On "Challenge HN": Request for Comments on a Protocol | Hacker News Reader

On "Challenge HN": Request for Comments on a Protocol

17 pointseru4 comments

Please have a look at the discussion following http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199967

The idea is that we will introduce a tag "Challenge HN", where the submitter describes a challenge for the users of Hacker News. I suggest that the submitter should also be the judge by default and barred from competition, unless noted otherwise.

Some people have volunteered to sponsor small prices to spice things up. While everyone can just decide what to sponsor on their own, like-minded sponsors could also form groups and use, say, approval voting to decide on one challenge to sponsor each week. That may help to focus attention.

I have pledged 10 Pounds a week for the winner's charity of choice. jacquesm will match that in Euros (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200094).

Any comments? I know that we do not have to standardize on any one protocol.

Also placing bets on HN and finding counterparties and an arbiter in the spirit of http://www.longbets.org/ would be interesting.

I'm all for it, I was actually quite surprised by the number of people that joined in. And the sportsmanship of the 'hare' (see his profile).

I'm aware of at least three people that are now writing software to try to figure out who the 'mystery person' is.

I'd say you need to somehow cap the time a contest runs, so that if it hasn't been solved in that time the prize money moves to the pot for the next one, and to rule out the 'brute force component'.

After sending Daniel my guess he responded: "you can brute force this by sending out a blanket 'are you it?' message, you'll get 999 'huh?' responses and one 'you're a genius'.

Some puzzles are not open to that kind of attack, and I think those could have infinite runtime.

I think that some non-cash prizes could be provided by those HN readers running a startup (should they wish to do so). 6-months of a premier SaaS offering, or license keys, or free publicity / advertising.

Very valuable to the recipient, relatively inexpensive to the donating startup.

Also bragging rights are important.

I think that challenges that encourage the entrants to leverage the power of the internet in a new way are particularly cool. Data mining or wide ranging web scraping for example. Stuff that could become the core of an interesting startup.

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