Live data from Hacker News

Starfighter, Summer 2015

sockpuppet.org

51–60 of 112 posts

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#52
post #35

> I don’t really like games. > Yeah, so… I was planning on telling you more about our game. > Just two months ago, Tom and I were driving to the grocery store The announcement read like a mentally disturbed love letter about the typical idea guy stream of consciousness. Good luck, but I had to unsubscribe to prevent the arrival of any more...whatever that was.

Interesting - I think this is probably the first piece of Erin's that I've read, and I found it really engaging. Definitely a love letter type of tone, and I guess I'm used to that a little having a lot of conversations work-wise with people discussing their 'my business is my baby' passion.

It was a great read for sure. But since it was called an announcement, I was expecting a "when we launch" in the first paragraph. Not a "this is not the announcement you were looking for" in the very last sentence of a 5 page post.

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#53
Atmega chips are great. It's not really because of AVR architecture, but the options they provide are amazing - from standard built-in UART to a proper RF TX/RX. All on one chip.

I really liked working with Atmega (and AtTiny) hardware. So if you get a compiler chain that works for AVR because of the competition, you may as well continue and get a starter kit ;)

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#54
I initially thought that the subject of the email (Stockfighter Announcement) was some sort of auto-correct fail. This makes much more sense after reading it in full!

Pretty excited about this as I was on a team that built a trading system (won't say which one but it was a big one) and my education is in electronics. It will be refreshing to deal with a (fake) trading system that uses "JSON/REST" as most of the real ones use proprietary binary protocols or something even worse like FIX!

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#55

I initially thought that the subject of the email (Stockfighter Announcement) was some sort of auto-correct fail. This makes much more sense after reading it in full! Pretty excited about this as I was on a team that built a trading system (won't say which one but it was a big one) and my education is in electronics. It will be refreshing to deal with a (fake) trading system that uses "JSON/REST" as most of the real…

Oh don't worry, we'll get people's hands dirty with FIX, too, but making things accessible to web developers in their usual toolchains seemed like a good call for Chapter 1. Especially since I had never personally worked with FIX before and we had a slightly aggressive timeline.

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#56
post #28
post #26

Stuff like when Tom called me and asked if he could have a truckload of pork bellies (CME ticker:GBP. And: I told him no.) delivered to our house. Sadly frozen pork belly futures don't trade anymore and haven't for about 4 years (almost to the day), and the Globex contract was GPB not GBP. But whatever, that sounds like a cool story and you should tell the rest of it :)

It's been almost 3 years since we sold Matasano, 4 since Erin left, and a few years more to get to that story. Matasano started in 2005. Also: we're old. (The ticker is my fault).

Sorry, silly question, we're pork bellies in particular chosen due to the movie Trading Places? If I were to pick a stock for a laugh I would have chosen pork bellies... It's a shame to see that they aren't traded anymore :-(

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#58
post #14
post #11

It wasn't clear to me, but it sounded like the community might be able to contribute back to the core of the game, by improving tools/finding (unintentional) bugs etc. Is that an intended aspect of the game, and how do you see it fitting in with the game's ecosystem? Perhaps by corollary, will there be a significant open-source community built around the game; will there be open-source assets, but also the ability to…

It is absolutely intended that people will build things on top of Starfighter. People built things on top of Microcorruption, too -- there are actual professional-grade reversing tools which have a command-line "microcorruption quirks mode" to better emulate the behavior of the game's emulator. We will also, naturally, take bug reports -- and sometimes even fix them. I don't see us shipping much OSS at launch, but th…

One recommendation which may be really obvious: don't release any source unless you want to simulate that the source has been released in the "game" world.

If you want to release any source code for any segment of the challenge, while the challenge is ongoing, it will be torn apart by the competitors for bugs.

Because, as Erin said: "...pretending all our bugs were intentional, to make things more like the real world!"

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#59
Great news! I played with matasano crypto challenges and Microcorruption. And as I understand this one is more greater and more enveloping. I was so excited when read "compiler theory" in the letter because I realized the LR(1) compiler engine in JavaScript, and these skills will help me in Starfigher I think.

Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015

#60
post #55

I initially thought that the subject of the email (Stockfighter Announcement) was some sort of auto-correct fail. This makes much more sense after reading it in full! Pretty excited about this as I was on a team that built a trading system (won't say which one but it was a big one) and my education is in electronics. It will be refreshing to deal with a (fake) trading system that uses "JSON/REST" as most of the real…

Oh don't worry, we'll get people's hands dirty with FIX, too, but making things accessible to web developers in their usual toolchains seemed like a good call for Chapter 1. Especially since I had never personally worked with FIX before and we had a slightly aggressive timeline.

I feel sorry for you having to use it. Especially the XML version. Stay strong!

Fun fact, the SOH delimiter character renders as a smiley face in some terminals. Some of the proprietary protocols are fixed width which makes them so much simpler to parse than FIX.

Post reply on HN