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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#201

Post by sarciszewski »

patio11 wrote: post #197
sarciszewski wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a wishlist of all the problem domains you'd like to tackle? (I'm thinking web, mobile, and desktop applications above the system level when I ask this, but any other areas are wonderful. Databases. etc.)

We prefer to keep things a pleasant surprise, but we'll be emailing anyone who signs up with a suggested reading list if they want to start brushing up on old skills or acquiring new ones to get ready for launch day. The reading list will give a good deal of direction.

Right now I'm wondering, "Does this have any overlap with tptacek's Amazon reading list?" but I suppose I'll find out with the email arrives.

Thanks :)

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#202

Post by amirmc »

tptacek wrote: post #168
jmgrosen wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who plays in a lot of "conventional" CTFs (e.g. DEFCON, Codegate, GitS, etc.), this sounds very cool, even if my participation in those already gets me some job offers :) One question: for a less "just for fun" site like this, with no time barriers, how do you plan on dealing with people just following write-ups? You can randomly generate the flags, but people could still follow the steps. You can say "don…

This is (a) a real challenge, (b) something we're addressing in part by not letting the content get stale, (c) something we were surprised by with the crypto challenges --- if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it! --- and (d) something that the game model will also somewhat address. It's hard for me to go into more detail on (d) without revealing a whole bunch of stuff about the game I don't…

> "... if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it!"

This is great but I think the stakes are somewhat different if it's ostensibly about jobs/hiring. I don't recall the crypto challenges being promoted as a hiring mechanism (though they may have been useful for that).

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#203

Post by tokenrove »

javajosh wrote: post #129
patio11 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got nothing against CRUD apps, because they make the world go round, but it is unlikely that Starfighter will choose to send our candidates to firms making CRUD apps. The difference will be fairly obvious when you see our client roster. We're geeks with good taste for the kind of jobs a geek would actually want to have. (Sorry for being coy here. Don't want to jinx contract signing.)

>We're geeks with good taste for the kind of jobs a geek would actually want to have. You're geeks who've assumed that the only job a geek wants to have involves finding system-level exploits. It's all very clever to write a program that reads use it's own bytecode as the secret, but does that feed people? Get them to Mars? Heal people? Does it make application programming easier, less error prone, more accessible? P…

> Does it make application programming easier, less error prone, more accessible?

If you want to write systems that improve the safety of application programming, it helps to have a lower-level understanding of what is happening.

As for Mars, if articles like this (http://spinroot.com/dcas/) are any indication, there will need to be a lot of systems programming and especially tool building that requires deep systems understanding.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#204

Post by spydum »

marssaxman wrote: post #156
TeMPOraL wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you might be confusing the very unfortunate use of the acronym CTF for security-related programming games with the usual meaning of Capture The Flag, as in a game mode in First-Person Shooters where people work as a team to capture enemy's flag and bring it back to their base.

I was previously unaware that security-related programming games existed!

you are missing out! check out these unrelated CTF type ventures: - http://smashthestack.org/ - http://overthewire.org/wargames/ - NetWars @ SANS

Actually on further research, here's a nice reference: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/3592/what-hackin...

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#205

Post by tptacek »

amirmc wrote: post #202
tptacek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (a) a real challenge, (b) something we're addressing in part by not letting the content get stale, (c) something we were surprised by with the crypto challenges --- if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it! --- and (d) something that the game model will also somewhat address. It's hard for me to go into more detail on (d) without revealing a whole bunch of stuff about the game I don't…

> "... if you ask people to follow the honor system, they tend to do it!" This is great but I think the stakes are somewhat different if it's ostensibly about jobs/hiring. I don't recall the crypto challenges being promoted as a hiring mechanism (though they may have been useful for that).

The crypto challenges were how we (for instance) hired Alex:

http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

I think we plan on making minimal demands of our users, and none of them involve grooming them for prospective employers.

Look, the reality is, most of the people who participate aren't going to be looking for a job when they do. So all our incentives are to make the experience itself rewarding to participants.

I'm weird about typing those words because very very soon we're going to actually ship the first rev and levels of this thing, and as anyone who ships software knows: right now, at this point in the release calendar, my instincts are to be LOWERING the bar, not raising it. :)

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

japesinator wrote: post #14

I’m curious as to how much this will select for people with free time. Many of the CTFs I’ve played in required a quite non-trivial amount of investment of time (which I didn’t mind, as they’ve been quite enjoyable), but there are certainly people who can’t afford n dozen hours to solve problems due to family/work/other obligations. I do think this is significantly better than the alternative, but I’m also concerned…

> I’m curious as to how much this will select for people with free time.

There are very few hiring mechanisms (including, you know, the whole application and interview process) that don't select for people with free time.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#207

Post by ebbv »

This is neat, but is it really that hard for people to tell who has the skills they're looking for and who doesn't? Every developer I've interviewed it's been really obvious to me what they know and what they're bullshitting about.

I guess there's value is all in assembling a pre-qualified pool for employers to recruit from, though.

But in that way this is kind of like the 2015 version of CNE. Except it's free, which is good. And hopefully less miserable.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#208

Post by ChuckMcM »

And then there were four.

This theme (test your coders, don't interview them) is spreading about, I keep getting spammed by them as a way to "only hire top talent!" its an interesting proposition and I can't wait to see a bit of history behind it. At the very least it will weed out people who think they are programmers when they are not.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#209

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #198
paulhauggis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(a) For the same reasons you'd noodle with any other game" I play games for fun and to relax. "(b) For similar reasons to the ones that make you noodle with a programming language you doubt you'll ever use in production" On your website, it says that these will actually be real problems for real companies. I would think it's something I would see in production? "(d) Because for some of the technologies/concepts we w…

Whoah. You misread and we miswrote. We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be? Read "real" here in the sense of "plausible". Sorry about that.

> We are not taking our clients problems and reframing them as games. How boring would that be?

Not that boring, if your clients have interesting problems.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#210

Post by CmonDev »

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…

Will you get me above £100k in London?
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