

Ask YC: Hacker News Feature Request - Gigs Page - PStamatiou

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.<p>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.<p>Thoughts?<p>That being said I have a gig ready to post from a prominent web guy.. involving a database, opml/rss and some categorization.
======
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!

~~~
immad
cereal? :P

------
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.

~~~
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.

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

------
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...

------
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

~~~
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.

------
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.

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

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

~~~
PStamatiou
haha, will keep you in mind next time.

