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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

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adrianmonk

Could be a sneaky recruiting trick. Stuff like this has happened before:

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/26/11618060/puzzles-are-fun-searc...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080

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Caught me by surprise when I first saw that black box emerge while doing a search.

I saw it last year while I was doing a project for school - and clicked off the page as it was appearing. Never seen it again.

I got a Google Foobar challenge back in 2022. Never ended up completing more than the first level, but would be interesting to know if they're still using it for hiring.

Last I heard they'd stopped it. The site still seems to exist though, maybe it came back.

The last problem on mine was really interesting, took me days. I wonder if there's a list of the problems somewhere, I thought I remember hearing that they weren't all the same.

I never did continue with the recruiting part of it, just had some fun.

The team behind it still exists.

I loved that puzzle site. I don't think I have ever been as hooked by programming as when I worked on those puzzles. Managed to get thrown out after completing level 5 by requesting another puzzle and forgetting about it. I even sent a support ticket begging to be let in again. If someone at the team sees this, I'd appreciate it :)

The last level for me was to write a function that evaluated

  sum([floor(i*sqrt(2)) for i in range(1,n+1)])

for 0 < n < 10**100. It was the first time I ever had use for my Knuth books.

It was quite detrimental to work performance though. Never heard from a recruiter, but I guess they don't employ developers in Norway.

I got the website three months ago, I just did the first puzzle and then stopped because I had to make way too many exercises for the classes I was taking and never entered the second challenge in.

Yes, and the Mastadon post came up because it was too obscure.

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