Sounds good. Anyone with a challenge, email me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com with title/text of the submission. I'll post them on a weekly, or even bi-weekly, basis and credit the author.

Edit: The intention behind this was to keep it structured and organized, contest-like, and not for karmic purposes, which I take is the reason for the downvotes.

People could post their own challenges, that would be fine too.

Just make a new username for your contest-organizing activity.

How about donating small prices for the winners? Similar to ICFP programming contest bragging rights [1].

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICFP_Programming_Contest#Prizes

That would certainly spice things up.

Hacking and puzzling are intricately interwoven anyway, especially debugging. It's no wonder that plenty of hackers have hobbies like lockpicking.

Also donating prizes would give a different metric than pure karma-per-submission to order the challenges. (Though it might be hard to order bragging rights. But we should be able to find a (corporate?) sponsor who hands out 50 dollar for the charity of choice of the winner every week. (Hey, I might even be able to get the money out of my employer, if I asked to--or I just do it myself.))

Enough parenthesis. I just go ahead and pledge 10 Pounds per week to it. Perhaps we should discuss more by email?

(More later, I'll have to go to bed now.)

Ok, I'll match your 10 pounds, whatever that works out to in my currency (euros).

i could care less if you get karma. frankly, you'd deserve it for orchestrating this.

Karma doesn't enter in to it, what's the difference between posting a challenge yourself vs mailing someone and having them post it for you and credit you.

Seems a bit roundabout without any real advantage.

Daniels tag is all it really needs.

Oh, there's something to be said for having an "official" challenge of the week. It focusses attention. Though on the other hand, having the primaries out in court of HN may be the best approach to picking the most interesting challenges.

Informal is cool with me. Someone could just state their challenge, and the prize, if any (which need not be money), and if others think the challenge is interesting enough they could paypal the author their contribution to the pot, or they could publicly state that they want to up the stakes (or both).

Yes. Probably a common protocol will emerge.

Also posting bets and searching for someone to take the other side (or be the arbiter--in case any is needed) could be interesting. Similar to http://www.longbets.org/, but embedded into HN and not focussed on long-term bets.

Edit: I have opened a new top-level post about this topic. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200153

Payment could be in the form of services provided by startups at HN. Subscriptions to our SaaS systems, free products, discounts, etc.

Sure. Or just bragging rights on some website. (E.g. a small line mentioning the winner on the bottom of HN, for challenges that pg thinks worthy.)