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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#261

Post by rhizome »

dragonwriter wrote: post #192
elptacek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not have access to the µc data, any longer. That belongs to Matasano. I am now sad that I did not ask myself the same question and pay closer attention while I did. However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. I believe in this so strongly that I am dedic…

> However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. That's a nice thought, though it rather presumes that the playing field is level outside of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the hiring process. I think that neighborhood, though, is probably, while not witho…

I think the desire to to figure out where a level playing field can be built within a neighborhood of aptitudes. And to be fair to a process of refinement for that goal, some problems can't be solved before you have them. Like a business plan, the initial draft is just a guess, and I think we can all agree that it's a heretofore unsolved problem, the gender thing.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#262

Post by nulltype »

tptacek wrote: post #107
otakucode wrote: post #59

I'm sure you've got your own ideas for your CTFs, but if you haven't heard of them before I would recommend you check out the Matasano Crypto Challenges (cryptopals.com). They ran them privately for awhile, you just emailed them and said you wanted in and they sent you the challenges, once you emailed the answers for one batch they gave you another, etc. I've tried various 'code gaming' things before, and the Matasan…

We wrote the Matasano Crypto Challenges. Besides cryptography, what are some other programming problem domains you'd enjoy playing with? We're particularly interested in problem domains that are hard for ordinary programmers to pick up on a whim. We want to make it possible to seriously engage with interesting problems while in your couch with the Daily Show running in the background.

I guess what sort of domains do people like to play around with in their own time? For games there's 3d rendering, physics and AI which seem fun (at least to me) but I'm not sure how to necessarily make fun challenges out of them.

For non-direct-games things fancier AI like deep learning, audio synthesis, making compilers/parsers/transpilers, math stuff like project euler, puzzle/board game solvers/bots (https://gist.github.com/christopherhesse/51e9baf0e3d440d8aff...) come to mind.

Some of the stuff in the 3rd stripe CTF was pretty interesting like making a search engine or dealing with distributed system consensus problems (raft).

Maybe using the coolest new framework is fun for some people, like a challenge could involve angular.js so you could get some experience using it without having to go full-on side project or put it in at work without having any real idea if you should.

Implementing things that you are familiar with but that you don't understand the internals of has been fun for me in the past (for instance like https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-bui...). Maybe you always wondered how this thing works, and now you can figure it out and solve this challenge at the same time.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#263

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #192
elptacek wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not have access to the µc data, any longer. That belongs to Matasano. I am now sad that I did not ask myself the same question and pay closer attention while I did. However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. I believe in this so strongly that I am dedic…

> However, this is what I am hoping and dreaming for: that work-sample testing will completely level the playing field. Regardless of gender, age, or origin, if you can do the work, you should get the job. That's a nice thought, though it rather presumes that the playing field is level outside of the immediate neighborhood surrounding the hiring process. I think that neighborhood, though, is probably, while not witho…

[deleted]

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#264

Post by rfrey »

lambda wrote: post #242
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…

On your "About Us" page, you say "We're especially interested in talking to you if you will be hiring 10+ engineers in the next year, as we may be able to help you out with that. Get in touch with any of us." Does a company need to be hiring 10 or more engineers to make it worth it to talk to you? I'm at a small company, that has been trying to hire engineers for the last couple of years, and not having much success;…

I obviously can't speak for the founders, but I suspect that if you're viewing this as a replacement for a technical phone screen, you might not be viewing it as intended.

Did you read Thomas' "The Hiring Post" which was at the top of HN a couple days ago?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#265

Post by kasey_junk »

I am curious about a biz dev kind of thing, and it may be entirely too early to answer, but here goes:

"Contingent recruiting" has an extremely negative connotation to me. Quite literally, I have to constrain my bias when designing hiring pipelines to not throw recruiter backed resumes away. I understand that you are only taking the payment model, and are trying to undermine the business model, but have you run into any problems associating with the industry?

