skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just have to share my favorite cheating story. And just to let everyone know, this occurred in 1976 when I was an undergrad EE. I wanted to take an elective that was an “easy A” and everyone said, oh, you have to take music appreciation, very easy A. Cool, so I took the course. The basis was that you were supposed to go into listening rooms where there was a library of classical music and become familiar with the pieces and would later be tested on them. Back in those days, recording were on these large round vinyl discs called “records” hee hee, long time ago. I would go to class and this doddering old professor with thick coke bottle bottom glasses would look at the record place it on the turn table and it would start playing and everyone’s hand in the class would go shooting up and they would immediately know what it was. Well, I was dying in this class, I was spending more and more time in the listening rooms and getting no where fast. I felt like the stupidest person in the world. Until finally someone in the class clued me in. They showed me their notes; which went something like this: “blue label with red writing, Bach”, green label with yellow writing and furly loops around, Beethoven”. You get the idea. They were keying off the labels and the poor old professor did not have a clue. Now, I was faced with a real moral dilemma! On the one hand, I had been spending tons of time in the listening room and there is no way the others in the class could catch up with me so if I told on them, I would get and A and they would all probably fail. But on the other hand, if I joined in with them and also cheated, then we would all probably get A’s. What would you do?

If anyone responds to this post, I will tell you what I did in a later post.
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feature request:

figure out some convention to do console output that doesn't break on browsers that don't support the console. Maybe something like:

//->console.log("hello world")
You can skip tracks in Spotify's radio, but you only get fixed stations by genre.
As someone else pointed out here, Shakespeare's vocab was just over 30k (which was the number I was familiar with).
The page you linked indicates that Firefox 8 is not supported. Also, please try to be civil with your comments in the future (and welcome to HN).
The Difference Between Success and Not Failing
That's not necessarily true. Lot's of people can "talk the talk" with a highly embellished resume and land a job.

As a result of the cheating, grade inflation becomes worse and a possibly highly able candidate with a 3.4 GPA may completely miss the "GPA filter" on a resume sorting algorithm for a cheater with a 3.6.
A fellow grad student got blackballed and ultimately kicked out of the program for bringing this up to the chair of the department.
Google already has automated system to link up members to other profiles across the web. They could help with this fairly easily. Would people find that intrusive or creepy?
isn't this why you have closed book exams?
Also, the more unqualified people get through college, the less a college diploma means. I wouldn't say that cheating is the only reason for the problems with the college diploma in the U.S., but it's a substantial contributor. The 20% cheating rate observed by this professor is fairly normal across the entire country and a lot of unqualified students get through by cheating.
When I TA'd, I took a hard line on any cheating I detected. Basically it was a 2-strikes approach.

I didn't use turnitin or other mechanisms. I figure, if someone is smart enough to cheat well enough that it's not detectable, it's okay to pass that person. It's not "great", but it's not unleashing a total disaster onto the world.

The cheating I detected was usually because those students were moronic. I am not talking "slightly different". I'm talking, copy-pasted from prior semesters, with 1 modification: the name. Or copy-pasted from the other person in the class with 1 modification.
This is totally and utterly untrue. The only person who gets hurt by cheating are the students who don't cheat. The professor doesn't have to teach and the school graduates that many more 'grade A' students.

And, this is the fundamental problem: the schools really aren't in the teaching game. They are in the successful enrollment game.
I've seen the entire suite of DOS Borland C++ developer tools run under NTVDM, and other non-trivial, useful stuff, like Lotus Magellan.

I've also seen some quite trivial programs fail completely in DOSBox due to imperfect compatibility.
math.stackexchange.com and mathoverflow.net are working well, from what I can see, so the model works in at least one area outside of programming.

Mathoverflow has become a place where serious mathematicians go to discuss research level mathematics, and some of the world's top mathematicians ask and answer questions there (including at least a couple Field's medalists).
With prompt given for the assignment, I'm hardly surprised by the amount of plagiarism.
... until they get a job writing for an online info-database, and their idea of creating new content consists of copying wholesale competitor's pages.
'Where the fuck is this' cannot really be misunderstood in such a way, though. :)
It is totally a question of honor. It is utterly dishonorable to cheat, and egregiously so at the levels described in the aforementioned blog.

The goal of the scholastic experience is so that you, the student, learns something.

If the school turns out people who didn't learn, they are producing worthlessness.

