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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#171

Post by throwawaymaroon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #166
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety. If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations. As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited. --- Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a busin…

If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations. If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable. Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the…

Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it.

Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#172

Post by ddlatham »

tptacek wrote: post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

Is it ok for a group of us who to complete the challenge as a team for fun? Or must we agree to only work individually?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#173

Post by tptacek »

ddlatham wrote: post #172
tptacek wrote: post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

Is it ok for a group of us who to complete the challenge as a team for fun? Or must we agree to only work individually?

Fun is the point.

I don't know exactly what the "rules" are going to be, but what rules we have will have one purpose: not to screw the game up for anyone else.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

dragonwriter wrote: post #166
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: The following is a neutral appraisal, not a criticism of either the implicit or explicit variety. If you feel that it is an accusation or a criticism, I would suggest that indicates something unrealistic in how you view business negotiations. As patio said, this is a trade between interested parties. Generosity is therefore expected to be limited. --- Fair enough. I just wanted it on record that this is a busin…

If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations. If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable. Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the…

Exactly. Tesla Motors comes to mind as a company for which "electrification of the world transportation" is the goal, and "profitable business" is only means to an end.

I understand the fear though; most of the companies we interact with (and I'd wager, 90% of startups we see here) are what I call toilet-paper companies - they'd gladly switch from whatever it is they're doing to manufacturing toilet paper if that would render more profit or increase chances of getting acquihired; their top priority is business, not the goal. I hope that Starfighter isn't such toilet-paper endeavour.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#176

Post by gknoy »

eugeneionesco wrote: post #147
tptacek wrote: post #2

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess. Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here: "CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doi…

How are you planning on combating cheating? For sure people will post solutions online to your CTFs.

I bet that Thomas and Patrick could do something like have dynamically created tests, where there are multiple versions of an exploit, so that they test the same skill but in different ways. You might have a challenge that tests whether you can do SQL injection, but the tables may differ. Overrunning a buffer (as Patrick mentioned in his post about Microcorruption) could depend on different payloads.

I naiively believe that things could be varied enough that you would need to understand the concepts rather than paste answers, in which case "cheating" would mean "learning", and is basically something they say they want you to do. I'm not sure how hard it would be to get to that point rather than being vulnerable to Bob the Super Coder posting walkthrough screencasts, but I trust that the founders are already savvy enough to have been thinking about that.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#177

Post by bearclough »

pnathan wrote: post #146
tptacek wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microcorruption player identities were totally private. There's no way for a recruiter to look someone up, unless they used a very-identifiable username. Privacy is important to us. How would you imagine the bizarro-world third party recruiter that would emerge from something like Starfighter could interoperate with employers to shield you from the kind of BS you're concerned about? We're interested in ideas!

I would suggest Starfighter Recruiter, LLC have a contract with a VP, CTO. Something to the effect of... "We provide you the names of people interested in your fine company, along with our certificate of credibility. You in turn agree that the interview process will be entirely on the intangibles[1] of interpersonal relationships, career goals, etc". Along with that would be a rider that would involve Starfighter Rec…

I think if it leads to higher quality job leads than that would be great for many people. I find personally with response rates to cold drops of a resume being around 75%. The amount of time shifting through positions I don't want >> than pursuing those that I do.

The great employers don't require to much chest thumping and I've had some down right fun interviews. I question the culture of a company that uses a CTF game as a metric to hire people. People who play and succeed at CTFs tend to be hyper-competitive and thats not always a wonderful characteristic in a team member or company.

Thats fair, after reading some of your comments above. I believe you don't intend this to be more work for people. And, I believe hiring on both sides of the equation is a non trivial problem.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

throwawaymaroon wrote: post #171
dragonwriter wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations. If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable. Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the…

Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it. Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their busi…

Even if you are being generous with your time and effort, you can't carry out an effort with any kind of reach without some support model. Financing it through its own operations may not be the only choice, but its not a choice incompatible with generous motivation.
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