sandaru1

Actually, that seems to be a good idea :) We should try to do it now.

Now that I think about it, another point that should have gone into the blog post is that "be prepared to monetize if your app goes viral in few days"

At the moment we have no way of knowing whether our users are health care professionals or not. We are releasing a new medical case each week(or more often), so that would keep the medical professionals from removing it - but others who are just downloading to checkout the app would get rid of it (that's our guess - we are still learning, trial and error). Advertising to medical professionals is much appealing than a general crowd.

Yes, we have several clean advertising plans. i.e - sponsored cases.

Agreed. Coming from Sri Lanka where the culture is rather conservative, it's taken a great deal of perseverance on our part to get any interest at all. In the end we decided to go ahead with our own funds (and take a big risk by working full time), but things have paid off as our app is the 7th in the US medical app store now (free apps) and has had thousands of downloads in just 10 days : http://blog.medicaljoyworks.com/prognosis-is-a-success-but-y...

P.S. Our success began just after YC rejected our idea :)

I'm little bit sad to see that HN'ers are discussing the prize and money/time ratio instead of the challenge itself. What happened to the "hacker" in "Hacker News"?

I agree, money is a factor - but it doesn't have to decide your every move. This is an interesting challenge whether the prize offered is worth your time or not. The entrepreneurs are supposed to bunch of people who likes solving interesting challenges - not a bunch of people who likes solving interesting problems if only it makes you money.

HTML5 in the mobile is definitely great. One of the best advantages of native apps is that you can get them into app store - of course, that's by design. Even with the large number of apps, app store provides a great distribution channel.

>> Between Gmail, Twitter, Yammer, Skype and Facebook it seems that hundreds of people known and unknown are trying to contact you at any given time.

Does anyone actually use Yammer?

As far as I understand, depth values make the blob detection easier. Normally blob detection tries to use the brightness differences caused by 3D objects - depth values make it much accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blob_detection

The youtube video channel of the author has his previous demos : http://www.youtube.com/user/yankeyan

There are some commercial products such as http://pikture.logikit.net/Content

and there are lot of research papers if you are interested in implementing them : http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1021261 http://www.springerlink.com/content/e774824834226tv2

>> Please tell me that does mean potential data loss!

Looks like it's not. Our server just went up - after the damage notication. Data seems to be intact.

Still waiting. There is a queued task to restart the server about "36 years 10 months ago".

Yes, MillenniumIT started proving services for CSE first and then moved to Malaysia, Boston, London, etc based on the initial platform developed for CSE

Bill Stone proposed a much more interesting challenge on his TED talk. Send a team to moon without return fuel and they'll extract the fuel from resources of the moon and return. I highly recommend you watch the TED talk if you haven't seen it already - it's really interesting.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...

Do you have spare time even after going through all these sites?

Did you see discussion? Once the case is finished, you can go to the discussions screen. The ideal treatments are described there and you can share your thoughts via comments.

Thank you for the feedback. We have already fixed main menu bounce and manage screen on/off buttons for the next version. We'll work on other suggestions too.

One of the first things you have to do is installing the firebug extension for Firefox.

More information about the application and development process is blogged on http://blog.medicaljoyworks.com/

Russia and China has surprisingly low number of members. Any theories?

Those improves your coding ability a lot. For example, If your application needs to scale well, you should always consider implementing efficient algorithms. Yes, you can use some open source libraries, tools, etc but someone has to write those using efficient algorithms. This is one of the main reasons, that companies like Facebook, Google are recruiting people using these "puzzles" or contests like Topcoder, Google Codejam.

Participating in programming competitions like IOI, ACM, Topcoder, GCJ, etc

> more than anything, this seems like a feeble attempt at a rich person to do something they consider "crazy" so they can have a cool story to tell their friends over caviar. "oh wow, look how dirty i was! ha ha!" this guy needs to get over himself.

Actually if you read the other entries of this guy's blog, you'll see that he is genuinely curious guy

Thanks for spreading the word. Sure, we'll let you know the results.

Nice idea. We should try to reach some teachers.

Actually, the background image may not be a bad idea, but the problem is that we currently have about 100 sentences for the Free version and keep adding new sentences for the Pro version. So, keeping up the background would be a huge task (along with the file sizes)

It would be pretty easy to write a simple greasemonkey script for this.

I have a quite good experience with feedly. It's a firefox extension which integrates with google reader. The integration seems to have some bugs with new "shared items", other than that it's perfect.

  - don't even think about running it on the hardware you already have - 
  only use specifically built systems (such as those linked)

As far as I know, hackintosh works well in laptops. I'm running it on HP Pavilion dv5-1010us. The only hardware I can't get to work is wireless - which is admittedly quite a pain.

TTN has quite a few more features. The key ones would be :

1. Viewing a playback of how the candidate coded the question.

Even a bad candidate might be able to 'prettify' his final code (or even craftily cut and paste code while solving the problem).

However, it is almost impossible to do so in a playback of the entire coding process.

It is like the difference in complexity between creating a fake photo vs creating a fake video !

2. Adaptive testing

Depending on the performance of the candidate, the questions presented will increase or decrease in difficulty - allowing the system to accurately assess the candidate's skill level (that is the advantage of using several small questions, as opposed to a few large questions).

3. The ability to embed the testing widget both on your website or even on a job posting on a job site - that way candidates never even have to leave your website.

go through one of the test link and create an account. it'll take you to the test. I gave the recruiter login which was used to create those tests because it's easier to check it out.

Clickable Links

http://beta.techtestnow.com/

Java : http://beta.techtestnow.com/en/user/testLogin/secret/TTN4c24...

Ruby : http://beta.techtestnow.com/en/user/testLogin/secret/TTN4c24...

We have the same thing in Sri Lanka called a "Web Card". You don't even need to have a bank account to get a Web Card - just pay some amount, and get a card for that value. Then you get a temporary VISA number which can be only used in internet transactions. It's actually quite convenient actually.