It is a lie to say that you have a degree, when you really have a collection of credits that you cheated through. The degree is worthless and should be sent back.
A34 . I would like to have a mini 3D avatar of myself on the web that would have all my body parameters and "go shopping" to most online stores, try on clothes, shoes, accessories before I buy them, so that I could see exactly how the looks would be.

That actually sounds like a pretty cool idea.
but if he'd stuck it out for another year or two - and showed the next round of incoming classes just how ugly it will get - he'd have gone back to 'normal' cheating rates rather than 28/108.

I don't think this is necessarily true. I can construct arguments either way, but they depend on big ifs. I think it's unreasonable to ask someone to go through a professional grinder for two years because things might get better.
How do you get learning mode to work?
Yeah, I personally couldn't believe he had people copying entire articles into their paper and simply let it slide with a lecture on how to source articles.

I've always tried to agonize over drawing some unique conclusions from a variety of source material. Looks like the more efficient method would have been to just reword the wikipedia article.

All of the stories about education bubbles, unemployed graduates, etc, seem to make a lot more sense when you see data like this.
"Instead of the usual evaluations that were in the region of 6.0 to 6.5 out of seven, this time my ratings went down by almost a point: 5.3 out of 7.0."

Way to bias ratings. Students caught cheating should certainly not be rating the professor who caught them. I won't say "problem solved", but that would make a fine start.
Tips for successful freelancing:
http://typicalprogrammer.com/?p=111
I'm not sure I agree with the author's view of product management or of how singular control of the product strategy and execution is useful. Good product managers don't insist on having things done their way, they insist on understanding what users want and managing a team towards solving the hard problems related to those user needs. The only reason Steve Jobs is successful in how he approaches product development is because he is the CEO. No other product manager I know of wields that sort of control over the product and the paycheck of those he works with.

Success comes from having the right people do the right things at the right time. I'd rather hire kick-ass product managers to help the rest of my product team do kick-ass things than insist that the team does it "exactly my way".

I'd probably quit if I worked for someone that forced the team to do it exactly his way...
I believe there is a google summer of code project to this effect, but as has been said previously in this thread "I'll believe it when I see it".

I think it more likely that Emacs-Lisp will continue to grow on its own incorporating its own threading support and continually reducing the motivations for a rebase overtop of Guile.
Its funny how almost all of this hard work put into cheating, copying, changing, editing etc. leads to one line on your resume, the GPA. A good GPA gets your resume short-listed at the very least but someone who never earned the GPA is extremely easy to catch in an interview, especially for CS majors. A little digging into that project you got an 'A' for and it all comes tumbling down like a house of cards. All it achieves in the end, is a waste of the interviewer or recruiter's time.
That would be nice, wouldn't it? Unfortunately it's quite easy to find people who barely finished schools but could talk well and landed a job... and then they must really mess up to be fired - they can usually survive doing the absolute minimum.

As long as you work for someone who doesn't actually know what you're doing, it's not that hard to hide the fact you don't know either ;)
That's why artificially encouraging/subsidizing home ownership is actually economically suboptimal.

Lowering relocation costs (financial and other) and increasing labor mobility (geographic and across industries) definitely helps the economy.

The military is one of the better organizations for this, since they have operational needs to relocate people on fairly low notice and without much flexibility. The relocation process is fairly well structured and some resources are the same everywhere, while other things are customized to the location.

Big companies are pretty good about this for their top execs, but maybe there would be value in startups making relocation easier for new hires, especially older ones who might have families or other obligations.

Of course, telecommuting and satellite offices solves a lot of this, too (especially if you have a job with 50% travel, it isn't that much worse to have 50% travel + 10% travel to main hq in order to remain somewhere else).
Your claim that the author has drawn the wrong conclusion relies on a major assertion for which you have failed to provide support. Specifically: why do you think a 22/108 cheating rate is non-standard for a large US research university's business school? Are there institutions that check such things in any sort of systematic fashion (e.g., TurnItIn run on a substantial portion of the classwork)?

It seems to me that the incentives that Panos describes, such as poor evaluations, funding/salary, disinterested administrators, and awkward one-on-one confrontations are common to many top institutions.
Agreed. Anyone caught plagiarizing so blatantly should be expelled immediately. It is simply a waste of time to coddle people who should know better.
Ask HN: A non-Java Android book, what would you like in it?
I am currently working on an Android book to teach people on how to develop for Android using a non-traditional language, such as Scala, JRuby, or Clojure.

My idea is to lead the reader from essentially zero knowledge of Android to developing a relatively simple application, learning Android basics along the way.

