

Ask YC: Why not give away your old stuff here? - rokhayakebe

HN is a community mostly made (I think) of frugal entrepreneurs. All of us have a few things (electronics, programming books etc..) sometimes that we may not be using and that we would not mind giving away to someone if they paid for shipping. So why not post those giveaways here and select a winner from the community?<p>The nice aspect of HN, is that some level of trust has already been built using the Karma system and you can easily go back and read someone's comments/submissions to get a feel of who they are.<p>Now for the self plugin: I am looking for a mint condition ATT phone if you have one collecting dust. Thanks all.
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russell
No. I come here for news and comments, not used stuff. If I had to wade
through another Craigslist or eBay I wouldn't bother. It dilutes the
franchise,

~~~
rokhayakebe
Well every now and then you get a random question about food, about movies,
and other interesting subjects that are necessarily related to most topics
discussed on HN. So I think a few random posts about your extra stuff would
not hurt.

EDIT: This giveaway could not work anywhere else unless there is a trust
system built into the community that was not based on sharing "stuff".

~~~
russell
I agree that other stuff is interesting, even book reviews, movies, and
politics, but I don't think HN should be a classified advertising space.

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old-gregg
Good beginning but mediocre ending, your post reads like an average Hollywood
movie. A _used cell phone_? Come on.

There are more "hackery" things we can exchange without USPS involvement.

I am looking for a skeleton sample of building an Outlook plugin, Xobni-style,
with potential cotchas solved.

~~~
jodrellblank
Hrm, if Python's OK, I think I've seen one either in the examples of the Win32
extensions, or the SpamBayes project has an Outlook extension (not a skeleton
though).

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beholden
Check out Freecycle.org. They are linked to Yahoo now so you need a yahoo
account but i find the service quite good. However it isn't good enough to
find something specific you are looking for - essentially it's hit and miss.

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cubicle67
Freecycle varies area to area. We were active members of freecycle Canberra
which was a great group, but freecycle Perth is pretty crappy and seems lorded
over by some self appointed email nazi.

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ieatpaste
If someone would suggest a service with an open marketplace and group
instances, we could probably go there. Or we could just make one.

~~~
alaskamiller
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451866>

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Xichekolas
I'm willing to donate the following books to anyone willing to pay the
shipping ($4.95 for priority mail, a bit more if you want a confirmation
number):

Agile Web Development With Rails: David Heinemeier Hansson (Paperback, 2005)
ISBN-10: 097669400X | ISBN-13: 9780976694007

Rails Recipes: Chad Fowler (Paperback, 2006) ISBN-10: 0977616606 | ISBN-13:
9780977616602

I'm the original owner of both and they are in perfect shape.

~~~
Xichekolas
Well that was quick! Sold out!

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spydez
AT&T uses SIM cards. So do the cheap pay-as-you-go phones from Walmart, etc.
So buy a phone for $10, swap SIM cards, and you're good.

~~~
ieatpaste
I worked on these. The phone's price is subsidized into the card pricing, so
they would loose money if you could do that. They had us design them that
there could be no swapping (they are locked to the pay-as-you-go sims).
Unlocking requires both software and hardware modifications - at least the
phones we made.

~~~
drewcrawford
This must be a recent development, because I made extensive use of this trick
(1-2 years ago?). Specifically, the $10 walmart ATT go phones worked fine with
the contract (3G) SIMs.

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tocomment
I have a Nokia s60 I could send you, but I think the keypad doesn't work. It's
fine though if you have people call you and then use the menu to look them up.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Thanks ToComment. I am emailing you. The incoming address is 1000app.

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davidw
If someone wants programming books (or other stuff) in Innsbruck, Austria,
we're going to be moving shortly:-)

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PStamatiou
I know this thread is not highly looked upon, but I have been trying to sell a
new Rev A Macbook Air + Superdrive and case for 1400 obo. email in my sig.

