Freshplum has hard problems | Hacker News Reader

Freshplum has hard problems

5 points16s8 comments

Freshplum has hard problems. It's plain md5. Cracked in less than 5 seconds with 16crack.

Edit. See the front page of HN to understand. They posted this: Freshplum has d64a84456adc959f56de6af685d0dadd 8d8a1b73876ca678cc3afa372e5199de

For some reason comments are closed. So I posted the solution here.

View on HN

Even easier:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=d64a84456adc959f56de6af685d0dadd+-fresh...

and

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=8d8a1b73876ca678cc3afa372e5199de+-fresh...

Yes, but less fun than cracking it yourself with software you wrote.

Yes, but I guess they're rather looking for people who value the goal and not the path.

They'll find plenty of those.

They don't want you to post the solution. If you're interested in the job, it shows that you have a basic level of competence in figuring things out. There's another teaser on the job page they link to.

So is this a paid spot on HN? Can't reply to or upvote/downvote their posting? Yet it's on the front page.

Edit: They should do better than md5 if they want smart people to solve hard problems.

I'm constantly surprised by this response to these sorts of questions. My understanding is that it's simply an initial filter - this isn't the hard stuff. My own experience is that there are many people who can't solve this sort of thing, and yet think they're great. This sort of question is just going to cull the obvious non-starters as an initial phase of the triage. The teaser on the jobs application page is similar. It's only after passing those - and showing that you care enough to try - that the interesting bit starts.

Sadly, by posting this submission you've simply negated the whole point, and now they'll have to think of something else.

And with regards paid spots, again, my understanding is that job posts by YC companies can't be replied to and simply drop linearly down the front page. They are treated as a special case, but equally, have to adhere to specific guidelines.

Inspired by the one on their job page, I wrote this quick test to see the distribution generated by JavaScript's Math.random(), interesting to visualize.

http://creori.com/rand.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com