291–300 of 309 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://8.8.8.8 just times out. Why not point it to http://www.google.com or just serve a little javascript redirect or something? Sloppy work Google.
And a DNS server should have an open port 80 (and so an additional attack vector) because...?
This is Intro to Systems homework at UChicago (the course is heavily based on CMU's equivalent.) You're given a personalized binary that asks for a series of passwords to complete each level. If you get a password wrong, it phones home to a server run by the professor and decrements your grade. The point is to teach you to reason about assembly using GDB. You can pretty trivially set a breakpoint at the phoning-home…
That program was not nearly as devious as the one discussed in the blog post. It made no efforts to stop us from using gdb, and the password encoding was never as reflective as xor-ing with the program bytecode.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's gets a bit complicated when your job candidates may find your test interesting enough that they post a complete walk-through of the solution online. The candidate was kind enough to avoid posting the name of the company (to hopefully hide the walk-through from Google queries for "crack me hiring test company name ", but an HN discussion might then arise around the walk-through, in which the company would be name…
If you're not changing your tests on every interview batch you're doing it wrong. You're asking a potential candidate to spend hours cracking your program but you can't be bothered to change it for each batch? I expect any company applying this interview technique to at least put some effort into it and even then it pays off since a batch could contain hundreds of candidates and you only have to build the program onc…
I'm surprised they didn't make him sign an NDA for it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, punctuation association rules are the same in all indo-european languages. Most of them bind to the left and have a space to the right. Emdash, and ... have two spaces, and endash and apostrophe have no spaces. But people struggle with this. I distinctly remembering practicing this in class when prepping for matura (Slovenian version of SATs) so I guess it isn't inherently obvious to everyone.
> Emdash, and ... have two spaces, and endash and apostrophe have no spaces. In English, Em-dashes have a couple of different uses, but in the most common use they are usually set closed (no spaces on either end), though some styles set them with a space on either end. En-dashes have one use (similar to that of em-dashes, which is used varies by house style) where they are usually set open, and a number where they ar…
Actually, the en dash has more than one use: http://cddc.uchicago.edu/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDash...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For developers that have the academics, but not the experience, I've always said that the industry needs to adopt the apprenticeship programs that other trades have. Where you do a mixture of work for the company, and trade schooling run by the industry to teach you the specific skills you need. For example, an IBEW apprentice will do a lot of gruntwork on the job site. Pulling wire, for instance. But they'll get exp…
That exists, its called a co-op. I couldn't graduate without doing x months of co-op.
I have only seen it (co-op) used in the last few years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nice simple test that I like to give as a first-wave elimination: Have a computer setup and running (all properly configured). Pull the network cable out of the jack a little bit (so it looks like it's plugged in but isn't). Ask the person being interviewed to show me an IP being used by microsoft or google. (so ping/dig/nslookup/etc) Let the person know that (a) the computer is in working condition (i.e. no driver…
If I answer without touching the computer, do I pass? :) Google DNS comes in handy!
This reminds me of the popular binary bomb lab offered in some computer architecture courses: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/labs.html
Yep, did those at University of Colorado Boulder.
Dude?? Did you wait until you go to Spain to post this? Still, it is very fun to read this post and comments here. Actually, I prepared these two crackmes in order to arrange a small competition among universities at Turkey. But, they became very good interview questions also. It's really good to read these responses. Cracking ability is really rare in CS student community in Turkey. Our intention was increase awaren…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Employers that do this are ridiculous. In my experience, they're usually startups or smaller companies that are trying to "copy google" in their hiring practices, but don't fully think out how they're doing it. It's not a good sign.
Well Google does it too. Their 'gang bang' interviews are notorious for weeding out people that don't perform well under short term pressure like that. "just write an algorithm for a stack on this whiteboard with a big O complexity analysis and memory usage pattern in 15 minutes while we all stare at you. What? You don't work well like this? Well this is how elite Googlers work all of the time so GTFO"