Blast from the past: Hacker Test. Score? | Hacker News Reader

Blast from the past: Hacker Test. Score?

hungry.com

27 pointssolarmist23 comments

Open articleView on HN

I remember seeing questions like this, and not even being able to imagine that amount of data.

0210 Do you use more than 16 megabytes of disk space?

0211 ... 256 megabytes?

0212 ... 1 gigabyte?

0213 ... 16 gigabytes?

0214 ... 256 gigabytes?

0215 ... 1 terabyte?

Just in case, do not image search "naked floppy" if you are unsure of what that is in reference to the question "Have you ever booted a naked floppy"

ROFL! That just made my day!

Hehe, sorry. Flashback to when I was 12 and found this test the first time. :P

Most of it works out alright (I got 263), but some of them are much easier to get today than in the olden days (More megabytes than megabucks, 1TB of diskspace, T1 or faster connection, etc.) and some much harder (Read all the newsgroups, Jensen's device, anything with punchcards etc.)

The first week I used usenet, I did in fact read every post on every discussion. Stunning to see the subsequent growth.

It's amazing that 50% of this is still relevant (it's from 22 years ago)

I scored 85, I'm ashamed :/

The test is brilliant though!

Too many checkboxes...

var c=document.getElementsByTagName("input");for(i=0;i<c.length;i++){c[i].checked=true;}document.forms[0].submit()

foreach( c in doc.getByTag("input") ) { c.checked = (rand()%3 == 0); }

Any one know what they mean by "Ever change the value of 4?"

I took it to mean, mess with people by remapping keys or using base 3 or something in the program, but I've always tried to find a more "real" solution, but being a binary system I can't think how it would be possible 100 is 100 is 100.

You can change the value of any constant in FORTH, using something like:

: 4 9 ;

... whereupon '4' will push the value '9' on the stack instead.

FORTH is an interesting language that I would recommend everyone learn, and that I would never use in any production system. (Yes, I know about Open Boot).

Forth is a nice language, and seems appropriate where other low level languages are, like C. (My day job involves Haskell though.)

Does this count? (Ruby FWIW)

class Fixnum; def ==(o); true end end; 4 == 5 # => true

http://everything2.com/title/Changing+the+value+of+5+in+FORT...

0x78

I didn't know what a lot of that meant. I'd be curious to see how scores and age relate. For example, in the list of programming languages I know, I didn't check a single box. But in the question above that asked how many programming languages I know, I answered "more than 4"!

I got 146. Not bad, but I used to score higher... Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing!?...

0x92 if you wanna do it in hex.

212. Got a little creative with some answers to balance out technically yes/no responses, and a few "was there when it happened"s.

Hmm, 0xF6. Officially declared a hacker.

227 Here

Though there's just something wrong with a "hacker test" that starts counting at 1 instead of 0.

283. And I remember Bandy-Grams (Hi, Andy!).

0x57. Ouch. Operator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com