Hacker News Reader

Great idea.

As someone who wants a small project to try out a new framework, this seems like a great site to find projects.

It might be helpful to have users flag tasks that they are working on, so that others can get a sense of how many people are currently working on an answer.

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Thanks for the feedback! That's an interesting idea. Right now, registered users can click "I'm working on it" on a given bounty to privately signal to the bounty creator that they have started work. I was hesitant to make the list of current workers public because it might dissuade other would-be solution providers from answering, since they might assume that the other user is almost done with the problem (when they might not have done anything at all). I might add in some kind of "I'm working on it" track record for each user, so people can see how often they actually solved problems they said they'd be working on. Thanks for bringing that up.

Hmmm... I guess I am worried about the opposite. The fact that lots of people might be working on it and I might be wasting my time.

Perhaps allow partial answers?

I have seen this happen often with StackOverflow. Were a person gives a one line answer to start things off, and then within 30 minutes elaborates the answer to a very detailed one.

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