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Comment by jefftchan | Hacker News Reader

(off-topic)

Love the contact page [1] of this website. What are some other effective filters?

[1] http://www.stephendiehl.com/pages/hire.html

Hah, clever. Bonus points if you don't need to run the code to figure it out (since the cipher is trivial and the ciphertext isn't particularly well obfuscated in the Haskell version).

I wouldn't expect people with python to necessarily have numpy, though.

Perhaps that's part of the filter

Yeah, if one is going to use code as your contact info, and ake people stare at it, one ought to make it good code.

After reading those weirdly-written snippets, I'm not comfortable with buying more code from the author.

I don't think that these specific snippets act as a demonstration of the code he is going to write, in case you hire him. Just saying.

The best part is that it's still his name at a common domain. I didn't bother with the code, but you can pick the common letters and match the positions to be pretty confident. The hardest part is his middle initial.

edit: To be more on-topic, Dwolla had a pretty challenge for their hackathon last year: http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/29/dwolla-etsy-join-up-for-ny...

Funny, I also didn't need the code to translate the scrambled address. I knew his name so that right away gave me most of it:

tufqifo.n.ejfim@hnbjm.dpn stephen.?.diehl@?????.???

since m=l in the name, assumed the same for domain, considering it's the most popular email service, gmail.com my first guess.

since n=m in the domain name, I assumed the same for the middle initial, which gave away the whole thing.

That's what I said? edit: I realize it might now have been entirely clear, I was trying to be a bit discreet ;)

With the info you have, you can easily figure out the cipher and apply it to the middle initial. This being said, it still means a recruiter has to go to some effort to scan the code to find where the ciphertext is and examine it.

I imagine webmaster@stephendiehl.com would also get to him.

I've written plenty of Python but only played a little with Haskell (just in GHCI, to see what the excitement is about).

Yet, looking at his two scripts, the Haskell was so transparent as to not need running, whereas the Python was opaque (probably because I don't use numpy).

set up an API endpoint for receiving post requests so that people could send a json payload with their contact info.

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