
Show HN: Barter Hack – trade your technical skills for other people's - Uptrenda
http://www.barterhack.com/
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gooseus
I think perhaps this would be better as a consulting/training exchange...
seems to be a lot of criticism related to the disparity of required time/skill
in coding a website and making a logo.

I'd be more willing to offer web consulting in exchange for marketing/pr
consulting where all we're exchanging is time and technical opinion.

Or else offering some set amount of time training in a skill like
javascript/css/html in exchange for some training in something like cooking
(someone mentioned cookies?) or personal finance.

In both cases while the we could argue about the value of each skill, the time
exchange would at least be even.

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itengelhardt
Why am I not in the least bit surprised that the #1 offer currently is
"programming in exchange for sex"?

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itsybitsycoder
Currently the top 2 offers are "nothing for everything" and "ass for ass".

Someone else may have gotten confused between the two fields because they're
offering to give people head in exchange for PHP.

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bliti
This needs submission filtering. Otherwise I can't take it seriously. Right
now it looks like a troll site.

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guessmyname
Have fun: [http://cixtor.com/pastio/uh895n](http://cixtor.com/pastio/uh895n)

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Uptrenda
Recaptcha added. I have foiled your evil plans (for now at least.)

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csmattryder
This is perfect for the one-man-band programmers amongst us, myself included!
While programmers can build great tech, we rarely have the marketing/PR
knowhow to actually get it out there into people's hands (lord knows I'm
useless at selling my products).

Are you going to be posting this on the marketing version of HN, and other
such places. I wouldn't mind knocking out a Rails site for a batch of cookies!

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pweissbrod
Seriously? That excellent! I make wonderful cookies. Please build me a site
that facilitates programming work in exchange for a batch of cookies. Once it
is complete to my satisfaction I will send you a batch of cookies :)

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nosuchthing
Do I get to dictate the specifications of the cookies and advise revisions, or
would you just be doing a tube of premade cookie dough?

I'll throw up a static css framework for a batch of homemade cookies ;]

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pweissbrod
For this work I will send you a batch of homemade javascript cookies.

If you send me a link to rent-a-coder I promise to send you some chips ahoy.

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allencoin
So it looks like this is specifically for people with technical skills to
offer their services in exchange for services from people with non-technical
skills.

Is that on purpose, or do you also want people with non-technical skills to
offer their services in exchange for technical services (or is there too much
of that already)?

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Uptrenda
It's a strange idea that we're come to accept money as being a necessary
prerequisite for the exchange of utility but that's not always the case.

Let me know what you think.

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jklein11
I don't think its so strange at all. Money eliminates the double necessity of
wants bartering requires. For example, in a barter economy, a cobbler could
only get milk as often as a dairy farmer needs shoes. The fact that we trade
money as opposed to goods allows people to develop specialized skill sets.

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andreabedini
Also money is easier to store than favours

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h_o
But perhaps not as valuable

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balabaster
Depends who owes you favours ;)

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krebby
There's also OurGoods, a more generalized (and less programmer-specific) swap
network. It's been around for a while and has a thriving community.

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skillachie
Nice idea. I have tried to barter my development services for art pieces and
so on before. Do they have a general barter site at all ?

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Uptrenda
I'm not sure to be honest. I did do some basic research before creating Barter
Hack and there didn't seem to be any good services for technical skills
(although I might be wrong about this.)

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meesles
Pretty good idea, but I would let people add more details, customize posts,
add links to portfolios or link to social media so we know they aren't some
random creep.

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Uptrenda
True - things like Github profiles, LinkedIn, maybe some simple ways to verify
ownership (if not already easy to do via some API.)

Nice idea.

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Uptrenda
Lets say that you're working on a part of a project that sucks and you're not
very good at it. What I find interesting is the possibility of swapping work.
For instance: two people with opposite problems:

1\. Alice: "I would rather be coding Python, not this front end crap."

2\. Bob: "I would rather be coding front end stuff, not crappy Python."

