The individual "Offer HN:" posts still occur and can be found through HN
search [1]. At one point in time, long ago, there was some push back on
too many "offer" posts [2], and pg responded by creating an /offerless
and /offers page [3,4]. They were simple but short-lived additions that
he made in the arc REPL so they didn't survive the next reboot.<p>The trouble with "Offer" posts is they can be fantastic when altruistic
and done purely for "hack-value" fun. Unfortunately, not everyone in the
world is altruistic, so if lots of offers are posted, then you end up
needing to wade through plenty of spammy or even manipulative offers. If
you know of a way of ascertaining actual human intentions, even through
the standard HN posting uniform of tin foil hats, then we might be able
to filter the various types of offer posts. ;-)<p>Earlier this year, someone started a "Help Me Out (HMO)" and/or "Help
You Out (HYO)" type post [5] but the title used was inconsistent. Since
the first one was well received, there was talk of it becoming a regular
monthly post like 'whoishiring' posts [6] but the idea petered out. I
cannot find the exact post, but when the idea of making it a monthly
feature was mentioned, our fearless HN moderator 'dang' warned that the
only one allowed to make automated monthly posts is the 'whoishiring'
bot.<p>[1] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Offer+HN#!/story/sort_by_date/prefix/0/%22Offer%20HN%22" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Offer+HN#!/story/sort_by_date/pref...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839723" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839723</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839808</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840060" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840060</a><p>[5] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7573172" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7573172</a><p>[6] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring</a>