
“We’re winding down Starfighter” - j_s
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/771533037666390017
======
exolymph
Brief previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410385)

~~~
thesmallestcat
Who was the "twerp" tptacek referred to? That thread is confusing, that the
submission is gone doesn't help.

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daveloyall
I think he's being cute. Try replacing that string with "tweet".

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elptacek
Yes. That is his word for tweet. I'm glad one of us thinks it's cute. :-)

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tptacek
Again: I have stuff to say here, both about what I learned about starting a
recruiting business on this model and interacting with people's hiring models,
and about what I'm doing next with the challenge-type stuff, and about what
Erin and I are in general doing next. This is just a tweet. Is there that much
to talk about? Give me, like, maybe a couple days?

I'll leak a bit of what I have to say here on this thread:

You would think that having anything you say about your company rocket to the
top of HN would be an immense blessing, and maybe it is and I'm just too dumb
to capitalize on it. But my day-to-day usage of HN, the way I talk about
things here, and the way I comport myself are anything _but_ strategic, and I
found the attention we got on HN to be incredibly difficult.

Finally: I'm not done. I'm just done with this specific iteration.

~~~
Redoubts
> I found the attention we got on HN to be incredibly difficult.

Now that's how you stoke curiosity.

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nmalaguti
I though Stockfighter was a cool idea, and was incredibly excited to try it
when it launched. Unfortunately the site was unreliable, winning felt random,
and in the end I'm not sure that I would have had faith that it was a good
litmus test for developer skill.

It was a great effort, but I feel like it never really caught on and that a
community never really developed around it.

As a comparison, I found Elevator Saga [1] to be much more approachable and
fun.

[1]: [http://play.elevatorsaga.com](http://play.elevatorsaga.com)

~~~
elptacek
Did you attempt the second set?

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nmalaguti
The embedded device levels? Or were there levels after 6 for stockfighter?

I played around with stockfighter in December/January and in July-ish. While
the service was more stable in July, the lack of documented endpoints for
level selection or the back office was still a bit of a turn off.

There were a few things I found most frustrating:

\- the trading bots concentrated most of their activity in a 5-10 second chunk
every 60 seconds. This made it hard to "react" to trading behavior in a
meaningful way throughout the "day" when my latency was in the 150ms+ range. I
think this was supposed to be part of the challenge, but instead I found it to
be an odd approach to getting people engaged.

\- I spent a lot of time on level 2 trying to code a bot that could win every
time. Maybe I just don't understand HFT (very likely) but I often felt
powerless to impact the result and instead was a victim of the whims of the
bots. I could beat the level, often handily if the bots traded my way, but I
never reached a point where I felt my actions were meaningful. It felt less
like an exercise in good engineering and more like a game of chance. And maybe
that was meant to reflect the real world, but it certainly didn't feel like a
game where I was actually increasing in skill as I progressed.

In reality, I don't think CTF style games are really for me. But I do love a
good engineering challenge, and really loved the blog posts about how
everything was put together. I wish I could have been doing that work instead
of trying to outwit the system. Building a system that fulfilled an API might
have made me feel more satisfied than the other way around.

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networked
Are there successful startups working on what you may broadly call
"programming games (with a serious practical purpose)"? I know of CodeCombat
[1]. The story of how they got into YC [2] is pretty interesting:

>With all the chaos trying to keep the server up and the bugs down, we slept
little and prepared for the next day's Startup School even less. We had been
tapped for on-stage Y Combinator office hours with Paul Graham and Sam Altman.
We watched a video of previous on-stage YC office hours and concluded that
"office hours" really meant "eight minutes of two of the smartest startup guys
in the world demolishing your idea in front of 1700 entrepreneurs and a live
video stream".

>Fortunately for us, they liked our startup and were much nicer than we
expected. In fact, as we were walking off stage thinking, "Hey, that went well
--maybe we'll get an interview!"\--then Paul whispered something to Sam, who
nodded, and they called us back.

>"Okay guys. Wait, wait, come back! Come back for a second. You didn't realize
that, but that was your Y Combinator interview. You're in the next batch."

It's worth watching the video for the founders' entire interview.

Edit: Added the quote.

[1] [https://codecombat.com/](https://codecombat.com/)

[2] [http://blog.codecombat.com/codecombat-in-y-
combinator](http://blog.codecombat.com/codecombat-in-y-combinator)

~~~
lj3
There's codingame[0]. It teaches video game programming through "programming
games". They're pretty fun, too.

[0]: [https://www.codingame.com](https://www.codingame.com)

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bbtuna
I've finished both microcorruption and jailbreak (at least, the publicly
available bits). I really enjoy these single player CTFs and wish more were
available.

Jailbreak was clearly still in development when I played and bugs were being
discovered regularly (it is software, after all). I assume the architecture of
the backend was designed to scale in such a way that maybe was never
exploited.

Once the core of the game world is complete, how much effort is it to
construct new content (new levels, for example)? I imagine the creative effort
is more significant than the concrete construction of a level. I'm trying to
understand if there is a way to balance the small subset of people who would
pay for a "season" of a game like this. Is there a way to balance the effort
and the price for such a thing to break even?

I'd pay to play a game polished like microcorruption (if you add an API
documented like jailbreak). Especially if it were wrapped in a campaign/story.
Combining open ended development/coding of such a task, the puzzle aspects of
most exploit development, and a genre-fiction story would be a win for me.

I worry there aren't _NEARLY_ enough people interested in such a thing but I
wish there were.

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bane
Well that's too bad, it was a brave attempt at trying to fill a general
recruitment need. I hope that the lessons learned can go into the next round
of recruiting tools.

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jacobwg
For those of us who don't know what this was, what was it?

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MikeKusold
A startup by patio11 and tptacek to attempt to help recruit software engineers
better.

[https://www.starfighters.io/](https://www.starfighters.io/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
The launch announcement: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/03/09/announcing-
starfighter/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/03/09/announcing-starfighter/)

Launch announcement HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9173939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9173939)

Hats off to patio11 and tptacek; trying is far more than most people do.

~~~
tptacek
I am not done. We're just done with this specific iteration.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I didn't think that my comment implied that you were giving up.

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tptacek
Sorry! I didn't mean to suggest you did. Just saying: it's not like a "I'm
doing this in the long term" kind of thing. The next thing will be in the
writeup I do for Starfighter.

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NDizzle
Reference images for the upcoming enormous patio11 writeup:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/)

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daveloyall
I'd never seen that twitter account before. Not my cup of tea.

Things that seemed cool until I looked (even a little) closer at the people
behind them: urbit, stockfighter, and ESR's homepage.

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tzs
Urbit: Curtis Yarvin.

Stockfighter: Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN), Thomas Ptacek (tptacek on HN),
and Erin Ptacek.

ESR's homepage: Eric Raymond.

I can see why someone might find something from Yarvin or Raymond less cool
after looking (even a little) at Yarvin and Raymond because they have some
controversial opinions outside of tech, but I've never heard any such things
about the Stockfighter people. In fact, two of the Stockfighter people have
the two highest karma accounts on HN, indicating that generally their opinions
line up pretty will with the majority of HN. What did you find uncool about
them?

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thesmallestcat
Huh, I was under the impression that Starfighter never left beta.

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rfrey
Thanks for trying, guys. It was great fun.

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danso
I never used the service but I figured it'd be a strong effort given the folks
behind it. Not knowing any operational or competitive details about the
business, is this any kind of an indicator in lessened demand (or friction)
for hiring devs?

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redstripe
Maybe twitter should hire tptacek's company for a security eval.

