Did anybody solve this?

http://1.61803398874.com/

by jgrahamc • 15 years ago

36 21 15 years ago

1.61803398874.com

kuriraisu• 15 years ago

Yes. Use the modulus implementation of the vignere cypher. Then look up how C and python handle modulus.

etrain• 15 years ago

The latter half of the challenge was much more interesting to me. I'm a C/Python guy but didn't know the subtle language difference here. Additionally, in figuring out the difference, I learned that the C implementation takes almost the same # of characters as the python one..

joe_bleau• 15 years ago

Sure, I did it by hand. Not sure it was really challenging enough to impress me, though.

dli282• 15 years ago

Yes. The secret URL is rethinkdb.com The key 61803398874 corresponds with the letter of the alphabet with a as 0. Enjoy!

gujk• 15 years ago

It also works with a as 7.

a3_nm2• 15 years ago

Also, did anyone solve their "canine challenge"? It seems to me that what they're asking for is "tee FILE... > /dev/null", but maybe I'm missing something?

dexen2• 15 years ago

The only problem with `tee' is that it's hard to find it unless you know where to look -- took me some 2 years.

Perhaps the real challenge here is sticking with the team that produces incredible qunatities of code, as they put it, and will rather re-implement tee than find it. I wonder if they implemented own virtual memory with on-demand paging yet ;-)

</snark warning>

mvgoogler2• 15 years ago

Except that if you read the problem statement, you'll see that tee doesn't meet the requirement of 'taking advantage of all available I/O parallelism'. Tee writes to each output file sequentially.

Given that their core business is data-stores that take full advantage of emerging storage technologies (such as flash), this seems like pretty relevant question.

ryaf• 15 years ago

I am by no means a system programmer (I'd love to learn, no idea where to start), but seeing some sort of either breakdown or a list of implementation challenges to solve this problem would be awesome. I get that the man page describes what it needs to handle, but I don't clearly see every moving piece that this would have to deal with and account for.

rfzabick• 15 years ago

I submitted the tee solution as a joke and I got a smiley in response. I was pretty pleased with myself.

ryanlchan• 15 years ago

Read up on the Vigenere cipher on Wikipedia. If you still aren't getting it, reconsider which direction you are shifting the cipher text in accordance with the key. Good luck!

(Or do some social engineering and figure out which db company has a 9 letter name.)

jerfelix• 15 years ago

Spoiler Alert!

The answer is rethingdb. Apparently an ad for rethinkdb.com:

    >>> print "".join((chr((ord(x)-int(y)-ord("a"))%26+ord("a")) for x,y in zip("xfbhlqtlj","61803398874")))
    rethinkdb

krakensden• 15 years ago

You know what's sad? I knew that just from the job description. I'm not sure if that means I've spent far too much time on HN over the years, or if there is a real dearth of startups doing systems-level development.

munin• 15 years ago

I like how they changed the text from "In your e-mail, please explain why C and Python solutions to decipher the string above return slightly different results."

they added "naive" and "might" ...

gwillen• 15 years ago

Does anyone here have any idea what they mean about naive C and python solutions? Normally I take 'naive' to mean 'bad but not wrong', but their question seems to imply that one or the other of the 'naive' solutions they have in mind is wrong, and I'm not sure what obvious way there is to write it wrongly in one of the languages and produce different results.

emmelaich• 15 years ago

.. and did you get bonus marks for recognising the Golden Ratio? Or is that too obvious?

chosen1x• 15 years ago

It's not that hard. ROT to the left 61803398874 times. Then re think your answer. ;-)

Did anybody solve this?

Related Stories