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Comment by the_rosentotter | Hacker News Reader

Your biggest problem is that I have read several quite long blog posts about Starfighter, and I still don't understand what it is.

I am a developer, I like to believe of above average intelligence, I'm your captive audience. If I don't get it, what are the chances the rest of the world will?

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Have you seen their homepage?

https://starfighters.io/

"Starfighter is a recruiting firm that detects and introduces the best programmers on the market."

And to learn how they achieve it, see: https://starfighters.io/approach

And to provide some context as to why Patrick and Thomas are in this venture, http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ (my all time favorite article by Thomas)

Hope this helps.

I'm confused as well. The description on their home page that you cite doesn't match the description they provide on the linked :

> Starfighter, if you're new here, is a company which makes fun engineering challenges that you can play online for free.

I can see how the two things would be related, but it's still confusing brand messaging.

Out of curiosity, would something like "play games, get hired" convey the message better?

It would if that were true, but you're not playing games and getting hired, you're getting your coding ability tested through a gamified vetting platform that will either thumbs up or thumbs down you to the actual company interview, where you'll have to be tested again.

Developers play games on this platform. The games are testing their technical competence. This info is passed/sold to recruiters. Hypothesis: If you are good at these games, you will be good at your technical job.

I agree. I know people love patio11's writing but... it's always such a long read that things gets obfuscated.

Couldn't agree more.

The length is always what gets me with everything he writes about. I really want to read it, but I just don't have the time. I'm skeptical of this type of communication strategy working for a product.

I think he can probably get his points across in half or 1/3rd of the length that he writes. His format of communication may be better suited to podcasting and talking than written. But ultimately, even with his drawn out writing, I derive good value from it by just skimming and speeding through it.

I almost wonder if that's deliberate. I don't think this is a spoiler, but there are times in Stockfighter where doing the reading is advantageous, ie "people who actually read docs should be rewarded".

A lot of my favorite parts of "playing" Stockfighter have actually involved going to a cafe, buying a coffee, and reading books like Flash Boys for a few hours.

Within the context of the game I 100% agree. A large part of being a great developer is being able to understand and abstract information quickly from a number of sources.

It's the verbosity of the marketing copy on their website that seems misguided though.

+1. My stream of thought is "it's some game and I guess trading is involved? Is this some sort of old school BBS game? Fuck, I have no clue.."

Step 1: read the API docs. Step 2: write an API client Step 3: Connect to a level Step 4: Lose loads of money Step 5: ??? Step 6: Profit! Note: I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ and wrapping a websocket client in R.

> I have not actually achieved step 6, but I blame a detour into learning C++ and wrapping a websocket client in R.

I always assumed detours like that (assuming you are referring to doing/starting that because of the game) would be one of the most useful benefits to playing. It forces you to have to explore areas that you might not normally get into based on your job and interests.

Completely, its been a lot of fun, and I surprised myself by enjoying reading the RFC (full disclosure, I always liked doing that).

That's what I'm taking it as a license to do. I mostly do statistics/analysis for a living, so building automated systems is pretty new (and fun) for me.

How'd you go with wrapping the websocket client in R? I've been putting together an R client and am stuck on how to do the websocket given the lack of R websocket libraries.

I think your best bet is wrapping an existing C++ library using RCpp[1] that will require some work but I hope not too much.

[1] I would have really liked that as I ended up writing all data to SQLite and then imported it to R for analysis. Not the most elegant solution...

That is exactly what I am (currently) doing. Its actually a little tricky because of the stream-like nature of websockets. Currently I'm just writing to a file, but ideally I'd like to use the R connection API. The issue with that is that there doesn't appear to be a Rcpp wrapper around that particular API so I may have to do that (or test my theories by just using scan to read from the file after using a c++ binary to write it (using system).

Its a dirty hack, but appears to work.

FWIW, websocketpp is the C++ library I'm using.

Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it could be worse: I wrote all the data to a csv file and then imported into Excel for analysis.

My explanation, having done some of the levels:

You know the myriad of websites with programming challenges and some kind of automatic assessment of how well you complete them? Well, its like one of those, but the challenges, rather than simple things like "write a Ruby program that consumes a series of lines on stdin with numbers and spits out a series of lines on stdout with the prime factorization of the corresponding input line" are things like "write a bot to interact with our stock trading HTTP and WebSocket APIs, that will make a specified amount of profit trading this particular stock within these particular constraints".

I think that's partially intentional: if you can't figure out what Starfighter is, you aren't the target audience.

That's not a criticism/snark. It's a self-selection strategy for Starfighter to attract appropriately-hacky candidates, albeit one I do not agree with.

I'd say less "a strategy" and more "an issue which we know we need to work on, eventually, but which is not crimping the funnel in such a way that it should be the #1 thing we have to care about right now."

Once we have a team of placement engineers hired and they're bugging me to send them more players who are interested in having career planning conversations, then I will prioritize making sure as many people as possible read one or two sentences of copy and slot Starfighter into their lives as a consequence of it. At the moment, though, lack of smart geeks to represent is not our problem.

For anybody in the audience who doesn't think our challenges are for you yet: no worries! There's an entire Internet of stuff you're not using right now. They'll be around (and hopefully improved) in 6 weeks, 6 months, or 6 years. No need to rush on any given Friday.

I think part of the confusion is because you call it CTF. I think Team Fortress when I hear CTF. I'd call it:

Stockfighter is a programming challenge where you try to beat a virtual stock market by writing code. If you can solve all levels, we might even have a real job for you.

I like recommendation. I was thinking it was a territory or plant-something-on-a-PC game due to capture the flag reference.

> I think part of the confusion is because you call it CTF. I think Team Fortress when I hear CTF.

Yeah, CTF is a highly overloaded term, and while I gather its perfectly clear in the security space, its a lot less widely recognized, AFAICT, in the sense intended outside of that space.

I think outside of the security space it means there's a physical object you have to grab. Lay people imagining capturing things with flags planted might mentally connect to war movies where people fought over territory. So, I don't think this confusion comes from security community using it so much as it being used for something very different than it's usual meaning.

Hack the Stock Market or HTM sounds more like exercises involving hacking the stock market than CTF does. Or maybe HTS... Hack the System.... exercises for if Starfighter has other types of scenarios. Yeah, there we go. The phrase even lay people associate with these things.

"Hack the System" would be the perfect name for this. It's too bad that domain is taken.

It has to be a domain? hts.starfighter.io startfighter.io/hts http://www.hackthesystem.io/

It is a simple concept but if you aren't familiar with CTF or the movie The Last Starfighter it can take a moment to put the concepts together as to what they are trying to achieve.

- create games/challenges that require programming and problem solving

- recruit individuals based on success in the challenges and related data points

Here's the response one of the founders gave me. It and the two links make plenty of sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11691737

Start from there then follow up with questions for further clarification.

I can second this comment.

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