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Ask HN: Why CTFs while being insanely technical seems to be not popular on HN?

4 points by tester756 ↗ HN
in before: I'm relatively new here

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't seem to be popular here

why it may be a thing?

5 comments

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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

Here's ranking of teams:

https://ctftime.org/

>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) 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.

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.