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Comment by tbx | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

Maybe if postings were limited to users with > 50 karma or something so it couldn't be gamed.

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)

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

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.

if you start listing jobs here, people will come for the jobs, possibly bringing the quality down.

Even worse, recruiters will spam us with thousands of lousy jobs, bringing the quality down even faster.

in that case, if it's solely for karma, it wouldn't deteriorate the community imo.

I agree, but personally I wouldn't mind it going both ways (karma or $).

That brings up how much is a karma point worth in monetary terms?

exactly zero dollars. if you tried to fix an exchange rate, you'd run into problems, because the supply of karma is infinite.

if karma is stored as an integer..

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