Email in profile! That's afaik the common or best practice. I can recommend doing the same since HN has no other way to reach out to an individual otherwise -- I'd already have shot you an email if you had ;)

I expect it'll indeed be good for students, can be fun to parse various statistics out of: from simple day-of-week counts, or how many strikes land near a few given cities/places (coordinates+radius), to exceedingly complex/predictive. We had some fresh-from-university developers apply who were not able to handle it properly, so also from an employer's POV I can recommend using some large dataset as teaching material (too big for RAM after decompression, but easily fits onto your SSD/HDD and it's decompressible sequentially on the fly to work with it)