skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish this was true, but it actually also hurts all the students who aren't cheating in the course since their classmates are receiving better marks than them while spending less time. Which tragically creates a strong incentive for other students to join in. In some courses this can be an epidemic and you have a significant fraction of the students cheating and getting better marks than the students who are actually learning.

When curves come in to play it means the honest students are getting lower scores than the dishonest ones even though they are learning more. This can suck in a lot of fields where grades matter.

The refrain that it only hurts the cheater needs to stop being something people say when this topic comes up. It is a serious problem that is undermining learning in our classrooms and it needs to be addressed, it is not a victimless act. It certainly does hurt the cheater, but it doesn't only hurt the cheater.

Don't fix it for the sake of the dishonest students, fix it for the sake of the honest ones.
I believe the intended reading is that he does "change" them, by adjusting the font, etc, as mentioned just earlier. His colleague was suggesting that he write entirely new assignments each year.

The author misunderstood what his colleague meant (Or at least, only does a half-measure), which is why he says that "He is" changing them.
I don't know what it is with you US Americans and "cheating"... but it seems to be a very touchy subject in your culture, almost like violating someone's honors. I never understood that.
> "... the only person suffering from this behavior is the student."

Actually, everyone suffers. Fellow students suffer, as some are compelled to cheat to compete because their peers do. Alumni suffer as students grades lose their value and the university is seen as less rigorous. Similarly for academia as a whole. Finally, society has to deal with whole cohorts that have been formally rewarded for making poor ethical choices.
Puppets don't like Facebook
9 Ways to Fight Fear
I understood your point, and don't disagree.

Terrorism is overblown as an excuse to spend the money in ways to benefit certain industries.
Fascinating read... sort of rings bells in my head along the lines of DRM/piracy cold war.

Reading the article and see the greater and greater extents the students were going through to cheat and the arms-race occurring between the teacher and the students, he leads you to his ultimate conclusion: the game has to change.

You can see the writing on the wall as you read through. Written "brain dump" style assignments, unless changed every year, aren't going to yield great results. Interactive, group-driven projects, competitions and discussions are all things that are much harder to plagiarize, are more fun and will (hopefully) teach the students more.

Not to mention more fun to teach.

I have a lot of teachers in my family (midwest) and none of them glow when they talk about teaching... they describe it like a war of attrition between the teachers, the students and the administration... like there is some clock ticking away slowly in the background and everyone is going through the motions just trying to outlast everyone else. I am talking about 2 separate generations here, like 40 years apart saying the same thing.

I can't imagine a shittier experience.

On the other hand, I am friends with a few (younger) teachers out here in the west that are rabid about how exciting their class is and how much fun they have.

The common denominator here is that the ones having a blast frequently do highly engaging and custom events in the classroom like re-enacting scenes from a play in drama on-the-fly or the poly-sci teacher segregated his class for a week while teaching about separate-but-equal.

Those are micro-examples, but what I'm getting at is that the teachers that recognize that the game has changed are still having a great time teaching.

Just like /cgi-bin shopping carts and "DO NOT HIT 'Purchase' TWICE!" buttons are dead on the web, so is the schooling experience of yester-year. If school wants to stay relevant, it has to compete with the allure of these extremely fast lives we live now. People cashing in $100,000,000 companies at 22 makes it tough to argue why your kid should stay in school until he's 73 so he can make $80k as an architect.

I wouldn't want to go to school now, a lot of things seem in flux. Notice how popular the "Why go to college?!" conversation is now adays?

I think in 10-15 years it will be much different/more effective with a different outlook though; that'll be a more engaging and compelling experience I hope.
I have had many courses in which the answers to the homework are given prior to the homework assignment. The assignment is large enough that copying the answers would take about an hour. Most students feel that if they are going to spend that much time faking it, they might as well do the assignment. Furthermore, biweekly quizzes clearly highlight a lack of understanding. Not doing the homework (or just copying the answers) is a rough road to go down, when averages midterm scores are in the low 60s (and yet some kids ace the midterm). Those who copy the homework do badly in the course. It's just that simple.
Thank you for providing the link! I'd trying been trying to get it before, but for some reason it wouldn't work.
While there's much to be said in favor of more creative assignments that aren't minor variants of last year's assignments, the author has drawn the wrong conclusion from what happened.

22 cheats out of 108 is big - and the real proportion may have been even higher, given that it seemed like he caught only either blatant cheats or conscience-stricken/less brazen cheats (the latter category from when he acted people to own up). And it's a lot of work, and I've been around this process at a couple different institutions and seen how tough it is to see it through to an appropriate conclusion.

