Ask HN: Whatever happened to Offer HN?

7 points by RDDavies 11 years ago | 3 comments

I remember every once in a while a few years back, a group of folks would offer their services, gratis, to startups, for a couple hours a week or the like, in exchange for exposure, potential for future paying work, or simply experience.

I've got a good friend who is just getting into development (and hell, even I) who could benefit from this sort of thing again.

jcr 11 years ago |

The individual "Offer HN:" posts still occur and can be found through HN search [1]. At one point in time, long ago, there was some push back on too many "offer" posts [2], and pg responded by creating an /offerless and /offers page [3,4]. They were simple but short-lived additions that he made in the arc REPL so they didn't survive the next reboot.

The trouble with "Offer" posts is they can be fantastic when altruistic and done purely for "hack-value" fun. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is altruistic, so if lots of offers are posted, then you end up needing to wade through plenty of spammy or even manipulative offers. If you know of a way of ascertaining actual human intentions, even through the standard HN posting uniform of tin foil hats, then we might be able to filter the various types of offer posts. ;-)

Earlier this year, someone started a "Help Me Out (HMO)" and/or "Help You Out (HYO)" type post [5] but the title used was inconsistent. Since the first one was well received, there was talk of it becoming a regular monthly post like 'whoishiring' posts [6] but the idea petered out. I cannot find the exact post, but when the idea of making it a monthly feature was mentioned, our fearless HN moderator 'dang' warned that the only one allowed to make automated monthly posts is the 'whoishiring' bot.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Offer+HN#!/story/sort_by_date/pref...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839723

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840060

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7573172

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

MichaelCrawford 11 years ago |

I've been contemplating doing that as well, however it had not occurred to me to do it through HN.

What I can offer is debugging, performance optimization and resume screening. I don't have any specific requests for what I ask of clients in return, other than that they say nice things about me to their colleagues.

brudgers 11 years ago |

It was a great spontaneous idea the first time around. Since, OfferHN has increasingly correlated with "will work cheap." An effect of the evolving community I suppose.