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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#301

Post by yummyfajitas »

kenko wrote: post #298
yummyfajitas wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat relatedly, as a person who's discussed these issues with you in the past, it sounds like you'll be gathering new evidence. How will your beliefs change? For example, suppose $GROUP is over/underrepresented among top starfighter performers. What will be your new belief about $GROUP's technical talent and the causes of over/underrepresentation in tech in general?

"What will be your new belief about $GROUP's technical talent" Hopefully the most reasonable one: that there's no such thing about the technical talent of "$GROUP" per se, though our society might presently be so organized that it's easier for members of $GROUP to excel at certain kinds of tasks.

Of course there is such a thing - cook up a tech talent score based on these test results (see my other post on that topic) and then measure a group's mean, sigma or credible intervals.

How society is organized may be a cause for a group having higher/lower technical talent (so might "intrinsic" features, i.e. things not mutable by "society"), but it doesn't mean that talent doesn't exist.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#302

Post by omegaham »

areyousure wrote: post #295
Pyxl101 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important problem. As part of interviewing processes, I have several times tried offering "take home work challenges". I had to stop after, having run the experiment several times, I detected plagiarism in about 30-40% of the cases. The risk is of plagiarism is real for any problem that's well known enough that the problem and solution can appear online, and detecting plagiarism is not always easy.

Wait, why'd you stop? Isn't this a great way to filter out those 30--40% of people?

I like this response. I think that one of the best things about a take-home challenge is that during the interview, you can then say, "The way you implemented this function was interesting. Let's talk about why you did it that way." If he knows what he's doing (or made a weird solution), you get a great glimpse into his thought process. If he plagiarized, then he's garbage.

English teachers do the same thing for detecting plagiarism. Bring the kid into your office and talk about the essay. If he's completely clueless, someone else wrote it for him.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#303

Post by MichaelGG »

tptacek wrote: post #194
MichaelGG wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The same way you do it with math problems. Mastery of the subject material is the easiest cheat code. Elaborate? Math questions are the opposite of a good example, aren't they? Even with randomized values it's fairly easy to write generic solutions. People do this even for Project Euler. How much more so for something even cooler sounding? (I'm very excited to see this project and it sounds like a lot of fun. I'd ju…

I actually hope this happens, and that there's a community of code sharing that forms around it.

Wouldn't that just make cheating easier, then? I'm sure you have this sorted out somehow, it just seems like a rather large unaddressed question.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#304

Post by woah »

sfink wrote: post #237

Hey job seekers. I'm level 45 in starfighter with a power VI blaster in C++ and IX in Python. $100 to get you to level 30, x1.5 per level above that (though obviously I can't get you above 45, but I know a guy so I can subcontract up to 52.) You just have to set up a port forward from your machine and I'll take care of the rest. Contact info is in my profile. Don't get suckered into using a bot. They may be cheaper i…

I'm not sure that cheating on this would be unethical. Programming is about getting things done. As a hiring metric, nothing can beat open source.

The open source portfolio really is kind of a golden standard. It is real work that you have done, that has (hopefully) advanced the commons, because you love programming and have something unique to add to the world. Some fake video game programming may indicate something, but is simply not as strong an indicator.

Who are you going to hire- TJ Holowaychuk, who wrote Express, or the guy who placed 3rd on TopCoder in 2012?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#306

Post by pron »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #300
pron wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think my beliefs about the facts are any different from yours; we disagree on the causes of the facts and their mutability. Therefore, my beliefs will change when the dynamics are tested. But this kind of data provides evidence for our disagreement no more than a still image of a flying arrow can settle the one between Aristotle's and Newton's theories of motion. Somewhat relatedly I'd like to add that while…

Tom and I disagree on how much of the underrepresentation of women in tech is due to skill deficits. His new platform can answer that question quite effectively. My disagreement with you stems from the fact that I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights. I may or may not disagree with you about "power" but so far you've yet to provide a clear definition of it. (I did re…

> His new platform can answer that question quite effectively.

Assuming his game tests for skill and skill alone. Though even if so, it wouldn't explain the difference -- just report it.

