The HN user was 'petercooper'.
I wrote a wrapper function around the site generator that took a callback so the next string to test would be called recursively. If a public key matched the public key I was aiming for, I dumped the response to the console, otherwise I just called the wrapper function again.
Then I wrote a function that iterated over a list of strings and output an array with all the possible permutations.
Then I just fed an array of the userids of the top 20 users into that function and fed that function into my wrapper.
I opened 5 browser windows and fed each of them 20 userids to take advantage of multiple cores, but I'm not entirely sure that makes sense to do.
Edit: I was so wrong. Just a bad URL: https://keybase.io/warp
Maybe I'm going mad but it seems that Challenge 4 is one of the easier ones - there are only about 3000 keys to generate in that case. The final challenge is obviously leagues above that with 128,063,081,718,016 combinations (by my reckoning - I may have miscalculated).
Either way, great marketing hack :)
Edit: it looks like the article just received a heavy scoring penalty and is now on page 3.
That is definitely an empty string. hint pg hint
EDIT: Not sure what you meant anyway, I don't see a pg on the top 100 list...
Uh, can't you do that anyways? Just... add your email to your passphrase?
without the slash. The challenges are down the middle. 20BTC challenge at the bottom.
This is using Chrome 31.0.1650.57 m
All tips greatly received : 1Li2Dq9L49mJmCYcEh4n2eSQ9B6eWKCgBv
For example, did the OP consider that reddit posts can dissapear? Therre is a max amount of pages you can go through at /r/Bitcoin/ Or did they mean from the top posts? Again, hard puzzle.
