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Announcing Starfighter

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Re: Announcing Starfighter

#311

Post by tlrobinson »

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 don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy.

It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this SQL injection) then that's easy to game. If you have to write a bunch of distributed systems code (e.x. Stripe's last CTF) that's a lot harder to cheat.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#312

Post by pron »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #310
pron wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> I don't care if membership in some particular group is correlated with lack of privilege.

And what if lack of privilege is caused by association with the group?

> If you want to argue that lack of privilege is an individual injustice

You may believe in individual rights, but you can't deny group injustice. Blacks were made slaves not due to any individual selection.

> 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?

You can't possibly be serious. But just in case you are, there are clear tests to measure power: money, positions of control in the private and public sectors, positions of control in the media. QED

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#313

Post by byEngineer »

tlrobinson wrote: post #311
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 don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy. It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this…

Somehow they never do. They'd rather pay $50k to someone else than do it on their own.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#314

Post by mania »

tlrobinson wrote: post #311
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 don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy. It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this…

They won't look closely. As you seem to see yourself, they would rather spend $50k per engineer to a 3rd party service than perform proper recruiting by themselves in house.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#315

Post by tlrobinson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #174
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…

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 wou…

As a public company isn't it Tesla's obligation to try to run a (eventually) profitable business?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#317

Post by tlrobinson »

mania wrote: post #314
tlrobinson wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand their business. Contingency recruiters' fees can reach 30% or more of an engineer's first year of salary, which could work out to $50k or more per engineer. You can bet they will be looking closely at each candidate's solutions, plus automated code plagiarism detection is pretty easy. It also depends on the type of problem. If you just need one weird trick to pass the level (e.x. use this…

They won't look closely. As you seem to see yourself, they would rather spend $50k per engineer to a 3rd party service than perform proper recruiting by themselves in house.

You seem to be trolling, but to clarify I was suggesting Starfighter would be looking closely before referring candidates to clients. Their reputation depends on the quality of the candidates they refer.

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#318

Post by compbio »

tptacek wrote: post #255
agentultra wrote: post #238

Another attempt to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being. How utterly irrational. It's ideas like this that make me question why I bother being a programmer for anything more than leisure these days... except that I have no idea what else I could do to keep a roof over my family's head this late in my life. You call yourselves, "engineers," but…

If you could tell us how to apply data analysis to produce a concrete number that represents the merits and talents of a fellow human being, I would love to hear it; it would make my job a lot easier. I didn't know that was possible. Is this some kind of linear algebra-y machine learning sort of thing?

I was hoping the challenges would include machine learning. There is so much exciting overlap between ML and security. From detecting intrusion attempts to scraping and processing pastebins.

I think it is amazing what you guys did here: you got more points on a give me your e-mail, we are building something post, than Stripe got when announcing their company. Really speaks volume on Patio's writing.

Will there also be marketing challenges? Like: Every day patio11 clicks on one email. Your task is to write an engaging headline. Or: Here is some Google Analytics code. Make it show 50.000 visits any way you can. Very hard to cheat. (But so is getting Google security to file a bug report).

I really enjoyed the comments. Especially the ipod-hasnt-got-wifi criticism. You guys must know that what you are doing is terrible and you should feel bad.

Who knew decoding morse in some wave extracted from a corrupted image file in Cicada 3301 could also lead to a job. Will there be an ARG element to the CTF's? Like you pose as an agent from the NSA or something?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#319

Post by yummyfajitas »

pron wrote: post #312
yummyfajitas wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> I don't care if membership in some particular group is correlated with lack of privilege. And what if lack of privilege is caused by association with the group? > If you want to argue that lack of privilege is an individual injustice You may believe in individual rights, but you can't deny group injustice. Blacks were made slaves not due to any individual selection. > For example, being black will sway college admi…

I don't deny group injustice. I don't believe injustice based on group membership is worse than any other kind - slavery is an injustice even if it's equal opportunity. Insofar as having bad schools or bad parents is not an injustice, it's also not an injustice if some group has more of them than another.

And insofar as such a thing is an injustice, the fact that it's correlated with some group is irrelevant to me.

If the only way power can be measured is via outcomes (in this case, I guess a high developer salary?), then I'm not sure why we need a new word to describe it. I also don't get what your point is. I guess you are arguing that smart people don't "deserve" the money/control that comes with a developer job any more than dumb people, and therefore starfighter is a bad thing?

Re: Announcing Starfighter

#320

Post by lkwjeklrzz »

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…

if you're monitoring everything players do, doesn't that create an incentive for them to write their own tests locally and only interact with your servers when they have stuff already working? so they look like a genius instead of a guy who made a bunch of mistakes. "look i never make any syntax errors, hire me". but seriously whatever you monitor, players will have incentive to try to figure out and game it. and that incentive messes up the regular experience, it's an incentive to do something other than beat the level.
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