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I never really pay attention to these bounty challenges. Are those rewards reasonable? They seem incredibly low compared to the work involved. I have seen lo

by slg 5y ago

I never really pay attention to these bounty challenges. Are those rewards reasonable? They seem incredibly low compared to the work involved. I have seen locally sponsored hackathons with higher total prizes.

noxer 5y ago
It's PR nonsense. They dont want anyone not working for them to work for them.
- potatoman22 5y ago
  3 grand don't seem like nonsense to me.
  - daenz 5y ago
    For a week's worth of work, for someone skilled enough to be capable of winning this contest, and there is no guarantee for winning? It is nonsense.
  - 55555 5y ago
    But to Twitter, it does.
codyb 5y ago
I figure it's kind of like a musician busking on the street corner. It's a no risk way to add a few constraints to the practicing you're probably already doing and if you're lucky maybe you'll earn a few bucks too.
ryankupyn 5y ago
I think the challenge is that if the rewards were high, Twitter employees (with the advantage of inside information) might be tempted to "tip off" an outsider in exchange for a cut of the reward, rather than just reporting the issue internally. At the same time, there isn't much of an outside market for algorithmic bias info in the same way there for security vulnerabilities. Probably the biggest effect of this reward will be to pull some grad students who were going to study algorithmic bias anyways towards studying Twitter specifically - after all, there aren't any rewards for studying the algorithmic bias of other companies!
jb775 5y ago
Seem insanely low considering it's really just a for-profit business asking the general public to figure out a very difficult problem they aren't able to figure out on their own.
version_five 5y ago
If they hired a contractor to work on this, the $3500 prize would get them 1-2 days work. At the same time, I can easily see someone interesting in this area investing time in it for the challenge. Doing a hackathon as a source of income is probably not too common.
- shoo 5y ago
  Seems like a hackathon. s/hack/work/ . Compared to the $1m netflix prize from 2006, $3.5k seems like a meagre bounty. There may be the case where someone has already been thinking hard about solving similar problems for the last couple of years, and this challenge falls fairly easily into a framework they've already got in place, so it is relatively quick and easy to crank the handle to generate a challenge submission (or a paper or whatever).
qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago
https://aipaygrad.es/ https://aipaygrad.es/ Average total comp for a novice AI engineer is about $300K. That's over $1000 per weekday. If they made it so the expected value of entering was comparable to the amount someone could make in their day job / as a contractor, I'll bet they could attract more & better submissions.

by slg 5y ago

noxer 5y ago

It's PR nonsense. They dont want anyone not working for them to work for them.

potatoman22 5y ago
3 grand don't seem like nonsense to me.
- daenz 5y ago
  For a week's worth of work, for someone skilled enough to be capable of winning this contest, and there is no guarantee for winning? It is nonsense.
- 55555 5y ago
  But to Twitter, it does.

codyb 5y ago

I figure it's kind of like a musician busking on the street corner. It's a no risk way to add a few constraints to the practicing you're probably already doing and if you're lucky maybe you'll earn a few bucks too.

ryankupyn 5y ago

I think the challenge is that if the rewards were high, Twitter employees (with the advantage of inside information) might be tempted to "tip off" an outsider in exchange for a cut of the reward, rather than just reporting the issue internally. At the same time, there isn't much of an outside market for algorithmic bias info in the same way there for security vulnerabilities. Probably the biggest effect of this reward will be to pull some grad students who were going to study algorithmic bias anyways towards studying Twitter specifically - after all, there aren't any rewards for studying the algorithmic bias of other companies!

jb775 5y ago

Seem insanely low considering it's really just a for-profit business asking the general public to figure out a very difficult problem they aren't able to figure out on their own.

version_five 5y ago

If they hired a contractor to work on this, the $3500 prize would get them 1-2 days work. At the same time, I can easily see someone interesting in this area investing time in it for the challenge. Doing a hackathon as a source of income is probably not too common.

shoo 5y ago
Seems like a hackathon. s/hack/work/ . Compared to the $1m netflix prize from 2006, $3.5k seems like a meagre bounty. There may be the case where someone has already been thinking hard about solving similar problems for the last couple of years, and this challenge falls fairly easily into a framework they've already got in place, so it is relatively quick and easy to crank the handle to generate a challenge submission (or a paper or whatever).

qPM9l3XJrF 5y ago

https://aipaygrad.es/ https://aipaygrad.es/ Average total comp for a novice AI engineer is about $300K. That's over $1000 per weekday. If they made it so the expected value of entering was comparable to the amount someone could make in their day job / as a contractor, I'll bet they could attract more & better submissions.