If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible? • Hacker News Board

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#191

Post by gottlieb » Mon, Nov 02, 2009, 6:19 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #175

forensic wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not take ALL the reservations, and then force EVERY customer that wants to eat there to buy them from you? Because you're fucking up the social contract that restaurants have with their customers.

I do feel that it was sketchy to ignore the rules the way these teams did. However, the restaurants do not have a contract with their customers. If they want to have a contract with their customers, they can, but calling their expectations of what customers will do a "contract" dilutes the term.

Actually, 'Social Contract' is a term on its own, that is many things to many people, but in general, it is the idea that societies have unspoken rules in order to maintain order. I do not think he is diluting the term, as it (or at least the concept) has been around for quite some time.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#192

Post by PostOnce » Mon, Nov 02, 2009, 8:08 AM UTC

fnid wrote: post #63

stuartjmoore wrote: post #14

Buy a box of Cokes, sell them individually outside the movie theatre, repeat. Run when the management finds out. I used to do this with Blow-Pops in middle school. You could buy a huge bag for about $1.50, and sell each one for 25¢. Great profit margin.

I did the same with Now and Laters. Buying them in bulk and selling them individually to kids at school.

I filled one compartment of my backpack with 1-cent bubblegum balls (circa 1997) that I got from a machine at the grocery store.

I spent my profits on something retarded like a metal detector a few months later, if I remember correctly.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#193

Post by PostOnce » Mon, Nov 02, 2009, 8:14 AM UTC

jcl wrote: post #30

edw519 wrote: post #18

Just a few options off the top of my head: 1. Email everyone I've done work for in the past 5 years, promising all of my time on Mondays for the next year to the highest bidder by 2:00 p.m. 2. Same as #1, but instead of the highest bid, the first $10,000. 3. Same as #2, but $1,000. I will accept all checks received in the next 2 hours. What they will get: free use of my next web service for life. 4. Tell my employer…

But with several of those options, you take on liabilities that may exceed the money you made. By the same logic, you could use your two hours to get a mortgage on your house. (And the last option sounds like fraud.)

You always see pictures of guy who are obviously tremendously muscular and who have gained 30lbs of fat for the sole purpose of photographing it and losing it again.

The diet ad doesn't say, Hey, unless you have 65lbs of muscle under your flab and are able to devote several hours a day to working out, this 4 week plan/pill isn't going to work.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#194

Post by rms » Mon, Nov 02, 2009, 8:28 AM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #18

Just a few options off the top of my head: 1. Email everyone I've done work for in the past 5 years, promising all of my time on Mondays for the next year to the highest bidder by 2:00 p.m. 2. Same as #1, but instead of the highest bid, the first $10,000. 3. Same as #2, but $1,000. I will accept all checks received in the next 2 hours. What they will get: free use of my next web service for life. 4. Tell my employer…

I've actually thought about writing a diet book. They are the most consistently profitable type of book. They're easy to write because there is a specific outline you follow.

Mine would be about how to use meditation to gain control over your food willpower, then generic stuff about eating healthy and the right number of calories. The central tip would be "if you're feeling hungry, go meditate until you are aware that the feeling of hunger exists but you don't have to act on it."

I think it could work but don't really want to write it right now.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#195

Post by mp3jeep01 » Tue, Nov 03, 2009, 9:15 PM UTC

antonovka wrote: post #143

mp3jeep01 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as a restaurant is concerned, why would they really care? It might annoy customers, but as long as the tables are still filling up, I feel the restaurant is more than happy, because they're still making the best of their available resources (tables and wait-staff). It's a valid point how the artificial constraints are the envelope and the time, because the way she listed the rules was, clock starts when you op…

As far as a restaurant is concerned, why would they really care? It might annoy customers, but as long as the tables are still filling up, I feel the restaurant is more than happy, because they're still making the best of their available resources (tables and wait-staff). You answered your own question -- to the customer, it's annoying. ... and to the restaurant owner, it discourages walk-in traffic. It's immoral in…

I never said whether it was moral or not, which it definitely isn't...I was just referring to the students response to the task at hand, which I still believe for what they were assigned was a job well done.

Re: If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours, how would you make as much money as possible?

#196

Post by jdbrew222 » Wed, Nov 04, 2009, 2:00 AM UTC

seldo wrote: post #51

nkurz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of 'funding' in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can. She cites three teams' approaches: 1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of char…

See, the problem here is that she hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. 1. Used a device to measure the tire pressure and materials to build the booth and signs. Did they cost less than $5? Maybe. Did it take less than 2 hours to create the booth, the signs, and perform the services? Unlikely. 2. Well done on finding something you can acquire for free and then se…

Arguing that the winning students have "broken the rules" assumes the rules dictated they had to spend all of the money; I didn't see or hear mention a requirement that they spend any or all of it anywhere. It seems to me a set of rules along one dimension of a subject in no way implies corollary sets of rules along any others. For example, if someone told you that you could create any password, but that you could only use three letters of the alphabet (e.g. A, B, and/or C), they haven't said you could not use each one once or more, or not use numbers, or characters, symbols, etc., and they certainly haven't said how long or short the password needs to be, or if you even need to use letters at all, or for that matter that you even needed to create a password; maybe you'd rather spend your time gardening!

To me the three examples (even though they were kind of hokey) didn't so much turn the constraints on their heads as they did make them totally irrelevant... They made it less an issue of the constraints of certain explicit rules, and more about the implicit absence of others.