Or, more interestingly, have you encountered anyone on the consumer side (HR, C-Suite management, etc) that has pointed out a non-obvious advantage to typical contingent recruiting. I for one would love to hear why companies keep going back to that obviously terrible well.

I'm excited to see what comes of this.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#266

Post by bdavisx »

lexcorvus wrote: post #68

This looks fantastic. One possible wrinkle: I predict that, although top-performing Starfighters will be a diverse lot, they will lack "diversity". I hope the Starfighter founders have a plan to push back against the carping complainers a venture such as this is likely to attract. (My suggestion is to point out that CTFs are the ultimate expression of "Shut up and show us the code." [1]) [1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?…

I don't understand your point. I've worked with mediocrity far too often in the programming world, and outright incompetence as well. These kinds of contests/games are designed to weed that out.

If you're talking about the "winners" having personality issues, then hopefully that will be caught in the interview process.

Perhaps I'm completely missing your point though.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#267

Post by psquid »

gknoy wrote: post #176
eugeneionesco wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 belie…

Unfortunately, I suspect you overestimate the obfuscating power of dynamic content when the number of users is sufficiently large.

A certain MMO I play recently had a limited-time event built around figuring out the meaning of different clues (locations to go to for the actual meat of the event), and despite a fairly large number of variations, people had collectively figured out just about every possible clue->location mapping within a matter of hours.

That's not to say you can't prevent cheating, but that even with relatively little incentive (that whole clues thing gave only a single cosmetic item, and anecdotally I've seen very few people actually use theirs) users can and most likely will outpace any attempt to prevent it by means of varying the problem.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#268

Post by llimllib »

tptacek wrote: post #188
TeMPOraL wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognized your confusion because not so long ago, I also had it. I started hearing about reputable security conferences having "CTF tournaments" and was all like "oh cool, they're playing shooters for prizes, go geeks!" and then was disappointed when I discovered that someone just stole the term CTF to call pentesting contest with it (it takes a lot of imagination to say that a file is "a flag"...). Not to say tho…

I only know the term as applied in the Defcon sense (which goes back to the late 1990s).

I've always been certain that the name comes from the common children's game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag

right?

The wiki article has a short discussion of how that morphed into video game terminology, which is the etymology that I'd expect without having researched it.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#269

Post by mbesto »

tptacek wrote: post #258
bayesianhorse wrote: post #214

May be interesting. But the claims made in the announcement are very hard to believe. The admission of not being ready to show that the claims have been achieved aren't helping my scepticism either. Still... if it works, and is actually better than most other attempts at code-gaming this may be fun. Profitable? They will have to see.

The origin story of this company is the application of exactly this process in a real business, to great effect.

But it worked in a very specific context (security) and a specific company (Matasano), no? I know Stripe has done these CTFs in the past (and mostly security related), but they only spin them up on occasion. If the promise of such a technique is so effective, then why wouldn't Stripe invest the money (they've got plenty, let's be honest) in doing this all of the time? Especially given that a recruiter who would place someone at Stripe is probably taking home $20-40k on a placement.

Also, what are the plans outside of security related (if any)? Can you do a CTF style process for non-security?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#270

Post by kasey_junk »

mbesto wrote: post #269
tptacek wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The origin story of this company is the application of exactly this process in a real business, to great effect.

But it worked in a very specific context (security) and a specific company (Matasano), no? I know Stripe has done these CTFs in the past (and mostly security related), but they only spin them up on occasion. If the promise of such a technique is so effective, then why wouldn't Stripe invest the money (they've got plenty, let's be honest) in doing this all of the time? Especially given that a recruiter who would place…

The answer to the "why hasn't stripe done this" question is simple. They aren't in the business of doing it. You might as well ask why stripe doesn't sell database systems. I mean, they probably have some expertise in building those out as well.

Stripe is going to hire a couple of hundred developers over the next decade (assuming things go well). It sounds to me like Starfighter's goals don't translate to a couple of hundred X 20-40k. They seem a touch more ambitious.

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