Ask HN: Is there a Stack Overflow clone that pays money for answers?

I would think a platform for some kind of micro-consulting would be more interesting, rather than just question answering, because such questions may be so niche that you're unlikely to find someone who can just answer off the top of their head, but you might find someone who could provide a reasonable answer with a few hours of research and investigation.

As for your specific question, why would you assume that "running a Lua compiler in the browser" is an easy thing to do ? I would say that unless someone has already developed that integration and made it available chances are that it would actually be a significant project to implement.

Perhaps fengari, as suggested by another commenter, would do what you need. Presumably it must include a Lua byte compiler, so the question is whether it provides access to the byte compiled code (though why anyone would need to byte compile Lua in the browser but not run that code is beyond me).

Micro-consulting sounds like hell. Sales are a huge drag on any expert trying to capitalise. By the very nature of their business they need fewer but larger deals.

So the "sales" part is what the platform has to provide, in order for it to be valuable.

I may be wrong but I think finding a person for micro consulting should be quite easy even now.

And for LUA issue and why I think it's easy thing to do. I found at least few solutions for running Lua VM in a browser with emscripten. I read about running ffmpeg in browser.

It's all about changing some configuration and compiling the code to be used with web assembly. The solution for what I need is a single command. But knowing nothing about c++ I find it hard to compile lua compiler instead of lua VM. And because I need several versions of lua - fengari is not an option, but it's sure an interesting project I may use somewhere else.

I actually had the same thought/idea just this morning.

At $dayjob I consult with various teams, some of them developing new web apps to deploy on the cloud. Some of these groups are scientists with minimal computer science experience, and no clue about cloud architecture, devops, or even basic software development best-practices.

In a mere hour of glancing at their code, I could provide them with valuable tips that cut days or even weeks off their development time, massively improved performance and security, etc...

There are many solo developers or small teams out there that could benefit from peer review of their code by someone much more experienced, but their org just doesn't have anyone available with that skill.

So "code review as a service" might be a pretty awesome thing. Grant the review SaaS access to your Git repo, approve access to some subset of the files, and it'll pick someone with the skills that match the contents. E.g.: for C# code it'll find an experienced C# dev.

The system could provide some safety nets such as automatically masking secrets. Similarly, it could perform a search & replace to hide product names or company names.

Genuinely very interested to hear an instance where you were able to cut weeks off development time.

Many instances, and in some cases it was more like months or even years.

One large government department struggles to hire skilled application architects, because they can only pay public service rates in a highly competitive market. The only hires they can get are 6 month contracts for relatively inexperienced architects who use the job to pad out their resume and then immediately move on to private industry. To make their resumes look good, they throw the kitchen sink at every design.

A recent project was a simple web app that's an extension to an existing web app. It implements trivial things such as adding sign-in to an otherwise static site, some email notifications, mobile push, reporting, and the like. Nothing fancy.

They were a couple of months into development, and they already had:

- Multiple web apps

- Multiple API apps

- A "mid-tier" behind the above

- Dozens of lambdas/functions

- Logic apps and workflow apps

- Multiple databases

- Multiple Kubernetes clusters despite most of the above running on a different PaaS platform already.

- ETL jobs for copying data between databases that can directly access each other.

- All of the above stretched across both Azure and AWS, just for funsies.

Etc...

It looks really impressive on a high level architecture diagram! Fantastic in a resume.

But it's a ton of work for a developer to implement, and achieves nothing. Microservices and lambdas/functions have their place, but not for a single-person web dev project!

Throwing out 90% of the "moving parts" from the design probably saved a year or two all by itself.

Then I started demonstrating how to use storage emulators for local development, how to manage dev/tst/uat/prd configurations, how to get logs and debug dumps from the PaaS environments in the cloud, etc...

That workflow stuff alone would save weeks or months, easily.

All this took was just a couple of hours of chatting.

Another meeting was less than an hour, and while the guy was scrolling through his code I yelled "Stop!" because I saw a reference to a low-level cryptography primitive. He had started trying to implement authentication and authorisation "from the ground up". I suggested using a popular JWT library instead.

Just showing a developer how to use an APM tool like Application Insights or New Relic can cut weeks off the troubleshooting time over the lifetime of a project.

I own a software consultancy[1], and work with Lua. It sounds like you want to run different versions of luac(1) in the browser, but not lua(1). Correct?

On a separate note, marek_leisk2 is correct. I have clients who I can bill for 15 minutes at a time, but it's because they are already established clients with me.

Edit: Sounds like this was just one example. Feel free to email andrew@andrewmcwatters.com or reply here and we can talk through that problem further if you want. No charge.

As a quick reply and to be honest, unless you absolutely need this running in a browser, I'd just take a $12/yr VPS[2], pipe source to luac, then return its output to your users. It's less than maintaining luac builds with JavaScript integration points of multiple versions of Lua.

[1]: https://www.andrewmcwatters.com/

[2]: https://my.racknerd.com/aff.php?aff=2502

I used to work for HackHands where you could get assigned to help people out with programming problems in real time and get paid.

It was mostly fun but also a bit sketchy. Frequently I'd wind up helping students with their CS homework which is questionable but usually pleasant work.

Occasionally I'd run into a "hard case" such as the person who wanted me to make changes to the production SQL Server database where it wasn't clear to me that he had permission to make the changes and I didn't want to be responsible for messing the system up. (Which would have been a risk no matter what but I hadn't admined a SQL server database in years at that point.)

Such website would surely require a good terms of service and some kind of moderation to avoid any shady events from happening.

HackHands was acquired, I will take a look at what PluralSight is about, but it's not definitely a QA website with a price listed near the topics.

I think you are looking for something like Experts Exchange:

https://go.experts-exchange.com/

I use codementor for this exact situation, usually when I'm exploring something new and I wanna get insight and advice into best practices.

You hire somebody at a certain rate per hour then you set up a joined zoom session and go from there.

There have been a few times when I answered someone's question on usenet or irc, and it turned into a more in-depth discussion where they hired me for small consulting engagements. I don't think there needs to be any middleman web site for informal things like that to pop up. I had thought Stack Overflow itself let people note in their profiles that they were available for hiring or consulting. I believe Github also does that. Regarding your specific Lua question, maybe you could just offer a bounty. I also have to wonder why you want Lua in the browser since you already have Javascript.

I have seen several websites where you can attach a bounty to a question. StackOverflow does that with reputation, but I have seen some sites do it with money.

First relevant result on Google (not a recommendation): https://bountyquestion.com/

I think you might want to change your perspective a little bit and think about what value this system could offer for the problem solvers other than compensate for their time and attention.

(Why would I spend 15 minutes reading your post and writing this comment if I am not getting paid?)

I think Quora or CodeMentor might be a good place to ask that kind of question. ISTR that CodeMentor has a way that you can pay to get short-term help like you need.

The closest I know is https://issuehunt.io/

Did you check out: https://fengari.io/ by any chance?

never seen that before. It seems nice, I may use it some day.

It doesn't solve my Lua issue unfortunately - I need several versions of lua - and fengari seems to implement lua 5.3.

Also the lua thing is just an example. I had many of such "not trivial, not too much" + "i don't really care, i need an answer and never go back to it" situations. I still long for StackOverflow with money offer for a solution.

try using Upwork or another Contracting Platform and post a job of "Expert Lua compiler consultant needed" with a one-time job fee of $250 (or pick your number). Then, filter their available talent by Lua and reach out to 20-50 contractors with Lua in their description, asking if they're interested in this job.

It sounds like more work than doing the implementation yourself.

Codementor