Want a Ticket to eCommerce Hackathon? First You’ll Have to Solve a Puzzle | Hacker News Reader

Want a Ticket to eCommerce Hackathon? First You’ll Have to Solve a Puzzle

betabeat.com

39 pointsAtaub2446 comments

I need to solve a puzzle to be allowed to sit down in a room with other programmers and code? You've got to be kidding me...

I'd rather buy a coffee at a coffee shop, I could care less about 'posers' I do have other things to talk about besides whether ruby/php/python is more scalable.

At least the coffee shop isn't trying to disguise selling coffee as recruitment, pretty soon your local microroaster will be holding 'baristathons' and asking obscure questions about coffee to weed out the 'posers'.

Even worse, it's a binary string that you convert to ASCII to produce /ImAHacker, to which you then apparently send a JSON PUT. So, you know you're only dealing with the truly l33t.

Actually, its a POST, not a PUT :)

I enjoyed it. Didn't take all that long and I'd rather be coding with people that are actually capable of doing it

Converting 'binary' to ASCII and being able to make a POST request is what counts as a capable coder these days?

I'm just saying that it seems like an arbitrary hoop, when I go down to hackspace they don't make me jump through hoops... some of the people at the hackspace definitely can't code they're doing things like yarn bombing or moss graffiti, some can't code and are absolute geniuses with electronics.

You forgot a part: you have to solve a puzzle be allowed to sit in a room full of hackers and code, while getting pitched to be a technical cofounder (for sweat equity, of course) from all sides. ;)

I liked the challenge. It's only limited to web hackers though. iOS/ObjC or Android/Java developers are cut out pretty much if they've never done web coding. Also the hardcore coders that do algorithms and and such. These people are necessary part of any good hackaton, otherwise the final products are just web eye candies. Do you think giving some RegExp's (which are pretty much a part of all languages) would attract wider hacker audience?

I was going to say that for an eCommerce hackathon, you probably don't need hardcore algo-hackers or mobile devs, but then I started to wonder what you could do with good web skills, data-mining/scraping, and a slick mobile experience with some of the API's it provies (geolocation, etc.).

That would indeed be a pretty impressive hackathon, I think :)

{"success":true,"message":"Thanks for playing! In the meanwhile, why don't you share your achievement on FB + Twitter and help us spread the good word? Head over to the 'url' parameter.","url":"http://ecommercehackday.com/share,totalTime:260 seconds"}

Eating pizza makes coding double hard for me, I should have had less then 3 mins for that puzzle, but I just don't think this was even remotely hard enough of a puzzle to weed out people for serious eCommerce development/hacking? Submit a few HTTP requests and you pass the tests? Besides filtering out people who don't know jQuery and console.log, I don't think this was a very good test/quiz for what they are looking for. I think they should be looking for the people who can create these simple puzzles from scratch in X time instead of the people who can solve them.

You can really solve this in a number of different ways... jQuery is just the easiest way because I've included a basic snippet there...

The puzzle part was merely a way to weave out people who can't even figure out basic documentation, and disrupt the workflow of those who can during hackathons...

Yea, as I read through the comments here I understood that was the idea. It's just I was expecting something more.... substantial to get "invited" to a hackathon, especially if you only know my email address and that I can construct valid HTTP requests in the language/program of my choice. For example, not including the jQuery library in the source code would have been better imo, so we would at least have to problem solve a little. Just my thoughts, I wish I could go to something like this but I can't so I am just complaining here instead :)

Oh I like this! Good idea. Removing jQuery now...

I jQuerify'd it

So I solved the puzzle about an hour ago and received an email within about 5 minutes after finishing it. When I went to register for the event though, there was no option to sign up as developer/hacker. The field only has N/A next to it on the event brite page.

Is it supposed to be like that?

no you didn't get the real invite. It will come later today or over the weekend. It will be a ticket, not a sign up.

Guess I came late to the party. There was no jquery there when I did it and the fun thing I learned was I could load jquery from the console.

I learned you can use curl with session cookies from this little challenge. Yeah, you probably don't need to be an elite hacker to solve it, but it's still a pretty cool way to give out invites...

I used 1.5 minutes, but I spent probably 30 seconds or more starting the text editor and opening a custom html document with the form values.

It has to be said that I had already made tools for converting the two first challenges :-)

I think they should have added some additional puzzles like fixing a bug in a JavaScript function or something, but it is a good way of making sure that the free tickets goes to someone that has some experience.

Got to the step with what looks like a hash in the instruction param, no idea what to do with it. I'm not cool enough for these guys :(

I'm trying to not give it away, but by Google searching "encode jquery" (without quotes), the answer was the 4th ("suggested") dropdown result.

Base64 decryption only works for the first part of the hash, though. The second part after the slash is still garbled. :/

try a different decoder (utf-8 is the key here i think) :)

Whenever you see something like '9234d87d07ad4a3f', you know that is hex. Whenever you see something like 'Kfj+sS8Absa==', it is a good bet it is base64. Hex uses 0-9,a-f (16 digits), base64 uses A-Z,a-z,0-9,/,+ (64 digits).

That was a fun puzzle. Did it just for good times, but does anyone have an actual opinion on whether this would be worth going to?

Etsy is considered to have one of the top engineering teams in NY - their CEO was originally brought in as CTO to solve what was at the time a technology mess - and they have a strong engineering culture. Dwolla is hungry to get developers to use their platform, and Alex and the NY team were a key part of organizing AngelHack NY. I imagine b/w the two of them they will do a good job.

In the typical hacker news fashion we see waves of posts that criticize the simplicity of a puzzle.

I don't know why people are so fussy these days. Just think about this test like a FizzBuzz test. It's primary goal is really to weed out the beginners, not to find rockstars.

Just appreciate it for what it was intended to be, a simple filter. Sheesh.

I am really excited to see events like this in NYC. The tech community around e-commerce is not as strong as it could be- events like this are great for building the community. There is a lot of growth and opportunity in this field, but I think it is being overlooked by a lot of developers.

Nice little Friday afternoon distraction. Shame I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic to actually go

Thanks, that was a fun puzzle for a Friday morning. Solved using Node.js and Restler.

I just did this while I was eating my lunch. I guess that means I'm a hacker. This looks kinda silly though.. I think they're definitely limiting their audience in terms of programmers by only making an ajax puzzle.

This isn't necessarily an AJAX puzzle.. You can solve this by using CURL, WGET, or simply pointing your browser to the endpoints...

When you get to the share button is that the end of the test or is there some secret level for l33t h4x0rs?

You can do the whole thing without JS, just use standard HTML forms. Assuming it does finish there.

Or with curl to really save you some time.

...that was easy, thought they would have made it tougher

The point wasn't to make it super hard... Just hard enough to ensure that other coders won't waste their hackathon time teaching others how to code...

I write C and... how the heck do I use AJAX ?

system("curl")

It doesn't require ajax.

http://dpaste.de/pPpQQ/

It's for ecommerce hackers which presumes you know web stuff anyway.

This is actually a pretty cool way to hype a conference that's free anyways.

If anyone's going to this and wants to team up with a designer, hit me up!

What the fuck is an eCommerce Hackathon?

71 seconds; I'm disappointed in myself.

that was easy fast fun

way too easy

"The point wasn't to make it super hard... Just hard enough to ensure that other coders won't waste their hackathon time teaching others how to code..."

I feel like I have seen this before...strokes chin in deep thought

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