The twist, in comparison to other books, is that it would allow the reader to develop in a language of his or her choice. The book will include information on how to set up a build environment, using the available frameworks/tools for a given language, etc.

Would you be interested in such a book, and, if so, what sorts of information do you think ought to be included?

Also, since the book would guide the reader into building some sort of application, what kind of application would be good to create? I have in mind a shopping list: something relatively simple to implement, yet potentially useful.

Thank you for your help.
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Using Facebook Ads to Get My Wife a New Job
It is violating honor, the honor of the institution and everyone who is sacrificing their time and treasure to advance your education.

The rules governing cheating are even sometimes called "Honor Codes".

Finally, from a Christian perspective, putting your name on work you did not complete is a form of lying and is immoral.
I think you seriously underestimate the emotional toll it takes on a person to go through 44 hours of "I know you cheated" with dozens of students. Merely calling that "work" - as if it's equal to prepping for lecture - is not fair.

I think you also ignore the chilling effect this had on the class itself. It's quite possible that the students who did not cheat experienced a worse class because of the change in atmosphere.
You need to create an account and either create a new list or copy an existing one.
Lessons from a stolen laptop: Let this be a warning to you my friends
Thats why sorting and filtering by GPA is something I never believed in and hope other people stop doing as well. A good GPA is an indication of a capable candidate but the opposite may not be true.
Two weeks is a common courtesy. People quit because they are either bored or their boss sucks.

Best you can do is have an honest conversation with the guy about the real reasons he's leaving and then learn from it.
Suppose it's a 12 week term: 45 / (12 * 32) = 11%
If it's a 14 week term, 45 / (14 * 32) = 10%

So at best, you're looking at 10% unpaid overtime for a job that already requires a lot (maybe up to 100%) unpaid overtime.

FYI, I get paid to teach 17-20 hours a week, but with prep time and marking it ends up taking about 30-40 hours a week.
As a student, I have no complaints about weekly quizzes. I attend university because it gives a structured environment to learn new material and quizzes help keep me focused on what I know and what I only think I know. But extending the time it takes to finish graded homework assignments? It's a waste of my time. I'd rather relax, work at a part-time job, learn a new programming language, or work on some project. Busywork is not why I decided to go to university; the internet provides a free avenue to learn everything I would in university (undergraduate). I pay for the classes, the structure.

(Clarifications. To stay enrolled, I have to maintain high grades, which means homework is an obligation. And yes, I have other motives for attending uni beyond someone telling me what I should learn next. There's the value of a degree outshining being self-taught and how close to 99% of students from my highschool take higher education. University is part of the culture here.)
Personally, I run a server (soon two) with Virtualmin/Webmin. They simplify A lot, first of all for people who are new to hosting.

However, it does not provide you with a one click solution for your "/index -> index.php" problem.
Ask HN: Web API platform
It occurred to me to wonder if there exists a platform for developing web API client applications? In general I'm thinking:

All the common issues handled once: OAuth, a unified data interface, workers, and a data caching layer - probably with metrics related to API rate limiting.

Ideally, single deployment (or online silo) for many apps. Users grant permissions per outside service, ideally with a minimal union of permissions required by the apps they're interested in. Apps pulled from VCS, run in a sandbox, errors reported with the request and response(s) involved.

Once I started thinking along these lines, it all seemed obvious, but the tools I've been able to find are sparse. Am I missing something?
Yeah, and people can already link to their twitter from their profile page. So this shouldn't be needed, a simple crawler should be sufficient.
Perhaps not, but after working for an advertising company the two overlap greatly.
if (!window.console) { window.console = { log: function() {} } }
Why not have the grade of papers be multiplied by the inverse of the plagiarism score? For example, your first author would get a maximum of a 3% grade on his paper. Of course there are false positives to think of as well, but this would force the authors into more and more original content.

The very first assignment I did in college was my own, some code I wrote for a programming class. I turned it in, but my friend was in the class didn't do his assignment. I figured it was a basic enough problem and I really just turned in the assignment for him. We both got slaps on the wrist, but I never blatantly plagiarized again. I'm not saying I've never reused a sentence from another document on occasion, but usually it was either cited or more unconscious.

The big bummer in college was exactly what he talks about though: the propensity for students in some sort of group to help each other out. The fraternities and athletes were always the worst offenders. For the general eds, everyone in class knew that so and so had a copy of this professors test which he barely changes from year to year, or this fraternity keeps all their papers from previous classes categorized(!) so other members can use them, and that sort of stuff.
http://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/async.html might be interesting for you.
"Also provides an incentive to keep shit tidy." This :)
This grabbed my attention:

Peter Vessenes: "I received one impressively long 14 point lavender comic sans missive which made me want to meet the person, but only in a public place."

