Show HN: We made a simple hiring puzzle Looking for feedback | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made a simple hiring puzzle Looking for feedback

puzzle.becomeverygood.com

4 pointsmahmoudimus14 comments

Quite fun, but since you ask for an email address first, I used a temporary one by lack of trust. Later, I would have written my address.

Thanks so much for that feedback! We will make that change :)

Plus, the passphrase is hundreds of characters long. Ridiculous. Not everyone will browse this on the same device as one receives enail?.

Thanks so much for that feedback. It was meant for desktops where you’d have access to a terminal. Thanks for the feedback.

@mahmoudimus figured it out (the 5th), however, doing ...something... got me on a 6th answer. Is this a bug or some bonus level? ;)

I like the puzzle. Sadly (and honestly), I got stuck on the last answer.

Thank you so much for your feedback. With your permission, I'd like to experiment by sending you a "hint" to see if it can help finish the last part without taking away the satisfaction of completing the puzzle! You can ping me on my email address.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this!

Thank YOU for sharing the puzzle. I love these sorts of things. I've been introduced to ARG's lately which usually end up being similar things. I missed the cicada 3301 wagon as I was too inexperienced at the time to be able to contribute. So I've been trying to find other puzzles and I'm happy I found this one. I'll reach out to your email shortly!

I'm stuck on the first one. The "obvious" thing to do didn't work :-). Now I have no idea how to decode it. I guess that is the point? - do you need to be from a security background and crack the code, might require some tools etc?

I wouldn't say that you need a security background to answer the questions. I certainly don't. I would say more about the problems themselves but I'm scared it would give too much away. If you'd like, I could walk you through the first answer through email (you can find mine in my profile description). That may be enough to get you going. If not, I'd certainly be up for sharing how the rest are solved. I'm more than willing to do that because in this case if you aren't familiar with the type of problem you wouldn't even know where to begin "googling" to learn more.

Thanks for the offer. I'm OK not to know the answer, but thought I would give you feedback.

The problem with these kind of puzzles is they reward luck to some extent. If you happen to try the thing that cracks the code you win. Otherwise you remain stuck. And there are no clues. Compared to real life software where you have a puzzle, you can't crack it, but you can apply debugging techniques and logically constrain the problem.

I might change it to say something like "here is an encoded message, it has been encoded by (e.g.) replacing each letter A-Z consistently with another letter A-Z. Once decoded, you might want to use this regex to help you pick out the message.

With that info I could go write a program to try and crack it and start thinking about how to solve the problem. The program itself could be part of the submission.

It started by asking for my email address, so it's an instant No.

It’s a hiring puzzle 🧩 so obviously we want your email address. However you can just write in ${anything}@mailinator.com for a disposable email address and still provide feedback.

That being said, thanks for the comment, we will move this stage to the end.

stuck at the last answer too

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