
Want a Ticket to eCommerce Hackathon? First You’ll Have to Solve a Puzzle - Ataub24
http://betabeat.com/2012/06/etsy-dwolla-ecommerce-hack-day-developer-ticket-puzzle-06292012/
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fleitz
I need to solve a puzzle to be allowed to sit down in a room with other
programmers and code? You've got to be kidding me...

I'd rather buy a coffee at a coffee shop, I could care less about 'posers' I
do have other things to talk about besides whether ruby/php/python is more
scalable.

At least the coffee shop isn't trying to disguise selling coffee as
recruitment, pretty soon your local microroaster will be holding
'baristathons' and asking obscure questions about coffee to weed out the
'posers'.

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asparagui
Even worse, it's a binary string that you convert to ASCII to produce
/ImAHacker, to which you then apparently send a JSON PUT. So, you know you're
only dealing with the truly l33t.

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mschonfeld
Actually, its a POST, not a PUT :)

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ScotterC
I enjoyed it. Didn't take all that long and I'd rather be coding with people
that are actually capable of doing it

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fleitz
Converting 'binary' to ASCII and being able to make a POST request is what
counts as a capable coder these days?

I'm just saying that it seems like an arbitrary hoop, when I go down to
hackspace they don't make me jump through hoops... some of the people at the
hackspace definitely can't code they're doing things like yarn bombing or moss
graffiti, some can't code and are absolute geniuses with electronics.

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tadruj
I liked the challenge. It's only limited to web hackers though. iOS/ObjC or
Android/Java developers are cut out pretty much if they've never done web
coding. Also the hardcore coders that do algorithms and and such. These people
are necessary part of any good hackaton, otherwise the final products are just
web eye candies. Do you think giving some RegExp's (which are pretty much a
part of all languages) would attract wider hacker audience?

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sgrove
I was going to say that for an eCommerce hackathon, you probably don't need
hardcore algo-hackers or mobile devs, but then I started to wonder what you
could do with good web skills, data-mining/scraping, and a slick mobile
experience with some of the API's it provies (geolocation, etc.).

That would indeed be a pretty impressive hackathon, I think :)

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mglinski
{"success":true,"message":"Thanks for playing! In the meanwhile, why don't you
share your achievement on FB + Twitter and help us spread the good word? Head
over to the 'url'
parameter.","url":"<http://ecommercehackday.com/share,totalTime:260> seconds"}

Eating pizza makes coding double hard for me, I should have had less then 3
mins for that puzzle, but I just don't think this was even remotely hard
enough of a puzzle to weed out people for serious eCommerce
development/hacking? Submit a few HTTP requests and you pass the tests?
Besides filtering out people who don't know jQuery and console.log, I don't
think this was a very good test/quiz for what they are looking for. I think
they should be looking for the people who can create these simple puzzles from
scratch in X time instead of the people who can solve them.

~~~
mschonfeld
You can really solve this in a number of different ways... jQuery is just the
easiest way because I've included a basic snippet there...

The puzzle part was merely a way to weave out people who can't even figure out
basic documentation, and disrupt the workflow of those who can during
hackathons...

~~~
mglinski
Yea, as I read through the comments here I understood that was the idea. It's
just I was expecting something more.... substantial to get "invited" to a
hackathon, especially if you only know my email address and that I can
construct valid HTTP requests in the language/program of my choice. For
example, not including the jQuery library in the source code would have been
better imo, so we would at least have to problem solve a little. Just my
thoughts, I wish I could go to something like this but I can't so I am just
complaining here instead :)

~~~
mschonfeld
Oh I like this! Good idea. Removing jQuery now...

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trendynoise
So I solved the puzzle about an hour ago and received an email within about 5
minutes after finishing it. When I went to register for the event though,
there was no option to sign up as developer/hacker. The field only has N/A
next to it on the event brite page.

Is it supposed to be like that?

~~~
Ataub24
no you didn't get the real invite. It will come later today or over the
weekend. It will be a ticket, not a sign up.

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mbrameld
Got to the step with what looks like a hash in the instruction param, no idea
what to do with it. I'm not cool enough for these guys :(

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eggbrain
I'm trying to not give it away, but by Google searching "encode jquery"
(without quotes), the answer was the 4th ("suggested") dropdown result.

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picardo
Base64 decryption only works for the first part of the hash, though. The
second part after the slash is still garbled. :/

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jurre
try a different decoder (utf-8 is the key here i think) :)

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jenius
That was a fun puzzle. Did it just for good times, but does anyone have an
actual opinion on whether this would be worth going to?

~~~
jelpern
Etsy is considered to have one of the top engineering teams in NY - their CEO
was originally brought in as CTO to solve what was at the time a technology
mess - and they have a strong engineering culture. Dwolla is hungry to get
developers to use their platform, and Alex and the NY team were a key part of
organizing AngelHack NY. I imagine b/w the two of them they will do a good
job.

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mrchess
In the typical hacker news fashion we see waves of posts that criticize the
simplicity of a puzzle.

I don't know why people are so fussy these days. Just think about this test
like a FizzBuzz test. It's primary goal is really to weed out the beginners,
not to find rockstars.

Just appreciate it for what it was intended to be, a simple filter. Sheesh.

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tommccabe
I am really excited to see events like this in NYC. The tech community around
e-commerce is not as strong as it could be- events like this are great for
building the community. There is a lot of growth and opportunity in this
field, but I think it is being overlooked by a lot of developers.

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stevejalim
Nice little Friday afternoon distraction. Shame I'm on the wrong side of the
Atlantic to actually go

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boatmeme
Thanks, that was a fun puzzle for a Friday morning. Solved using Node.js and
Restler.

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jps359
I just did this while I was eating my lunch. I guess that means I'm a hacker.
This looks kinda silly though.. I think they're definitely limiting their
audience in terms of programmers by only making an ajax puzzle.

~~~
mschonfeld
This isn't necessarily an AJAX puzzle.. You can solve this by using CURL,
WGET, or simply pointing your browser to the endpoints...

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jiggy2011
When you get to the share button is that the end of the test or is there some
secret level for l33t h4x0rs?

You can do the whole thing without JS, just use standard HTML forms. Assuming
it does finish there.

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elliottcarlson
Or with curl to really save you some time.

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polysaturate
...that was easy, thought they would have made it tougher

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mschonfeld
The point wasn't to make it super hard... Just hard enough to ensure that
other coders won't waste their hackathon time teaching others how to code...

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dysoco
I write C and... how the heck do I use AJAX ?

~~~
tomjen3
system("curl")

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thecodemonkey
This is actually a pretty cool way to hype a conference that's free anyways.

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liamondrop
If anyone's going to this and wants to team up with a designer, hit me up!

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criveros
What the fuck is an eCommerce Hackathon?

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whichdan
71 seconds; I'm disappointed in myself.

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cvursache
that was easy fast fun

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skram
way too easy

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fersho311
"The point wasn't to make it super hard... Just hard enough to ensure that
other coders won't waste their hackathon time teaching others how to code..."

~~~
polysaturate
I feel like I have seen this before... _strokes chin in deep thought_

