jbenoit

But then I'm paying hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time for maybe a few hundred dollars gain. Sure, it's more expensive for them in absolute terms, but it's more expensive for me in relative terms. Not going to get hundreds of people to do this. A class-action lawsuit can actually be positive EV for everyone involved.

(Actually, I don't know whom they'd send -- I think, for small claims court, they have to send a paralegal rather than a lawyer.)

Hmmm. I can see how it would be more painful for them to fight, but most people were conned <$200, and it's rather self-sacrificing to fight for that. Plus, no-one wants a reputation as litigious, but starting a CAL is less conducive to creating that reputation.

I only submitted before Nov 1st, so I'm not sure to what extent I was personally conned.

They started collecting problems last fall, saying the top 550 submissions sent in by Nov 1st would get rewarded, to the tune of $500-$5000 each.

Near the deadline, I counted the total number of submissions, and realized that each question I wrote had an expected value of hundreds of dollars, which is a great use of my time. So I wrote a good number, using the knowledge gained in my CS Ph. D.

Then, as the Nov 1st deadline rolled around, they announced they extended the deadline to Nov 15th. Then Nov 15th came, and it said on their website they were still accepting submissions.

Most of my submissions are being included in the benchmark, but I'm only getting paid $500, for one of them (the one I thought was most standard and least difficult, funnily enough). Had they closed submissions when they said they would, it seems likely I'd be paid for a few more.

From my perspective, they basically conned hundreds of Ph. D.'s around the world to write questions for much less reward than promised. My close friend wrote a large number of questions for them, is getting paid thousands of dollars, and still feels defrauded.

I'm not sure what they're doing in the end. It sounds like they're mostly just paying people who submitted before Nov 1st with a few exceptions, but either way they lied. There was no indication that people who submitted later would not get paid, and there was no indication that the deadline would be extended. Either they pay people who submitted after Nov 1st, meaning they lied to the people who submitted before about their expected reward. Or they don't, meaning they majorly lied to the people who submitted after. Either way, it's clear grounds for a class action lawsuit, and I hope one gets running.

Of course. It means people genuinely interested in your content will have it, but people looking to score cheap Internet points on you won't. ("Did you know he once called chapter 5 of Bob Smith's book 'under-researched," and Bob Smith's grandfather is Puerto Rican, so he's literally saying that people of color are stupid")

If you look at the link, that's what he actually says.

     Sometimes these notes are not things I want to share with the whole world, but might be helpful for a few people.

     So what do I do? I release them, but only for a limited time. I also put on a price tag — not because I expect to make any money, but so that only those genuinely interested will read it.

He said it was unfiltered. If I was giving out some of my unfiltered thoughts, I don't think I'd want them floating around the Internet for anyone to read at any moment.

So do you never look at a program and try to figure out everything that it does? You always just read one function at a time?

> You put it into a getters file and import it into the parent class. Almost every language has features for this

Wait, what?

So you can do this in C/C++ for sure. #include is not just for imports. But Java? C#? How!