
HackMIT 2017 Admissions Puzzle - patricki
https://delorean.codes/
======
patricki
Hey HN, HackMIT organizers here. This is the 2017 admissions puzzle! It
contains a variety of security, AI, and RE challenges. If you're an undergrad
and are one of the first 50 people to complete it you get automatic admission
to HackMIT!

If you start playing, feel free to join the Slack! Link is on the command
center.

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oldbuzzard
Just looks like a login page to me. No way to see either info on your event or
your clever puzzles w/o giving up my personal info :(

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igliu
Homepage: [http://hackmit.org](http://hackmit.org)

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anorphirith
I like the Easter egg in the console ;)

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eqqn
In case it is not obvious ( for me it wasn't ), you can only acceess the
puzzle through github login button. Registering doesn't give you access to the
puzzle.

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agroot12
Thanks for pointing that out, my first thought was the goal is to decode a bit
pattern from the flickering neon sign mp4! That would have been some wasted
time...

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moarrgan
That was definitely my first instinct. I got as far as the morse code decrypts
to "NETE" before coming back here to check if I was doing something wildly
wrong.

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OskarS
Something about unix time? Isn't the earliest moment in unix time around
December 1900? Epoch - 2^31 seconds? I'm betting it's something about that
plus some tricky nonsense I don't have the energy figuring out (assuming that
I could). I guess spoiler alert...

I used to love puzzles like this when I was younger, but I think I've lost the
patience for them now.

EDIT: ah, no, it's December 13, 1901. Never mind!

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nulldev
That puzzle is optional, and definitely the 'hard' way to get past that
challenge

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gshakir
The puzzles are similar to the ones on
[https://cryptopals.com](https://cryptopals.com). The first one involved a
combination of caesar cipher and running a jar file. The second one looks to
be related to timing attack.

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thinkMOAR
When i create a hackmit@ alias on my domain, and want to subscribe....

"Not a valid educational email."

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cnord
HackMIT organizer here. All .edu emails (and international equivalents) should
work. Please email us at team@hackmit.org otherwise.

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gaetanrickter
Required github login? Not everybody uses github, it's a very big world when
internal AI and Eng corp groups span the globe.

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kornish
The target audience for this is college kids, who these days frequently use
GitHub for consuming course material (e.g. boilerplate for class assignments).
Doesn't seem like a bad move on their part to avoid rolling their own account
system. People like one-click auth.

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bostand
Yeah, but they may not have an account on github.

And I see more and more students using gitlab instead since they have free
private repos

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rrdelaney
Students get free private repos on Github too with the education pack.

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teddyh
Oh it’s _free_ , that’s all right then.

Many people don’t use cost as the sole measure of everything.

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michaelmior
Sure, but the parent commenter explicitly mentioned free as a reason for using
GitLab.

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tentakull
tl;dl: too lazy, didn't login

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yAnonymous
^ THIS

