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Comment by asher_ | Hacker News Reader

I love this idea. I'm going to bookmark it and give it a shot when I get stuck on something that I need done in a hurry.

My thoughts: 1. The bootstrap theme is fine imo, unlike what others are saying. I'm assuming this is an MVP to see if you can get traction, and in this case the functionality is more important than the aesthetics. You'll obviously want to change this later on though.

2. Let me filter open bounties, or at least move those to the top of the list.

3. Your tag filters don't look like they are working properly. If I click 'javascript' for instance, I only get one record.

4. Can we set custom time limits? For small coding tasks, I don't want to wait a week to have them done.

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Thanks for the great feedback!

2. That feature is forthcoming 3. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll fix that. 4. It started that way, but then I realized the time limit wouldn't have much impact on when the bounty actually gets answered, because solution providers compete to answer as soon as possible. So in the interest of simplicity I decided to make it a week. I'll consider changing it back. In practice, most tasks have been solved well before the deadline.

My thoughts on the time limits...

I have wanted a service like this a dozen or so times this year, and each time it has been when I'm stuck on a problem that I need to get sorted ASAP. If I have time, I'll figure it out myself (that's part of the fun).

I usually want a solution within minutes/hours rather than in a week. I would happily offer relatively high bounties for solutions if I get them quickly, but if I have a problem and I have to give people a week to complete it, what happens when I solve it myself the next day?

This might not be the standard use case, I don't know. But I had an SQL query I was struggling with a few days ago that would have been fairly easy for an SQL expert to correct and I would have happily put up a $50-100 bounty for it, provided It was done in a few hours.

In any case, I love the service, and I will certainly test it out next time I get stuck on something!

Thanks for your thoughts. I see what you mean about the time limit- I imagine that use case (people needing solutions quickly) will be quite common, so I'll look for a way to address it. My concern with adding time limits was that a shorter one might not increase answering speed (but it does seem that it would in most cases).

Agreed - I've wished for just such a service in the past and can totally see myself trying this out. I see it as a means to an end when you're punching above your weight, programmatically speaking.

I think a higher minimum with a 50% charitable guarantee might work better. $20 is probably enough to keep quality high (on the supply side) and definitely enough to attract skilled coders.

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