

Creative Hiring: Solve the puzzle in this jobs page and get an interview - drusenko
http://www.weebly.com/jobs.html?contest

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tlrobinson
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>

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

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

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altay
any other douglas adams fans in the house? =)

~~~
rglullis
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.

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

~~~
tlrobinson
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.

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

~~~
davidmathers
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.

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

~~~
tlrobinson
Meebo and Facebook have puzzles too.

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llimllib
< 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.

~~~
rglullis
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.

~~~
llimllib
passing the time worked for me

~~~
rglullis
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();

~~~
altay
getTime() gives you _milli_ seconds. you want seconds.

~~~
rglullis
Danke sehr...

But still not enough.

~~~
altay
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...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1000+milliseconds+to+seconds)

\- 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.

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croby
fun! thanks for distraction at work :)

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jaed
Uhmmm...check the source code.

~~~
juanpablo
duh

~~~
insertcoin
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.

~~~
brett
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.

~~~
drusenko
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.

~~~
ed
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.

~~~
drusenko
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.

