Thanks for trying, guys. It was great fun.

A company that created capture the flag type games to be used for recruiting and hiring. See stockfighter.io for an idea.

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.

especially when their only game was something to do with stocks.

One of the two games/level sets was about stock market. The other one was about jailbreaking/reverse engineering.

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

I had fun with the first few levels, but like you I noticed little difference with better or worse strategies - it all felt pretty random.

As I got into the harder stuff, I quit because it just felt like work for me and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is more coding.

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.

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

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

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

Thanks. Let's be patient to discuss this until there's something substantial to discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12410410.

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.

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

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?

Reference images for the upcoming enormous patio11 writeup: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/

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?

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

Now that's how you stoke curiosity.

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.