Comment by narcissus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narcissus | Hacker News Reader

Hi all,

I made this site for the situation where you and your colleagues are all at lunch and the discussion of salary comes up. While a lot of people don't feel comfortable discussing specific numbers, they're all still curious :) So this site lets someone start a 'secret' with just a few clicks (no registration etc.). That 'secret' has a code that other people can enter on the site, too, and then by telling the site your salary it will show everyone on that secret the minimum, maximum and average salaries.

As per the 'privacy' page, I'm not storing any personal information... it is anonymous.

It was also a good chance for me to learn Silex (the PHP "micro-framework") and Twitter Bootstrap (though not so well), practice 'progressive enhancements' with Javascript and play with PaaS via Openshift.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback, flames or criticisms...

Are you familiar with the Millionaires' problem? [1]

There's an easy solution when you're looking for an average salary (and everyone doesn't mind doing a little bit of calculation). The first person thinks of a random number, adds his salary to it and tells it to the person on his/her right (so noone else hears!). The next one adds his salary and tells it to the next person and so on. When it re-reaches the first person, he then subtracts the original random number. The result is the sum of their salaries, which can then be divided to yield an average. All done in a way that no one person learns what the salary of any other person was.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaos_Millionaires_Problem (link sadly broken by HN url parsing?)

I have actually heard of this process before. In fact, it was this 'problem' that originally made me think of the site, but then I realised that if I'm doing in online, I may as well automate it a bit and came to this 'solution'.

That is to say, I'm all for people doing it that way if they like. If, however, they'd rather use an 'app' or whatever, then they're more than welcome to use this.

tl;dr salt the sum

Working link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_Problem

Neat! By the way, "its" is the possessive form of "it". "It's" is a contraction for "it is" or "it has". You have such a grammar error in the front page text.

Good luck!

Thanks. I can feel my English teacher's stares from here. It'll be fixed in the next push :) Now I just have to wait to see what the grammatical error in this post is...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com