Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

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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 "middleman": you're interested in applicants at all times). You already said that security will not be the single domain. Now, will I be able to use Starfighter as an excuse to finally stop procrastinating and learn that shiny new language I've had on my to-learn list for far too long ? (Patrick more or less hinted it shouldn't be the case, but I'd like to know)

I'm really looking forward to this. On the overall point of breaking the interview standard we have, I'd like to say a huge "Thank you". The points you've made in your blog post really resonate with what I can see (the interview process is a joke if you want to hire actual programming engineers). I really hope we can move towards a model where applicants can show skills through a portfolio, of which Starfighter should be a part if I understand things correctly.

If you haven't seen it before, check out https://projecteuler.net/ which is a series of (very) loosely connected programming challenges.

The challenges start mostly bite-sized and typical programming problems (think fizzbuzz or "what is the 100th prime") and grow into some really interesting areas. You use whatever language(s) you wish, with no time limit, and are free to skip around to whichever questions interest you (or just do them in order... whatever you like)

I find it fun. You might too.

Euler is more like math problems that can be solved with programming than programming challenges. Very neat, but decreasingly useful for programming practice past the first 20ish.

I always ask for the easier Project Euler tests (or give them a couple) to do; the reason they are good test (IMO) is that they are too small a task to leverage frameworks and can demonstrate things like good approaches to engineering and programming practice (even if the questions are mathematical)

It is possible to demonstrate good approaches to engineering with your solution. But if you're cranking out PE problems, you really are better off just throwing out a bunch of one-off unmaintainable scripts. It is a good test of math and cleverness. It is not a good exercise for maintainable software.

See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/01/solving-project-euler-p... as evidence that I am not just talking out of my ass about PE.

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.

Your app is not accepting email with the new longer domain extensions. eg: .systems

Thanks. I'll take a look at the email validation code.

The only truly reliable way to validate an email address is to try to send email to it.

My collegues like http://www.codingame.com/ which is more game oriented than security and you can use various languages (Haskell,bash,Clojure,C,...)

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