So, HN readers, how would you get a lightbulb in a bottle?

Please don't give interviewers any ideas.

Most obvious options:

- Use a large bottle

- Use a small lightbulb

- Construct the bottle around the lightbulb

- Construct the lightbulb inside the bottle

- Cut off and replace part of the bottle; this can be done almost seamlessly

- There's no technical reason that a lightbulb needs to be made of glass, so we can make a collapsing one, and unfold it inside like a ship-in-a-bottle

Just grind it into a fine powder and pour into the bottle.

Done.

You. I like you. You're like an evolutionary algorithm satisfying a fitness function. Spirit of the problem completely ignored, but problem bloody well solved.

(S)He's really more of a wave function

I couldn't find a picture (link?), but I would just blow he bulb inside the bottle. Alternatively, use the bottle as the bulb, add filament, pump out the air, and put on the cork, but I'm not sure whether that qualifies as a lightbulb in a bottle.

Depending on the wording I would assume that the small lights in a fridge or a small flashlight or maybe even Christmas lights count. I think those should fit through many bottles pretty easy.

or a big, wide opened bottle

At what point does a bottle become a jar?

about the same time a flask becomes a beaker. As Bill Nye has taught a couple generations of kids, you know the flasK has a necK. :-)

With a pencil and a couple of rubber bands.

I see more and more everything2.com [1] in comments on HN - is it popular again?

I remember E2 as (unofficial) predecessor of Wikipedia more than ten years ago [2]. Back in the days Wikipedia also had a triva section - nowadays its forbidden [3], what a pitty. (good we still have IMDb and its trivia pages)

It's sad that Harry Eng's Wikipedia article redirects [4] to "Impossible bottle" article and Bulwersator removed the paragraph about Harry Eng two years ago [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2

[2] /. posts that made Wikipedia popular, "Everything2 Hits One Million Nodes": http://slashdot.org/story/01/03/29/2035230/everything2-hits-... , http://news.slashdot.org/story/01/03/02/1422244/nupedia-and-...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trivia_sections

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Eng#Harry_Eng

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Impossible_bottle&...

I didn't knew E2 before, but reading that article was almost impossible with all those nonsense internal links. I simply don't get whats going on, it's supposed to be some SEO? Awful

e2 is fairly deranged. It's not your place to head for an informative read, and "encyclopedia" would definitely not be the right word, but it's great for ideas, stimulation, not-quite-sure-if-satire, unfinished short fiction, and link chains like "geometrical" > cannon defense patterns > transhumanism > The Broken God > a cloned kitten named "cc". I think of it like /b/ for bored grad students who are into Barthelme and Jeff Noon. One of the treasures of the internet, in my book :)

Those are traditional at E2 - a quirk of that particular community. I don't think they're SEO. If done right, sometimes they make you think. Sometimes they don't even go anywhere and are still successful in that regard. Sometimes not.

Jeez the amount of time I spent on E2 in high school and college was stunning. So many open tabs as I followed those links. Even wrote an app to find the "shortest distance" between two randomly selected ideas.

Not to detract from the subject itself, but that is some shockingly bad layout and design for a site whose sole content is long-form articles. Small font on a too-dark background in an unreadably wide column - what an absolutely embarrassing UX failure.