HN Explorer

Ask YC: Hacker News Feature Request - Gigs Page

33 points by PStamatiou ↗ HN
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.

43 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tbx
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

PStamatiou
in that case, if it's solely for karma, it wouldn't deteriorate the community imo.
tonyvt2005
I agree, but personally I wouldn't mind it going both ways (karma or $).
deltapoint
That brings up how much is a karma point worth in monetary terms?
aneesh
exactly zero dollars. if you tried to fix an exchange rate, you'd run into problems, because the supply of karma is infinite.
paulgb
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.

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

rms
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
Next think you know we'll have a currency exchange of karma points for dollars.
joshwa
writes business plan
aneesh
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.

cstejerean
you 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
here'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.

1gor
>the reason a Euro or USD has value is because there is a limited supply of them.

I thought thanks to Bernanke there is unlimited supply of USD.

TransientMuse
I'm inclined to agree.

Moreover, the US government basically prints money all the time... (in the metaphorical sense)

apathy
> (in the metaphorical sense)

Literal, as well. Paper money wears out and needs replacing.

mixmax
Karma is backed by gold didn't you know?
maxwell
I think the present limitation has more to do with the fact that karma is dolled out anonymously, which means there's no way to back up the legitimacy of your earnings from the status of your upvoters. It doesn't matter if karma is infinite, because there are a finite number of socially approved participants. This is why national currencies have value in the first place: because valuable organizations/individuals use them to transfer wealth. Money is just a communications medium, after all. One stuck in a pre-web mentality. Existing web currency manipulation systems are as primitive as a YouTube that only played TV in your web browser.

If you make karma transferable and allow negative values (thus creating debt and preventing runaway inflation), you could offer a genuine relativistic currency, in that individuals could back up the worth of their unit independently, without relying on trust in someone else (e.g. the state apparatus).

rms
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.

aston
Who would you think would want it? It's kinda tainted goods, no?

On the other hand, if you can convince PG you sold it to someone else, he might restore your rights...

rms
The username itself is pretty generic. I figure some people would love to have the huge karma number, with or without voting rights.

I'd start the auction at $0.01, I'm quite confident it would get some bids, especially with the proceeds going to charity.

maxwell
Plus, you get to pose as Stallman.
kirubakaran
It would be funny if Stallman himself buys that account on eBay :-)
davidw
Or he might simply nuke the account entirely to put the kibosh on that kind of dealing...
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
DanielBMarkham
I can't comment on the HN part of your comment, but I like the way you think, rms. People who design interactive web experiences do so under a lot of assumptions. Seems like you are always asking about the edge cases where the assumptions fall flat. What if I want to game the system to get as much karma as possible? What if I want to sell my karma -- it was my time I spent on the site, why shouldn't I own that effort I put in. Would it be any different than sitting side-by-side with another user and telling them how to work the site?

I have a feeling it ticks people off, but I like the questions. I think awesome business opportunities are built around folks who ask the same kind of askew questions that others don't consider. It's the lackeys following the main path of least resistance that have a harder time.

Good luck with your trip through the wilderness.

kirubakaran
> I think awesome business opportunities are built around folks who ask the same kind of askew questions that others don't consider.

I whole heartedly agree. I hope he gets his voting rights back. His comments are always insightful.

earle
stammy, you used to just IM me! what happened? ;)
PStamatiou
haha, will keep you in mind next time.
bap
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
thank you for injecting good sci fi references into this boring business discussion
Spyckie
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
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!
TrevorJ
Sure would change the face of the site. Personally, I enjoy the focused nature of the discussion here.
catgen
try www.assembla.com you can post gigs there.
suboptimal
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.