
Ask HN: Why CTFs while being insanely technical seems to be not popular on HN? - tester756
in before: I&#x27;m relatively new here<p>HN seems to be very tech community, yet security and things like CTF which do require proficency and experience in both - theory and practice doesn&#x27;t seem to be popular here<p>why it may be a thing?
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ColinWright
(a) What's CTF?

(b) Why do you think it's not popular?

But even without knowing the answers to those questions, in general I've found
that anything that requires significant amounts of both theory _and_ practice
tends to have a very small potential audience, and HN is no different in that
regard.

~~~
tester756
CTFs are security competitions between teams coming from many countries.

Those are some of "topics" that challenges/tasks during those competitions do
cover: (stolen from dev.to)

    
    
        Cryptography - Typically involves decrypting or encrypting a piece of data
    
        Steganography - Tasked with finding information hidden in files or images
    
        Binary - Reverse engineering or exploiting a binary file
    
        Web - Exploiting web pages to find the flag
    
        Pwn - Exploiting a server to find the flag
    

Generally it requires to be very proficent at CS and Computers in general to
compete at highest levels

The more detailed description may be here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ev9ZX9J45A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ev9ZX9J45A)

Here's ranking of teams:

[https://ctftime.org/](https://ctftime.org/)

>[https://dev.to/atan/what-is-ctf-and-how-to-get-
started-3f04](https://dev.to/atan/what-is-ctf-and-how-to-get-started-3f04)

------
croh
HN has very wide range of audience from differnet domains(business, biology,
physics, maths etc etc). Pentesters/Wannabehacker is just one of the small
groups. HN community really reflects guildline -

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
> more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
> answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

What you're looking for is very specific domain. In HN's context 'Hacker'
doesn't mean only security domain but The Hacker Attitude (from this -
[http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-
howto.html](http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html)) which could be
applied to any domain.

------
mettamage
On HN you don't see CTF writeups, but you do see a lot of responsible
disclosure type of articles.

This is truly just a random guess, but maybe it's because CTFs aren't real and
real security vulnerabilities are.

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shitscoop
HN isn't really for in-depth technical discussion.

It's more a venue for techbro chest-thumping, and being highly opinionated on
topics that one only has a surface understanding of.

