Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

stockfighter.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#31

Post by aphextron »

citizens wrote: post #4

"Starfighter is a new, weird kind of recruiting company. We detect and market underpriced programming talent. We do that by creating opportunities for programmers to casually and effectively demonstrate aptitude." Having a hard time parsing this. Do you find underpriced talent and help them get paid more?

Sounds like a brilliant business model, honestly. The world is brimming with brilliant programmers who are, for one reason or another, not able to reach their full potential due to outside constraints (third world countries, lack of tech investment, etc)

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#32

Post by logicalmind »

pchristensen wrote: post #5
citizens wrote: post #4

"Starfighter is a new, weird kind of recruiting company. We detect and market underpriced programming talent. We do that by creating opportunities for programmers to casually and effectively demonstrate aptitude." Having a hard time parsing this. Do you find underpriced talent and help them get paid more?

Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential. Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She…

Is that really the problem though? In my circle, plenty of people are doing the boring crud apps at random big company. The problem is that they're paid very well. So taking a job that is more challenging often involves taking less money, for more risk, with a small possibility of a payoff. Is there really a surplus of highly interesting tech positions with better than average pay that are desperately looking for people? If you're struggling to find talent, you're probably not paying enough.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#33

Post by aphextron »

s3nnyy wrote: post #22

Dev hiring is a sourcing problem, not a filtering problem. The people behind starfighter are brilliant and I respect them big time. So, probably they know what they're doin. I am excited to see how they want to solve dev hiring since starfighter looks more like a product that does filtering, not sourcing. (I am thinking since a long time to build something that leverages Github to find and reach out to engineers; e.g…

Please don't unleash another method of spamming developers on the internet. We already get 10 linkedin requests a day for the hottest coolest new idea.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#34

Post by kbenson »

citizens wrote: post #4

"Starfighter is a new, weird kind of recruiting company. We detect and market underpriced programming talent. We do that by creating opportunities for programmers to casually and effectively demonstrate aptitude." Having a hard time parsing this. Do you find underpriced talent and help them get paid more?

Presumably, if they are able to entice those people away from their current employment, they are offering something better, whether it be more money, more fulfilling (which can be for many reasons, such as being more challenging), or allows a better lifestyle. If nothing else, if gives those undervalued employees that have been identified a metric by which they, and their current employers, can judge their worth on the market.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#35

Post by lazerwalker »

logicalmind wrote: post #32
pchristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential. Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She…

Is that really the problem though? In my circle, plenty of people are doing the boring crud apps at random big company. The problem is that they're paid very well. So taking a job that is more challenging often involves taking less money, for more risk, with a small possibility of a payoff. Is there really a surplus of highly interesting tech positions with better than average pay that are desperately looking for peo…

tptacek, one of the Stockfigher founders, comes from the world of security consulting. That strikes me as exactly the right sort of niche: incredibly high-paying even relative to cushy crud apps, but there isn't really an obvious inroad for even an experienced programmer to make the shift over to doing security work.

I'd imagine there are other specialized software engineering fields with similar problems.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#36

Post by kbenson »

logicalmind wrote: post #32
pchristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential. Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She…

Is that really the problem though? In my circle, plenty of people are doing the boring crud apps at random big company. The problem is that they're paid very well. So taking a job that is more challenging often involves taking less money, for more risk, with a small possibility of a payoff. Is there really a surplus of highly interesting tech positions with better than average pay that are desperately looking for peo…

This invariably comes up whenever this is discussed, and what's usually referred to is that many people have a fairly narrow perception of what interesting tech work is, and sometimes exposure to other industries, or even interviews in other industries, can expand what they view as interesting work. Apparently, many industries have a problem sourcing good technical talent, even if they have the need and the ability to pay.