3\. They decide to swap tasks.

4\. They both win.

Seems people have already figured this out.

I wonder what other use-cases there might be.

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yellowapple
I'm suddenly hungry for a Klondike bar.

~~~
itsybitsycoder
But what would you do for it?

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johnchristopher
I'd be very interested about the who, what and how of that. Is that open-
sourced ? What tech ? There are few usable app/website for exchanging services
(aka LETS). There is communityforge (based on drupal), bliive (closed-source),
timebanking (python) and an old ASP out-of-date package.

~~~
Uptrenda
UI is a simple AJAX web app written in JQuery. Look and feel is bootstrap.
Database is MySQL. Backend is PHP. Communication between UI and backend is
JSON.

It's a really simple app overall - will open source it later today.

And I agree about usability. When I Googled for services like this they all
looked like spammy sites from the early 2000s and I didn't want to register
just to post a simple ad. (Ironically due to lack of captcha Barter Hack now
looks the same but this was only a quick prototype, lol.)

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Uptrenda
Haha, looks like some people had some fun with this. 10/10\. That's what I get
for being lazy I guess (I'll add a captcha to the post form today and delete
the current spam.)

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Seems this idea has some potential but needs
a lot of improvement first.

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werber
This would be great if it was trimmed down to a few concrete categories
relevant to devs and marketers, and done in a timebank fashion. It be awesome
to have a place to go to build up favors when you're in a slump with your own
work.

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mentos
ha maybe we could come up with a currency to keep track of these favors :P

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Uptrenda
That's where things like cryptographic IOUs could very well be of interest and
I think it's a good idea (although you would have to be careful not to
reinvent money like people have said as the lack of money is a core benefit of
the "product.")

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manuu
This is a good idea, now you have to post in the HN of designers and marketers

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mangeletti
Link please (haven't been to this HN-like site you describe, but sounds
interesting).

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dceddia
There's a Designer News:
[https://www.designernews.co/](https://www.designernews.co/)

There's also a handy mashup site with HN, ProductHunt, and DN all on one page:
[http://thenews.im](http://thenews.im)

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golergka
Can offer: sex

Wants in return: sex

Title: sex4sex

Okay.

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t2015_08_25
I like it! Probably needs some categorization, b/c it's hard to control
whether people will barter sewing for cheeseburgers or C for javascript, etc.
But a great start, keep going.

~~~
itsybitsycoder
It would also be nice to be able to search both ways. Right now searching only
shows what the other person is offering, but it might be nice to search by
what they want. That way you can search by the skills you have to see what you
can get for them.

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ArekDymalski
This is a nice idea. I think you should define more precisely who is the
target: people looking for/offering small taks or bigger projects/time
commitments. Good luck!

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username3
Does this have threeway bartering or more? If not, we could have a bartering
tickets aka money.

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eevilspock
Site breaks with Javascript off.

I like the popups instead of page loads, but since I'm building out an new
website myself, I'd like to know whether you lose too many users depending on
JS. Any good data on this?

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Uptrenda
I might be wrong about this but I'd say that the majority of websites out
there would break without Javascript. That's not to say that you can't
"gracefully degrade" functionality if Javascript isn't enabled, but from my
perspective the bigger problem isn't with losing users - it's with having your
content harder (or impossible) to crawl by search engines.

I'm going to have to change a few things around for Barter Hack so that the
listings show up in Google. Google Bot can run -some- Javascript but I doubt
it will be able to crawl a service like this.

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Uptrenda
I see what you mean and thanks

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maz1b
Interesting.

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sudo_bang_bang
This needs a potentially NSFW tag. Looked at this while working and quickly
had to close it due to some questionable content.

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jarradhope
Not all skills are equal - they have no innovation in terms of quantifying
time/skills? I feel like they'll end up re-inventing money and markets in
order to do so.

For this reason I'm doubtful of this sites longterm future.

This is not a nice idea.