However, all this wasted time, and all this aggravation, wouldn't be necessary if all the other professors were doing it too. The only reason they're at 28/108 or higher is that people have obviously been getting away with almost anything.

The author has buckled (understandably) as being the only hard-ass in a environment where everyone else is getting away with it isn't feasible. From his perspective, I can see why he didn't fight this, 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.

The idea that you can always produce assignments that are 'unique flowers' that can't ever be duplicated year by year by cheating students has its own pitfalls. One problem is exactly that these assignments _are_ unique flowers, and might turn out to be systematically too hard or too easy or too vague. An advantage of the rather mechanical, "near-clone of last-years stuff" approach is that you can learn from last year's assignments and tune them onto the target. Faculty shouldn't be dumping the same material without fixes every year, but in many fields it's insane to expect that they have to prepare all new assessment material every year. They just don't get paid enough or get enough time for that.
the only person suffering from this behavior is the student

You really think so?

The more diplomas you give to students who learned nothing, the more the rest of the world will pick up on it and refuse to hire anyone from your University.
Inline HTML is a part of the Markdown syntax though: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

So you can use Markdown for most of the content, and HTML when you need more complex layout control.
When you cheat you violate an agreement everyone has made either explicitly or implicitly. When you violate an code of behaviour to your benefit, others may suffer. It shouldn't be very difficult to understand that causing someone else to suffer for your own gain is "touchy" at best.
But without knowing any better. Chrome has always updated on its own and there's no reason to know what version of Chrome you're using because it's the latest. I had to check just now, apparently it's 12. FireFox has always had hugely publicized major updates with a long time between them, so there's a disconnect--you're supposed to care about a new FF version.
Sorry I was just lazy.. :) Thanks for the actual link.
Just in case you (or someone else) would like to know, Ray has been tested with both JRuby and Rubinius.
A little tangential, but I think this post outlines another argument for the "higher education bubble." Is 40k a year worth learning how to effectively plagiarize?
I have taught (as a PhD student) similar material and this is no surprise to me. But then, is it realistic to expect undergrads to turn out a thoughtful piece on LTE and 4G comms? If it is a technical comparison, sure, but even if you don't plagiarise your sources what are you really doing? You're going to read some articles on the internet, form an opinion, and rewrite that stuff in your own words. So long as they are learning, what's the difference?
Just out of curiosity, where are you from and how is cheating regarded there?
I too have switched to Chrome about 5 months ago -- only because of its lower memory and CPU footprint (in my experience at least), and have found myself used to the Chrome web dev tools' assortment of annoyances. All things being equal, I'd prefer to use Firebug, but Firefox just eats up too much memory and starts to lock up for a few seconds at a time.

Some issues I've found with Chrome dev tools:

* console.log() is fundamentally broken [1]. There's a bug filed for it and it doesn't seem like it will be fixed.

* When you log an HTML element, there's no way to jump to it in the "Elements" view.

* If XHR response is in JSON, it does not show you it in friendly easy-to-navigate format, but rather a big string.

Aside from that both tools are really awesome and do pretty much everything I need them to.

[1]: http://techblog.appnexus.com/2011/webkit-chrome-safari-conso...
Many of these drugs will be legal either by prescription or when taken under medical supervision in 15 - 20 years anyway due to the following factors:

- The baby boomers who were coming of age in the 60s will become the ones with the most political power in another 10 - 20 years. And the younger generations are more liberal on drug issues in general.

- The rising cost of gasoline will encourage more people to move back into the cities, where they will become more liberal.

- The exponentially decreasing cost of genetic engineering means the average high school kid will be able to modify algae and yeast to make millions of doses of LSD for no more than a few hundred dollars.

- The exponentially falling costs of LED lights means that in another 10 - 15 years people will be able to cheaply grow marijuana indoors without the risk of getting caught by heat sensing helicopters or high electric bills.

- The rise of European science, where at least so far it has been somewhat easier for scientists to study drug use in humans without excessive government interference.

- The economic costs of the drug war are becoming no longer affordable.

- There is going to be an increasingly strong outcry for new medicines that actually work due to an aging population, and due to the extremely high costs and low efficacy of the current system. It's currently politically feasible to let a few hundred thousand people die for no reason each year because no one notices, but once this becomes a few million people each year people are going to start noticing.

- Most people just favor what their friends favor and don't really think through the issues. So as more people come to favor various forms of government regulation instead of criminalization there will be some sort of tipping point, similarly to what we've seen with marijuana in many states already.