> I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights

I don't understand. One of these things is normative (individual rights) and the other is positive (privileged population groups). The existence of privileged population groups is a matter of fact[1] -- no one thinks they should (normatively) exist. As to individual rights -- everybody believes in them, too. The question is what would be their nature. For example, I believe that if the wealthy were allowed to wield their power (money) over the poor unhindered, then the poor should be allowed to wield their power (numbers) unhindered over the rich as well. The point is that power, by definition (see next paragraph), means restricting in some way the freedom of others, so to obtain freedom you must either restrict all power or unloose all power.

> they provided multiple disparate and unclear definitions.

Perhaps, but not different enough or unclear enough to preclude study or reasoning. The gist of it is, power = the ability to bend (or sway) others to your will. Power is measured by how many people you can sway, and to what degree you can sway them.

[1]: For example, that white men are more privileged in America than black men is a fact.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#307

Post by captn3m0 »

So, we launched a long running CTF platform a few days back: https://backdoor.sdslabs.co. I guess more in the space is merrier.

My prediction is that Starfighter will become something akin to HackerRank where companies host their own CTFs to recruit people. While it sounds fine, making CTF problems is significantly harder than making algo problems. I'm sure the team is right for this, so it might just work.

I hope they do release some work in the open (such as their sandbox environment).

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#308

Post by captn3m0 »

rakoo wrote: post #136
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…

Thank you for running a long-term CTF ! I've always been interested in those "improve your coding skills by playing" challenges but from my inexistent experience most of them fall in a combination of: - They are timeboxed - They are mostly (if not only) about cracking security - They are targeted towards low-level languages You've already stated that it won't be timeboxed (which totally makes sense as a hiring "middl…

If you are interested in a long-running CTF, we launched https://backdoor.sdslabs.co a few days back (with >30 challenges as of now). We also tend to have more beginner level challenges.

I'm also really looking forward to this, especially from the pov of Hiring. Ours is an academic initiative, with no plans to monetize ever and its cool to see patrick and tptacek picking up the mantle on such a task.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#309

Post by scobar »

gknoy wrote: post #187
jasonlotito wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My worry is that this service could be seen as yet another certification, and just adds to the list of things you "have to do." I guess I can ask you directly: how much time do you spend interviewing people, not counting the work-samples you already require? As for suggestions, it's really about the next year. Unless you've already been doing this, you have to find people, and place them. And that means working not o…

I think you have an interesting concern. I don't worry that this will become an "extra certification", though. I imagine that one might still get called for a 3 day interview, but I suspect that people using a work-test like Starfighter before asking for that will already have a MUCH better idea about your capabilities than they would have without it. Interviews then seem like they become more about assessing your fi…

>>At this point, my biggest fear is that I might not have the technical chops to complete the challenges.

I fully expect that I don't have the technical chops right now to complete the challenges, but I can barely contain my excitement to get started. Learning whatever it takes to overcome a defined challenge is so much more thrilling than learning a topic for the sake of knowing it.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#310

Post by yummyfajitas »

pron wrote: post #306
yummyfajitas wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom and I disagree on how much of the underrepresentation of women in tech is due to skill deficits. His new platform can answer that question quite effectively. My disagreement with you stems from the fact that I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights. I may or may not disagree with you about "power" but so far you've yet to provide a clear definition of it. (I did re…

> His new platform can answer that question quite effectively. Assuming his game tests for skill and skill alone. Though even if so, it wouldn't explain the difference -- just report it. > I don't believe in any privileged population groups - I only believe in individual rights I don't understand. One of these things is normative (individual rights) and the other is positive (privileged population groups). The existe…

The existence of privileged population groups is a matter of fact[1] -- no one thinks they should (normatively) exist.

As a person who cares only about individual rights, I don't care if membership in some particular group is correlated with lack of privilege.

If you want to argue that lack of privilege is an individual injustice, fine - but then you need to stop discussing race since there are plenty of privileged blacks/women and underprivileged asians/males.

...not different enough or unclear enough to preclude study or reasoning.

You assert that white men are more privileged than black men. The definitions you've provided are insufficient for me to concretely state a test we could run to to disprove that.

For example, being black will sway college admissions officers for you but police against you. How do any of these definitions allow me to say that on balance, these things are negative? At what magnitude would the balance become positive?

Anyway, this is completely tangential to starfighter.

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