
Show HN: We made a simple hiring puzzle Looking for feedback - mahmoudimus
https://puzzle.becomeverygood.com
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klavinski
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.

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

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

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

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

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mc3
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?

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jessehorne
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.

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mc3
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.

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

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mahmoudimus
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.

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YaBa
stuck at the last answer too

