Slashdot Mirror
Mystery Company Recruiting Talent With a Puzzle
An anonymous reader writes "Google has previously used coding competitions to locate top talent. In a new twist on the idea, an anonymous tech company is posting a help-wanted ad that challenges developers to find out who the company is. A little digging and text mashing reveals a website containing a Web 2.0 puzzle that makes notpron look like child's play. So, fellow developers, who is this company, and, well, what is the significance of the date '01-18-08?'" Update: 12/12 20:20 GMT by KD : Replaced link to a removed Craigslist ad with a mirror.
Cloverfield. 01-18-08 is the release date.
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
And a movie with a release date coinciding with those numbers would be the culprit, in my opinion.
You can't take the sky from me...
If the mysterious company makes you jump through hoops to get into the door, will they jump through hoops to make you feel like a valued employee or just break out the whips since you're lucky to have the job?
If anyone wants to save some time (like 30-60 seconds) with Base64 to Ascii:
eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9 converts to { ':' => '', ' ' => '-', 's\n' => 's.com\n' }
The clue is base 64 for:
{ ':' => '', ' ' => '-', 's\n' => 's.com\n' }
Now, if you notice [RFC 3548] later changed to 4648:
"CB-" ":" ":" ":"
":"
my 30-seconds attempt is over.
Sigs are for the weak.
I'll bet you dollars to donuts that that company creating all of this is the same one to submit the story.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Just base64 decode the string that appears to be made of random chars. You get:
{ ':' => '', ' ' => '-', 's\n' => 's.com\n' }
Apply that to the subject in the contact details. You get:
http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/
That was pretty easy. The test then seems to move to web programming and I'm not interested.
Banu
eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9 (3548, 4648)
"eye and i......"
my l33tspeak isnt what it used to be.
The significance of the date "01/18/2008" (the eleventh question) is that the company is American and does not use ISO date formats. The particular date is unambiguous, but in general that is not true with their format, e.g. "02/03/2008" could mean either February 3rd (for American readers) or March 2nd (for European readers). ISO is the global standard, and the format removes ambiguity: 2008-01-18. A small additional benefit is that it makes sorting trivial.
If these people were really as committed to quality as they pretend to be, they would be promoting the ISO format, to facilitate less-ambiguous global communication.
Without even solving the puzzle, but reasoning purely on circumstantial evidence, the answer has to be Mike Hunkapillar's stealth startup Pacific Biosystems. The reasons are simple ... (1) PB's genomic technology is producing a flood of raw data, (2) PB therefore needs programmers to convert that stream into IPO-salable value, and (3) PB is the only one hiring right now!
"Drink more Ovaltine"
we would like to extend a job offer to you.
by hitting upon the clever solution of submitting the puzzle to slashdot as a story subject and letting random slashdot commentors solve the puzzle for you, you have displayed a high level of ingenuity and cleverness. we therefore would like to hire you as the manager of the 3 other programmer applicants who slogged and plodded it out and solved the puzzle through brute mental force on their own. your salary will be 250% of theirs.
congratulations again,
anonymoustech inc.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
42.
Except when people discuss about not discussing it ... which is actually counter-productive to their argument ;)
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
...I mean, come on guys, at least design your test to be a little resilient to people who grok JavaScript.
but it's also my birthday. Do I get the job?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
xkcd 356 - nerd sniping
Am I the only one who grabbed their /js/ and peeked at the code...
... That was easy.
"// Note: It is not necessary to reverse-engineer this file in order to complete the contest"
I did no testing of any sort... inside framework.pack.js it says
p.setAttribute("title","list, uniquify, relativity");
p.appendChild(document.createTextNode("Ford's, success, has, the, country, almost, financially, industrially, mechanically, exhibits, in, higher, than, persons, have, thought, possible, contradictory, requirements, of, efficiency, increase, great, workers, cost, consumer, And, cost, cost, consumer, And, cost, cost, consumer, And, workers, workers, workers, workers, to, repeated, great, increase, quality, increase, great, great, increase, quality, efficiency, efficiency, which, are, of, contradictory, contradictory, requirements, of, possible, have, have, thought, possible, have, have, persons, than, than, most, persons, persons, than, most, exhibits, exhibits, exhibits, exhibits, financially, financially, financially, financially, almost, the, the, country, almost, Ford's, Ford's, success, has"));
"Dictator Flakes. They WILL be delicious."
I don't have the function that passes the tests that they wanted yet, but here's a collection of everything so far:
/* /*
/2 ~=-154 - 1 = -155.
First off, the craigslist posting leads to:
http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=
Then, the main.css file has two bits of non-css info in it. At the very bottom, there's:
34w4wa
*/
Then at the top, we have:
([Dollar,Daily Universal Register] % 100).([Flavian II => Severus] / 2 - 1).([Sherman Anti-Trust,Van Gogh] / 9).([Tycho Brahe,Stellar] / 12)
*/
There's a hint at the bottom of the page, as well:
sticky falling bricks of truth
I have nothing on 34w4wa. Daily Universal Register, as was noted elsewhere, used to be the name of the Times of London. Dollar, who knows? Flavian II was the Patriarch of Antioch. Setpimius Severus was a Roman general, and Roman emperor. Sherman Antitrust Act was the first US Government action to limit cartels and monopolies. Van Gogh was of course a painter. Tycho Brahe was an awesome astronomer, and stellar, again, I don't know.
It's an array of four things, with dots between them - an IP address. Perhaps something with dates?