No one of these factors would be enough to tip the balance, but all of them combined are going to cause some powerful changes in society. Currently the FDA is already approving many trials with MDMA, marijuana, psilocybin, and other drugs, so the only real hurdle at this point is the DEA and the white house. And that's not going to last forever, especially since this new lawsuit the ASA is about to file is almost certain to move the needle at least a little.
Some people will ask for the "friendship price", because they have seen a distant relative of yours on the other side of the road or something like that. It is generally less than the normal payment.
Holy crap. They let so many people get away with copy-paste assignments, and they call themselves a postsecondary institution? That's fucking horrific. Where I'm from, a single sentence similar to one of your sources is marks deducted. A paragraph puts you on academic probation. Anything bigger is a bus-ticket home.
Alexa rankings - for what they are worth - seem to show their traffic slowly bleeding away. The number of visitors and activity showed a big peak early in the year, and has been fading since quite steadily.

Possibly more disturbing for them is that the metrics that show 'engagement' (bounce, # of pageviews, time on site) have been declining even more markedly over this year, suggesting that people aren't spending very long on the site.
38,800 here.
<quote> "The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.</quote>

I know this is not going to be popular because Schneier is a crypto/security God and all but I call B.S. on the above quote.

If you would have given any of the 9/11 terrorists or UBL a button and told them they could wipe out the U.S. and everyone in it by just pressing the button how quickly do you think they would do it? Or do you think they'd say "Sorry, no-can-do. There won't be anyone left to terrorize."?

Their goal is not to terrorize/scare people. Their goal is the total destruction of anyone or anybody that stands in the way of their total domination.
Javascript Hologram Tests (devicemotion in browser detection)
Fear actually engenders itself. The other evening, I was walking down the sidewalk late at night. An attractive woman was coming the other way. I am young, was well-dressed and clean-shaven, but she looked like she was afraid of me.

That made me uncomfortable, which I am sure made me act strangely which only serves to further engender her fear.
Why shame? You should check the first comment on that post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004210
How many startups actually shut down? When I say shutdown I mean close the doors, unplug the servers, delete all code and walk away?

If there is any significant codebase, isn't that at least worth something? Sell it off to the highest bidder?

I think the open source clause under shutdowns is going to be rare.
If you use Ruby 1.9, I'm pretty sure there's a way to distribute it as YARV bytecode.

EDIT: I guess not http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/971
Anybody know why this was closed?
I registered "upmyownass.com" years ago for a comedy writing site.

Everyone I told about it assumed it was hardcore gay porn.

Mom: "What... what kinds of things do you put on that site?"
Me: "Funny stuff"
Mom: "Oh... like gross-funny?"
Me: "Oh god, no no... funny articles, I write sarcastic articles."
Mom: "We love you no matter what"
Me: <appropriate meme-face here>
Except he might not know that it's true, he was just drawing attention to an interesting comment.
There is no evidence that cheating hurts the cheater. Sure, they will learn less. But if they get higher grades from cheating than from trying to learn and not scoring as highly, then this will get them a higher wage in many professions.
It may get some flak, but I think it is a very cool project.

Dare I ask if a Python version will become available?
Full disclosure: I am a college dropout - so take this with a grain of salt.

At the very least, it matters, if only a little, to the reputation of the institution. If they start turning out plagiarizing idiots, eventually they become unable to charge as much for that education.
Lightning precautions are based on the testable realities of physics. There is no relation between that and the voodoo pseudo-security that is the TSA and public 'security' in general.
> (Btw, bananas are berries, but cows are not deers. :) )

Not sure if you're joking or not, but to be clear to non-native speakers: bananas are definitely not berries. Berries are smaller and rounder. For example: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. I guess strawberries, too, but they're outliers.

Also the plural of deer is deer.
Their goal is to maximize destruction given the resources they have. If they had a button that instantly destroy the US, of course they would press it. But the fact is that they don't have such a button; they have very limited resources. Their most efficient use of resources is to make random, very visible and violent attacks and hope that our responses do even more damage.
Why not use the bitcoin protocol, longest block chain wins, missing transactions are just replayed. Use difficulty settings to tweak the transaction latency. It even solves the split brain issue, which ever brain has the longest block chain wins when the network is unified.
Yeah, standards seem to differ a lot.

