Show HN: Barter Hack – trade your technical skills for other people's | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Barter Hack – trade your technical skills for other people's

barterhack.com

73 pointsUptrenda55 comments

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.

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

I don't know, why aren't you surprised?

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.

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

Have fun: http://cixtor.com/pastio/uh895n

Haha, oh the temptation!

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

You evil bastard! (I love it)

Do respect the site. It's not nice to rain on other people's parades

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!

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 :)

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 ;]

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.

Exactly, plus all the other highly specialized parts of product development like UX, graphics design, PR, sales, customer support, security ... etc.

>Are you going to be posting this on the marketing version of HN Good idea. I might post it later after I've cleaned up the spam.

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)?

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.

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.

Also money is easier to store than favours

But perhaps not as valuable

Depends who owes you favours ;)

Money is favors owed recorded on paper.

No one thinks it's necessary; it's just fungible and storable, and therefore more practical than barter.

Value-matching with barter is really hard. Maybe I'm a neurosurgeon and I want to buy some novelty shot glasses. Must I perform neurosurgery for the shot glass salesman? That's a very asymmetric trade.

Maybe you can advice about neurosurgery, and in return get what you want. I like about these is that it avoid taxes, and that's always a plus.

You're expected to pay tax on the value of barter in many places. Not sure about the US but in Canada you are.

Not that anyone does, but if the CRA comes knocking you could be in trouble. :)

In the US this is incorrect, it's classified as barter income: http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

"An example of bartering is a plumber exchanging plumbing services for the dental services of a dentist. You must include in gross income in the year of receipt the fair market value of goods or services received from bartering."

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.

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 ?

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.)

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.

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

Nice idea.

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.

I'm suddenly hungry for a Klondike bar.

But what would you do for it?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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.")

I've lost count of the times I thought of some "revolutionary" concept and it was just a super annoying and pretentious way to say money. blah

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

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

There's a Designer News: https://www.designernews.co/

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

Can offer: sex

Wants in return: sex

Title: sex4sex

Okay.

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.

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.

I agree, and things could end up quite messy without categories. Will try think of something simple to start with.

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!

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

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?

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.

I see what you mean and thanks

Interesting.

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

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.

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