Creative Hiring: Solve the puzzle in this jobs page and get an interview | Hacker News Reader

Creative Hiring: Solve the puzzle in this jobs page and get an interview

weebly.com

14 pointsdrusenko38 comments

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Does anyone know of any other job puzzles like this? The only ones I've seen are Facebook and Meebo:

http://www.facebook.com/jobs_puzzles/

http://blog.meebo.com/jobs#web

http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/puzzles07.html Has a couple of very nice puzzles.

http://www.icfpcontest.org/ And ICFP contests are always fun

any other douglas adams fans in the house? =)

Maybe I shouldn't have read so much Douglas Adams and got a little more focused on learning Javascript. The idea that I still haven't got past the first step pisses me off.

If you don't like JS, curl should be your friend :D

For the first step, yes... but that's just the first step...

And actually, I couldn't get curl to work... I'm guessing I wasn't setting the referrer or user agent right or something.

Erm... this maybe a silly question, but how far are we supposed to take this?

You're supposed to construct the most powerful computer that has ever existed. Use it to help you create an even more powerful computer. Then let it compute for 10+ million years, while protecting it from outside interferences.

Obviously.

This must be the first startup I have seen that is "passionate" about what they are trying to do!

Meebo and Facebook have puzzles too.

< 15 minutes to solve. (I think. I come up with an answer string, but don't see anywhere that it would conceivably go?)

Firebug rocks.

Is this supposed to be an all Javascript puzzle? I am passing the current time, and the damn thing still complains about the wrong token.

passing the time worked for me

WTF?

 function solvePuzzle() {
     var t = new Date()
 
    var time = t.getTime();
    
    var params ="";
    params += 'pos=solvepuzzle';
    params += "&";
    params += 'auth=' + time.toString();

   
	new Ajax.Request('/weebly/publicBackend.php', {parameters:params,  onSuccess:handlerSolvePuzzle, onFailure:function() { alert('Transmition error. Please try again.'); }});

  }

 solvePuzzle();

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_timestamp

Isn't that what I am doing by using getTime() ?

You need seconds. Also make sure your system clock is accurate and that you're in Weebly's time zone.

I got back to it now. Still not working...

 - Divided by 1000. 
 - Changed the clock to Pacific time
 - rounded using either parseInt, Math.round and Mouth.ceil

All failed.

Dude... you're trying too hard on a trivial area.

You only have to be close by 60 seconds give or take, so just hard code in the timestamp: http://www.unixtimestamp.com/

It's a pain in the ass to change every minute, but it works and you'll get on with the rest of it.

Nope. Still not working.

I changed the timezone in my computer, calculated time differences. Everything. What is getting on me is precisely the fact that this is supposed to be so trivial.

I think unix time is set in UTC, not PST. that might help.

getTime() gives you milliseconds. you want seconds.

Danke sehr...

But still not enough.

ummm... well, how might one convert milliseconds to seconds? here are a few ideas:

- write a screenscraper to get the answer from here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1000+milliseconds+t...

- or perhaps hook your function up to the search API to get the answer that way (not sure if you can access the calculator through the API, though)

- or maybe just divide by 1000.

Why so verbose? Am I the only one who likes concise code?

'pos=solvepuzzle&auth='+(new Date()).getTime()

edit: yes, that's milliseconds

Did it work?

I broke down so that I could change the string more easily.

you're about half way there...

If it looked something like this you're not done:

YWxlcnGZvbGxvd2luZzogQoJ1zZWNyZXQgY29kZSB1zZWNyZXQgGZvbGxvd2luZzogY29pczYioyK==

No, I got to the DNA

fun! thanks for distraction at work :)

Uhmmm...check the source code.

duh

that's pretty pathetic. At least bury the 'puzzle' in a css or js file so that it's not the first thing you see.

I'm kind of confused about what the three of you are talking about. Yes, the clue to the puzzle is in the source code; I think that's where they were going with "embedded". "an hour" might be an extreme upper bound, but it's not like getting from the page source to the answer was instantly obvious or trivial. "pathetic" is definitely way over the top.

it's not really meant to be a hard puzzle, per se (that would be pointless and a waste of time). it's just intended not to be really really easy, and useful enough for us to say "this could be a good candidate" based on getting the correct answer.

Well the problem with this puzzle wasn't its level of difficulty, just that it was awkward to complete. It seemed more like a test of my Firebug abilities than anything else.

the fact that you're using firebug, know some basic concepts, can debug javascript and can formulate your own POST requests puts you above quite a few of the applicants we've seen.

you failed the puzzle

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