Thursday, November 04, 2010

Thank you, Mr. Nast, may we have another?

Reddit will soon be announcing a new employee, and in the meantime, we get to hire another one! The job description is very similar to last time (go read it; we'll wait) with the following changes:
  • This time, it's for a regular full-time employee position.
  • This position comes with benefits.
  • You don't have to be a superstar programmer, if you make up for it by being a superstar Unix admin, systems architect, or distributed databases expert.
Other than that, though, all the other stuff from last time still applies, in particular:

To apply, you'll need to solve a puzzle. We're only accepting resumes sent in via www.reddit.com/apply/X, where...
  • X = A * B * C * D

  • A is the first byte of the ICMP section of the packet that a router will send back when it sees a ping which has hopped too many times
  • B is the integer nearest to how much an Olympic-sized swimming pool of the minimum depth would weigh, in gigagrams, if it were filled completely with solid gold
  • C is the four-digit year in which the company whose data-link layer addresses look like 08:00:09:??:??:?? registered its primary domain name
  • D is the decimal HTML entity for the Unicode character "ℜ" (which is not the same as the ASCII letter "R")
If you're smart enough to solve the puzzle, please don't show off. This whole plan will only work if everyone can bite their tongue, so we're just going to ask you to please, as a special favor to reddit, keep the secret a secret. Thanks!



Here are the answers from the previous puzzle:
  • A = 2010031103, at the time of posting.
  • B = 86400
  • C = 47
  • D = 22
Multiply them all together, and you get 0x7a793900, which is the null-terminated string "zy9". It's just that simple!
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