The date format tells us it's an American-related quiz. The US dollar was adopted in 1785, while the Daily Universal Register was also begun in 1785. 1785 mod 100 = 85.
Flavian II died in 518. Severus reigned from 193-211, when HE died. 518-211 = -307,
So far, 85.155...
Sherman Antitrust and Van-Gogh's death were both in 1890. 1890/9 = 210
So 85.155.210...
Tycho Brahe died 1601...I don't know about stellar, but other dates have coincided so 1601/12.to_i = 133
85.155.210.133 doesn't appear to have a web server on it, but that 155 is really suspect, as is the 133 (not an integer). Brahe was BORN in 1546, and 1546/12 = 129.
85.155.210.129 isn't answering either. Again, the 155 bothers me.
Flavian II died 518, but 518/2 -1 = 258, which isn't exactly a meaningful number for an IP address, eh?
I got my Severus wrong, as there was a Severus that succeeded Flavian II in 512, 14 years after Flavian II became patriarch. 14/2 - 1 = 6.
85.6.210.129 has no website on it either, but it's feeling better. Maybe that 129's a red herring...I feel like the 85 and 210 are right as rain though.
A google search for 'tycho brahe stellar' returns a couple of hits for an article listing 1572 as a date, and 1572/12=131. Turns out SN1572 was known as Tycho's Nova.
85.6.210.131 still gives me nothing though.
-knewter
i phrased what i said as a joke, and yet it is a sterling example of business intelligence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Are you kidding?
I've gotten this in my email like a hundred times!!
How would you like your penis to be this long?
--->"eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9" ??
ORDER NOW!!!!
a cached page (google rocks) at learn4good alludes to the company being fordware, based in delaware http://72.14.253.104/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enUS242US242&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.learn4good.com%2Fjobs%2Flanguage%2Fenglish%2Fsearch%2Fjob%2F42067%2F the cached description of them on the same site http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:LVPBSirfWw0J:www.learn4good.com/jobs/language/english/search/company/33798/+fordware&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
FWIW the code.png is 591x19 pixels. 19 is prime, and 591 is a multiple of primes 197 and 3.
A histogram of code.png shows all values concentrated at 8 locations, making me think this is digital information, not something meant to be viewed as an image.
Nothing interesting from "strings code.png"
That's all I have to contribute. Off to do something else now...
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Nerd sniping
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Helmsville McDonald's Hiring Fry Cook Seeking highly motivated candidates. Inquire at drive-through.
I work for a company that uses puzzles to attract and evaluate people. We started doing this in the late '90s after hiring people who had good resumes and interviewed well, but couldn't program. Having evaluated a bunch of submissions, I can't imagine hiring someone without seeing a sample of their code. Resumes have almost no information in them. Someone with "10 years of C++" might know the language like the back of their hand, or might write simple, sloppy code. Pretty much any phrase on a resume could mean just about anything. A programming puzzle is like an audition. It's better than writing code during the interview. Writing code in an interview on a white board is pretty far from real coding: no symbol completion, no access to references on the web, a strict time limit, someone who holds a key to your career watching your every move. Only time for simple questions, and no way for the person to choose a problem aligned with their skills. If a company asks you to spend a few hours, so they can decide whether to employ you for years, you can be sure that you'll work with people who have been similarly vetted, and they won't write spaghetti code with variable names like t1 and d2. And it can be quite frustrating maintaining code that makes www.beyondfailure.com look good.
Part 2 is at: http://wanted-master-software-developers.com/?key=coLLAborATE
The code.png contains 6 colors. If you interpret it linearly and separate it into blocks delineated by green-blue, you'll notice that many of these blocks appear several times throughout the file.
Someone in the Google group has decoded the CSS classnames in the source (substitution cypher), the result then leads to part 3: http://www.wanted-master-software-developers.com/?you=me
Look at the bottom of the page on the actual test "Top winners get interviews. All winners get free software", so this is just marketing bullshit, viral advertising for some software release.
It has been solved. The code.png image is indeed a sequential file. Counting sequences of one color separated by other colors reveals a numbering scheme between the red dots which, when applied to the rest of the file, yields indexes into the decimal representation of PI (the description shows familiar substrings at offsets 0, 1 and 2.) Taking 6 digits each from the listed positions gets you two 3-digit ASCII codes which form the description of a stack machine that decodes the messages on pages 2/3 and 3/3. The 2/3 message is "cerebrum, vere-tempus, together (adv.)". Turn Latin into English and English into Latin and you get "brain, real-time, simul (una)". Googling reveals that a company called N-BRAIN will release a collaborative software development package called UNA on 2008-01-18. An encoding of "UNAreleasedate" for the stack machine is "eRnnnueNueAueRleIaue-leNaueRleBanue-leNaue-leIanueBleRaue-leNaueBleBanue-leIanueBleRanue-leNau", which transports you from page 3/3 to the congratulations. They'll send you a standalone version of UNA if you provide them with your email address and the email addresses of your collaborators. You can also check a box to request an interview. A cookie contains the code you entered in step 1/3. They say they'll look at the order of the entrants and the code to determine who gets an interview.
N-BRAIN is a privately held company in Boulder, Colorado. You can apply for a job without going through the puzzle. According to http://www.n-brain.net/jobs.htm they don't look at resumes but give you an assignment to evaluate your code-fu. The team page lists four people, including the founder John A. De Goes, who is the author of two books on game programming ("3D Game Programming with C++" and "3D Game Programming with C++ Gold Edition"), worked as an instructor at http://www.gameinstitute.com/ and is a member of the Boulder martial arts and agile software meetup groups.