David O'Neill: "On that score, Comic Sans for editing code might be amusing..."

Actually, it is. I do this since years. Not in lavender, but dull grays and subdued colors... http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/comic-sans-python.jp...
Three thoughts:
1. Does this translate to creating more incentives for artists to do make great music and for fans to support great artists?

2. This opens the question of who will eventually "own" the artist's work and how the legal aspects around that would be managed.

3. I can imagine the RIAA (i.e. the middle men in this scenario) wouldn't take to this very kindly.
This is fascinating, aside from one huge, glaring bit of stupidness on the authors part - highlighted here:

"One interesting observation: Almost all cheating happened within ethnic lines. Koreans copy from Koreans. Indians from Indians. Greeks from Greeks. Jews from Jews. Chinese from Chinese."

Korea=country
India=country
Greece=country
China=country
Jewish=religion

This would appear to show some form of bias, or at least a lack of cultural understanding by Panos Ipeirotis, who I'm assuming is of Greek origin based on his name.
you might also be interested in: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

not exactly the same thing, but targeting the same problem
Naked Capitalism weighs in on this article as well:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/felix-salmon-misreads...
I can't speak for college, but I cheated quite a lot in high school. I cheated "better" than the students in this post though, by copying sentence by sentence from various sources, rewriting it to make the cheating non-detectable, and reading over it to make sure the flow was good. It saved me at least 50% of the time compared to writing something from scratch, and the quality was good too.

Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely not.

It's imporant to consider why people cheat before you deem it bad. I cheated because the assignments were a waste of time. Plain and simple, a waste of time. It often felt like something the teacher gave us just so we shouldn't spend our evenings having fun. It wasn't something you were supposed to learn something from, it was something you were supposed to do because you were supposed to do it.

I should point out that that the Norwegian high school system is quite different from the American system. We couldn't choose our subjects, we had to take what the education law said we had to learn. Because of that I had a lot of subjects that I didn't have any interest in whatsoever, the only thing important was the grade I got. When you don't have any reason to study a subject other than to get a high number on a paper, it's natural to cheat. It's borderline impossible to be motivated to do something forced on you.

However, if the subject or course is your own choice, like the case with most university courses, cheating is something different. If the the only value the students get from a class is a grade and not relevant and valuable knowledge, I understand and sympathize with the cheaters.
A house for $700 in India
I thought it would be crowd sourced suggestions for when you lose your keys...

45% found them on top of their toilet

20% under the bed etc.
I think an easy solution would be to immediately show the TurnItIn results to the student when they submit. They are then given a chance to resubmit if it picks up plagiarism. The first time they'll probably keep tweaking the content until it passes but they'll soon get bored of it (and the time it consumes) and start writing their own papers.
2+2=4, Why?
One of the problems here (which I've heard is common to most universities) is the use of student evaluations to evaluate professors. That creates a very unfortunate incentive for profs to try to please their students. Not all students value the best education; some just want a high grade for as little work as possible. Their evaluations are not going to be in line with the goals of the university. By using them as part of the prof evaluation, the school is encouraging behavior it almost certainly doesn't mean to.
Seriously. I hated classes that had stupid assignments. Personally, I opted not to do them at all because I didn't want to cheat. I was fine accepting a B in a class to avoid these assignments. Eventually, this bit me in the butt when applying for grad schools (not severely, but reduced funding), so I totally understand why people would copy them to keep their grades from falling.
Offer HN: I'll help you get stuff done
"One interesting observation: Almost all cheating happened within ethnic lines. Koreans copy from Koreans. Indians from Indians. Greeks from Greeks. Jews from Jews. Chinese from Chinese."

...or maybe it's just that people copy from their friends?
If universities faced de-registration for allowing plagiarism to go on, it would dry up in an instant. Create a national ombudsman. Take calls from disgruntled lecturers and the students who can't stand working 10X as hard as their peers to get the busy-work done. If the university can't clean itself up, it loses the right to profit from federal teaching loans.

Disgruntled students could abuse a complaints system, but there's tonnes of ways for them to create trouble already, so I doubt that's a big downside.
I am surprised that neither of you have befallen downvotes as I had when I explained similar things.
> An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver’s license images had picked his as a possible fraud.

> Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say.

That's a lotta terrorists.