HackMIT 2017 Admissions Puzzle | Hacker News Reader

HackMIT 2017 Admissions Puzzle

delorean.codes

91 pointspatricki24 comments

Hey HN, HackMIT organizers here. This is the 2017 admissions puzzle! It contains a variety of security, AI, and RE challenges. If you're an undergrad and are one of the first 50 people to complete it you get automatic admission to HackMIT!

If you start playing, feel free to join the Slack! Link is on the command center.

Just looks like a login page to me. No way to see either info on your event or your clever puzzles w/o giving up my personal info :(

Homepage: http://hackmit.org

I like the Easter egg in the console ;)

Very cool! Kudos to you guys for putting this together!

'Login' can be used as a noun or a verb. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/login

In case it is not obvious ( for me it wasn't ), you can only acceess the puzzle through github login button. Registering doesn't give you access to the puzzle.

Thanks for pointing that out, my first thought was the goal is to decode a bit pattern from the flickering neon sign mp4! That would have been some wasted time...

That was definitely my first instinct. I got as far as the morse code decrypts to "NETE" before coming back here to check if I was doing something wildly wrong.

Something about unix time? Isn't the earliest moment in unix time around December 1900? Epoch - 2^31 seconds? I'm betting it's something about that plus some tricky nonsense I don't have the energy figuring out (assuming that I could). I guess spoiler alert...

I used to love puzzles like this when I was younger, but I think I've lost the patience for them now.

EDIT: ah, no, it's December 13, 1901. Never mind!

That puzzle is optional, and definitely the 'hard' way to get past that challenge

The puzzles are similar to the ones on https://cryptopals.com. The first one involved a combination of caesar cipher and running a jar file. The second one looks to be related to timing attack.

When i create a hackmit@ alias on my domain, and want to subscribe....

"Not a valid educational email."

HackMIT organizer here. All .edu emails (and international equivalents) should work. Please email us at team@hackmit.org otherwise.

Required github login? Not everybody uses github, it's a very big world when internal AI and Eng corp groups span the globe.

The target audience for this is college kids, who these days frequently use GitHub for consuming course material (e.g. boilerplate for class assignments). Doesn't seem like a bad move on their part to avoid rolling their own account system. People like one-click auth.

Yeah, but they may not have an account on github.

And I see more and more students using gitlab instead since they have free private repos

Students get free private repos on Github too with the education pack.

Oh it’s free, that’s all right then.

Many people don’t use cost as the sole measure of everything.

Sure, but the parent commenter explicitly mentioned free as a reason for using GitLab.

So then they can make a GitHub account... I don't see how that would be worse than having to make a custom HackMIT account.

tl;dl: too lazy, didn't login

^ THIS

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