You might not think a position at an insurance company sounds interesting, but if the CTO starts explaining their plan on integrating their major departments with a new application they are developing from scratch (and maybe you get to help make ground floor decisions, like language), and needs to contain some interesting data warehousing to make sure that the statisticians and actuaries can access the data in heretofore impracticable ways, that might just tickle your fancy.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#37

Post by kbenson »

bdavisx wrote: post #26
pchristensen wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential. Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She…

Except according to an earlier posting from someone who went thru the process -- they didn't get a direct offer: they still had to go thru technical interviews. I thought a big point of this was that you could skip the BS technical interviews and prove yourself thru this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11433414 While it's a great service, this takes a lot away for people who are great programmers but might not…

To be fair, regardless of where the lead was sourced, if I was responsible for hiring a new programmer, I would make damn sure I had an interview with them that contained at least a technical portion. It's irresponsible not to, I wouldn't be doing my job. If the new employee turns out to not be able to code their way out of a paper bag, I'm sure I would catch at least some of the flak.

Trust but verify.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#38

Post by nialo »

gue5t wrote: post #16

The user interface is appalling. Whoever designed this has managed to produce worse ergonomics than a single 1970s-style terminal, for essentially a similar set of tasks (editing text+binary files and piping data through commands). I see some discussion of "files", but seem unable to list them or explore the filesystem. I don't know if this in-game filesystem is supposed to be on the "AVR" device or an imaginary "dev…

I haven't tried this, but https://github.com/ketchupsalt/debugger might be of interest to you.

More generally, it's not actually sandboxed inside a web browser, you can interact with system through REST-ish API as well. see https://starfighter.readme.io/docs/retrieve-device-status for some documentation on that. It's obviously pretty inconvenient to get a full debugger type experience that way, but I don't really see how they could make it less sandboxed, given the constraint that the authoritative copy of everything must run on their servers for security.

I do wish all the commands gave some sort of feedback, load in particular is super frustrating that way.

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#39

Post by doktrin »

tinco wrote: post #24
doktrin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because I don't have the desire right now to code all day and then code some more Tell me about it. Speaking only for myself, I have near-constant coder's guilt - a term I just made up to describe the nagging voice in my head that keeps telling me I should be coding more in my free time. It sounds something like this : "somewhere a rockstar wizard ninja is writing a C compiler in Haskell and here you are wasting yo…

Hi man, I just interrupted my game of Overwatch because a colleague pointed me to this comment. My C compiler in Haskell is located here: https://github.com/tinco/nanc it's not fully functional yet, but will be soon ;) Also, just got owned by a team with 3 tracers :( edit: Just read what this thread is about. I really like to program, so much so that I usually find an hour or two per day to code (not every day, check…

> Hi man, I just interrupted my game of Overwatch because a colleague pointed me to this comment. My C compiler in Haskell is located here: https://github.com/tinco/nanc it's not fully functional yet, but will be soon ;) Also, just got owned by a team with 3 tracers :(

Haha what an unexpectedly fantastic response. Kudos on your cool side project, and triple Tracers sounds like the pinnacle of frustration :P (is this a new meta? I was just watching a top tier EU game where one team rolled 3 tracers + 2 winstons)

> Overwatch is much more forgiving than SC2 or DotA btw

Couldn't agree more. I personally find SC2 almost too stressful to play competitively these days (as a 30 year old fogey), and the match length of your typical MOBA is also a major turn off for a casual like me.

> So I also play video games or watch movies. I like competitive games, mostly SC2, DotA and now Overwatch, but I don't worry about my MMR the way I used to when I played over an hour per day. Compared to achieving a high MMR building a ninja rockstar software project like a C compiler in Haskell is easy. Who is going to compete with me? It's a crazy idea anyway! I just work on it a couple hours per week, and after a year or two it'll be an impressive project no matter what. It's got everything I learned in it.

I'll be using your experience for inspiration. I also love coding - particularly once I get started - but lack the discipline to make a habit out of it in my spare time. Hopefully in a few months I'll have some similarly interesting work to show for myself :)

Re: Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live

#40

Post by kbenson »

gue5t wrote: post #16

The user interface is appalling. Whoever designed this has managed to produce worse ergonomics than a single 1970s-style terminal, for essentially a similar set of tasks (editing text+binary files and piping data through commands). I see some discussion of "files", but seem unable to list them or explore the filesystem. I don't know if this in-game filesystem is supposed to be on the "AVR" device or an imaginary "dev…

> Did nobody try to use this shit, even a little?

Isn't that moving a bit beyond useful or informative and helpful to a discussion to aggressive and antagonistic? Is this free game/tool/resource actually causing you that much agitation?

Post reply on HN