overhoarding behavior of resources by and with the aid of the bankers worldwide, that's a whole new thread to engage in.

jameshart 12y ago

Calling a task-oriented service 'Rabbit' seems worrying. Either you're unaware of the existence of TaskRabbit, in which case you haven't done basic market research and don't understand enough about this market to participate, or you know about TaskRabbit but don't understand the concept of trademark, in which case you may be fuzzy about other aspects of intellectual property - which is a red flag when you will be dealing in code, too.

coderdude 12y ago
Because they have "rabbit" in the name, everything they're doing is called into question? Ridiculous.
- TylerE 12y ago
  Try launching an online auction site called "The Bay" and see how long it takes for you to get sued. My guess is hours.
  - danielsamuels 12y ago
    Possibly the worst comparison you could have made.
    - TylerE 12y ago
      Umm. How exactly? The original comparison n was Rabbits vs Taskrabbit.
- notthemessiah 12y ago
  The last person who hired me as a consultant confused Square with Squarespace. The confusion is real, but not as much to us because we deal with keeping track of namespaces every day as programmers.
bornabox 12y ago
You're being overly harsh. TaskRabbit is about cleaning and handyman stuff, Rabbit is about programming jobs. Different areas, no chance to get the two confused. And calling a task-oriented service Rabbit, seems common sense, it's a very obvious choice and doesn't imply all the negative stuff you're mentioning.

xorcist 12y ago

These things are hard. If you can describe a simple programming task in non-ambiguous language, then that's your program right there. It might be in pseudocode, but transcribing it into a "real" language is trivial compared to describing the problem in the first place. If it's not, there is probably a programming tool closer to your problem domain that makes it easier. The biggest business opportunity here is probably helping out with office automation, because not all business minded people can code, not helping professional programmers with boring grunt work.

netcan 12y ago
These sorts of mediation services pop up often, so I understand where you;re coming from. I don't know anything about this one, so I'm talking generally: I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this service is really trying to solve the (impossible) problem that you lay out. This is more about hiring human labour in an efficient way than it is about making software. From the homepage, I think this is the most interesting example: Ok, so I can (1) scrape all the pages; (2) grab the name, address, and phone number of every listing; and (3) put all the listings into a CSV spreadsheet. This will be <price redacted> and take three hours. Is that ok?* Programming is is a useful skill for this task. For the right person, it's 3 hours work. For the "wrong" person, it could be 3 weeks. This type of exchange is a kind of economic fundamental. Economies are a long, long way from efficiencies and one of the biggest elements limiting them is what economists term "transaction costs." These are sometimes literal, like paying an attorney to write a contract. More often, it's a general communications difficulty. Solving those communication problems produces. Programming-oriented-tasks is not necessarily a bad place to explore.
- mbesto 12y ago
  > For the right person, it's 3 hours work. For the "wrong" person, it could be 3 weeks. > How much do you charge? We never go over $300 One of these things is not like the other.
  - netcan 12y ago

ing33k 12y ago

is the pricing negotiable ?

brandonhsiao 12y ago

Hiya everyone, OP here. If you reached out to us in the last 14 hours, I'm sorry to say we probably haven't gotten back to you. We didn't anticipate this many responses-- we were expecting under 10 offers, and instead we got over 100-- and our management system is still really shoddy. For example, we're still copy and pasting your email into our admin dashboard to get your signup link. We're working on fixing/scaling things, but in the meantime I didn't want to insult everyone with an automated message, so hopefully this message can catch you before that frustrated comment! Also, we do intend to get back to everyone eventually. Just since we're on HN, if you have any thoughts to share feel free to reach out to me directly - bh at slimetree dot com

kayge 12y ago
>For example, we're still copy and pasting your email into our admin dashboard to get your signup link. Sounds like you need a grunt-work programming job completed! Sorry, couldn't resist... :) Good luck with your product, and congrats on launching!

dEnigma 12y ago

According to the Qualys Lab SSL Test[1] there are some problems with your https configuration (mainly POODLE vulnerability) [1]https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ilikerabbits.com https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=ilikerabbits....

evertonfuller 12y ago

I gave this a try and first delivery was good. Sent another job and was promised delivery the other night, but haven't heard anything since and they don't reply to emails.