There's also the whole grade inflation problem: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/93987

... perhaps a part of the problem is accreditation of higher ed schools?
Panos, I wrote you a long response on your blog.
To Pique Interest, Start-Ups Try a Digital Velvet Rope
thats exactly what google are good at, advertising.
they make DEVS believe totally crazy things like what you just mentioned.

its scary - but they sure know their thing
Texas Lawmakers Pass Bill to Get Around Federal Light Bulb Law
It explains in the article that he changed certain elements of the assignment so that it was obvious when someone turned in the old version.
Others will suffer if the students continue the practice in their later accounting, legal testimony, health and safety practices, and business partnerships.

Do you think after succeeding with cheating through college, they can turn it off like a switch when the stakes are higher?
See, I already learned something about you. Ditching an email address doesn't have to be a hassle.

Tip: Hook your old and new accounts into Thunderbird with IMAP (IMAP is key. No POP3). Drag-and-drop your folders full of email from Old to New. Wait for it... you're done! Now turn on forwarding in your old email account, and never log in to it again.
Once the author decides that the academic standard allows copying and pasting, it ceases to become cheating - and he has joined those for whom the term "academic honesty" has lost all meaning. Seriously, when 44 hours over the course of a semester is too much work to uphold a minimum standard, the issue is not confined to students and the author has no moral high ground because they have abandoned the tough part of their job and are doing the grading equivalent of cutting and pasting.
As a student I pay thousands of dollars to earn a degree from a respectable institution. When students cheat and get away with it like in the OP's article, it dilutes the value of my degree.
And alone with the counterpoint:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/06/is_the_cult_of_self-e...
> the fact that they've been known to change their binaries

It was shown that the change was only to the license embedded in the installer, the actual executables were unchanged.

Link to the TC forum admin explaining it: http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?p=95255#95255
Because the cheater gets out the other end of the degree course with a degree they didn't earn. And then they start competing for the same jobs as me.
How will you address the large jump in showing costs brought about by "small private rooms"? I don't want to pay $500 for a movie ticket.
That's not even true.

The web console is not a replacement for firebug. its just decent built in tools.

Firebug - guess what - supports Firefox 7 and probably 8 too.
And of course, Firefox 5 as well which is the latest release of Firefox btw.

It's tiring to read the large amount of FUD against Firefox lately. People like you are the major regression to the interwebs. Very seriously.

http://getfirebug.com/
Feature Hoarders: Extreme Edition
Http://www.hamariweb.com/islam/allah_ho_aalah_ho_np220.aspx
For a nontrivial number of people, saying that "driving is a privilege, not a right" is equivalent to saying "being able to remain employed is a privilege, not a right".

What's the right way to deal with this?
It also lists a lot of "Coming Soon" features for Veracity. Until they're released, they shouldn't be in the chart.
I have a patent for collaborative filtering. When the company I worked for decided to apply for a patent on the work I had done, I told them it wasn't patentable because of prior art. They told me to go along or be left off the application. I said OK. It's just one more thing for my resume. If someone gets patent reform that invalidates my patent, I'll be cheering from the sidelines.
Yes, the student is the only one suffering. Going to school and not learning anything is pointless and the diploma by itself is worthless in the long run.

Unless it turns into a complete party place, the university will do just fine and employers don't really care what your grades are and how you got them.
'We are not a party company' became a winged word at SoundCloud ever since,
the employees even got vodka bottles featuring it for Xmas (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericwahlforss/5489172509/ )
I think you're missing my point though: practically anybody will accept to be interviewed no matter the industry. Try it yourself and tell me that you don't get incredibly high results.
RecordBreaker: Automatically structure text formatted data
If I was him I would at least write a letter to the department of Academic Affairs (or whoever handles cheating) informing them of the way he was penalized for reporting students. They, if anyone, are the ones with an incentive to fix that problem.
That was one of Dave Sim's favourite lines. I think he thinks he made it up himself, though.
Not what I am envisioning at all, lol. But I love the image.

Hey, get me between $50k and $100K (like donations, not investment -- getting well was not cheap) so I can pay off my debts and quit my day job and I will get right on it. Otherwise, well, I will get there when I get there.

But thanks for the encouragement. Really. :-)
Trademarks are the way to protect your brand name. Here is the link to get you started in the US - http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/index.jsp
The world`s first digital audio exchange...
Check out the world`s first digital audio exchange.
A community driven development methodology that aims to change the way music does business...
Note, the latest release is from 2008.

Edit: "Do you run the Arduino development tool chain on an obscure (i.e., non-OS X) platform?" is a gratuitously condescending in my opinion. Since when's OS X the default/most popular/whatever platform for doing GCC development?
That's an interesting tip. Will update the post.