Hacker News Reader

Baba is you is similarly a good introduction to the mindset needed to write exploits.

It seems similar to the hiring process for Jane Street, as described in "Going Infinite", by Michael Lewis. Jane Street tests applicants on how well they do with games where the rules change during the game.

Baba Is You would be perfect for teaching people security, penetration testing, and so on.

Lateral thinking puzzles are underrated, and orgs mostly punish lateral thinkers. Even though the lateral thinker is going to catch way more bugs. They will also generate more bug reports by doing so, and that's bad for numbers, stop that.

Or the old FANG hiring problem. "How would you implement a binary search tree for this problem, and do it only on a Google doc, no auto complete."

Good programmer: "I would never do that. That sounds horrible. Who thought of this?"

I love a good lateral thinking puzzle, but in my experience too many of them wind up being "read the author's mind" guessing games and misleadingly-worded "gotcha" silliness instead of actual exercises in thinking about a problem.

Have you played some of the pure puzzle video games out there? Many of them involve meta layers and secrets that involve lateral thinking and epiphany to progress in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com