No offence. (and also using your excellent service) But.

My statistical background have always questioned me, are these guys, who are posting rebuses on job pages are actually searching for rebus solvers or need their job done?

Or did they ever conduct a practical coding experiment with applicants who love rebuses and who dont..

It took me exactly 20 seconds to get the email address behind this ... and I'm not a professional rebus solver. I just happen to know how a base64 and hex encoded string looks like.

I thought it's a new way of securing email addresses. I didn't even understood this is a puzzle!

dammit - I thought I had decoded gibberish for 5 minutes there ! COuld not work out what I had done wrong.

when you say 20 seconds did you reach for a bash command ? interested knowing which.

Here is some bash kinda:

curl -s http://blog.balancedpayments.com/balanced-payments-operation... | html2text | grep -P '[^.*]=$' | head -n 1 | base64 -d | sed 's/../0x& /g' | xxd -r -c 100 | rev

You should apply. I'm looking for people like you :)

Nah I just googled for an online base64 decoder, then for a hex decoder.

hah!

so much for import base64!!

You gave it away :P

!gnihtyreve ton ,llew

Oh no! Not another puzzle! ;)

I think there's probably a pretty high correlation between people who can solve them, and people who can get the job done (or quickly learn...).

I wonder if the results of that study would show whether it makes any difference. :)

Actually, there were some studies that showed absence of correlations of ability of solving puzzles with actual productivity. See "The Invisible Gorilla" book by Simons and Chabris. Very rewarding reading.

(I work for Balanced) Just a simple thing to keep bots and Nigerian princess promising giant riches for small exchange of name/address/ssn/bank account/horoscope off. Also, we have explicit emails from people who decoded and it and found it fun. So, yes, this was a data driven decision

Nice post! Someone on my team just posted a similair post!

http://blog.factlink.com/post/45861768695/yolo-spend-less-ti...