skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree.

When undergraduate education goes well, the students will be interested in the material and motivated to learn it, both on their own and through working on collaborative projects with other students. Then testing and grading, while not necessarily eliminated, become less important in the students’ minds and cheating becomes only a minor problem.

Creating an environment conducive to that kind of learning, though, can be very difficult, especially with large classes, heavy teaching loads, and subjects and curricula that are perceived as requiring passive knowledge acquisition rather than active engagement and exploration.

I will retire next year after teaching for seventeen years at a large university in Japan. Cheating has sometimes occurred, both in my own classes and in the classes of a large first-year writing program I used to manage. But because the classes were mostly project-based, with students writing and revising in stages over the course of the semester and sharing their drafts with each other in class, and because the average class size has been only about fifteen, the amount of cheating has been small and manageable. I’ve been lucky.
I'm not familiar with Java or their concept of trust managers, but I don't really see a major problem with it. It doesn't seem like there is anything confusing. I might not know why they did that, but I don't think I'd have trouble understanding code that uses it.

I'm guessing someone probably thought that a lot of the common use cases would be best done with a factory pattern, and they didn't want you to have to implement it all yourself.

It seems like a very strong form of One and Only One Obvious Way to Do It, extending so far as to have an opinion about what pattern to use.

Or, maybe there's just some other API that needs a factory for something, and so they have to directly expose it, and they don't want there to be more than one way to get one.

I would have to actually be familiar with Java to have a real opinion on it, but on the surface it seems kinda nice. It feels like the kind of thing that might help prevent hacky or quick and dirty code from being written in the first place, and possibly save time refactoring.
Ask HN: What can software engineers learn from pro athlete unions?
The National Basketball Players Association has negotiated 51% of the NBA’s revenues are shared with the players.

While Major League Baseball has spent as much as 54% of revenue while growing in profitability.

In each of these cases, you have billionaire owners willing to pay their employees more equitably and fairly due to collective bargaining.

If software engineers and similar workers were to unionize could they not accomplish the same and obtain even concessions for better interviewing and coding standards (ie. privacy, security, less dark patterns) within the US tech industry?

SOURCES:

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2019/01/11/economic-data-shows-mlb-spent-less-on-player-salaries-compared-to-revenues-in-2018/

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Collective_Bargaining_Agreement
So this actually looks really neat if it works. However, hopefully in the spirit of constructive criticism, I would be very nervous about sticking this in big letters at the top of the introduction:

> Software can literally be perfect

because that is a wonderful way to get people to invest in really robust, excellent, high-quality software - and then trust it blindly and ignore that even if everything goes well and the software is itself perfect, and the verification has no bugs, and the model that it perfectly implements actually maps the problem space correctly, it will still run on fallible hardware, interfacing with other software that is imperfect, taking direction and data from humans who can make mistakes. Now to the author's credit! Further down, under "Do you think this language will make all software perfectly secure?" and "Is logically verifying code even useful if that code relies on possibly faulty software/hardware?", this is discussed. And I think the writer actually does appreciate the limits of what this can actually do, and I very much appreciate them explaining that in what I'd call clear terms. Just... maybe don't headline with a claim like that when it has caveats and people are liable to read the claim and ignore the caveats?
OK. What novel problem is the senior engineer solving using a hash table in a coding interview?
This was a great read. I wonder if it's actually more time-efficient at some point to just do an oral exam rather than these paper exams.

In oral exams, it's obvious whether you know the material or not.

It may appear more time-consuming, but considering there is no need to grade or worry about cheating, you may come out ahead.
Pipelines get production to consumers. A well with non-existent transport is not useful to lowering fuel prices because it needs to get to consumers.
many make that because of massive information asymmetry. they are players in a giant con game that is engulfing the world. to some, there is more to life than bartering.
Compared to what alternative?
they got into Stanford, which confers above average intelligence and also bestows connections, so that probably helped. Interesting stories.
Cheating... I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

Give a quiz that can be completed in your own time over the course of a week. That sounds more like an assignment to me. So... the cheating was violating the rule that it can't be done cooperatively? If I'm cheating by asking other students about an assignment then I think I cheated on everything.

And, of course, I did not. My answers to assignments were my own, but, often, I collaborated with other students to understand the questions, or to develop an idea of how to approach finding the solutions, or to clarify issues that were unclear.

And, always, to make sure I got the right answer. Because if I didn't, it meant that I did not understand something and I needed to go back over the material to work out what that was. Any other approach would have rendered school valueless.

This is the normal process of education. You can tell that I did not cheat because my work and my answers were unique. If I submitted an image of someone else's work, that would be obvious.

Ah, but wait! I think I see. If the answers are multiple choice, that doesn't work.

But why are they multiple choice? To make it easier and cheaper for the school. Your inflation of the profit margin on my education makes me a cheater because you can't tell if I did the work myself? That sounds about right.

I think academic integrity is eroded more by the profit motive than by the Jesuitical definition of cheating in the article.

Even though I went to what are considered some the best schools, the greatest insult to academic integrity was always the faculty, because most of them didn't know the subject they were teaching, faked it, and didn't care.

And when I see many of the students who didn't cheat coming out of school not knowing shit from Shinola, I have to wonder why it matters? You get out what you put in, so who cares if people violate an arcane rule that says, "this, this here is an assignment; but that over there, that thing that looks identical to this in every way, that's a quiz, so don't talk to your friends about it or we'll nip your promising young academic career in the bud. Understand?"

The only lesson here is that you need to cheat better.
First job out of college (July 2013) was w/ an employer (Bay Area company whose name rhymes w/ Crisco) who marketed all of these things (GPA cutoffs, checking transcripts, etc). My college transcript was....less than exemplary but I made a point not to mention my GPA anywhere and bet on the interviewers not asking about it (they didnt). Got the job by speaking w/ a recruiter at a career fair despite not having the degree they were looking for.

Three months after starting the job, I got an email from HR asking all new grad hires to send in their transcripts which I conveniently "forgot" to do. Never heard from them ever again after ignoring that first email.

My feeling here is that these are just vanity metrics that companies like to parade around to signal how "prestigious" their employees & hiring practices are.
> There's no guarantee it's a solvable problem. With the Manhattan Project we knew it was feasible and how to do it, all we needed was engineering.

I mean, the Manhattan project wasn't about trying to figure out how to harness nuclear power, it was about how to deliver a nuclear explosion. getting some energy out of fission was never really a particularly hard problem once we understood what was going on (it's literally so easy that it's a problem), getting it to explode from a package you could load into a b-52 was the harder problem.

The difference isn't really about what we know is possible, it's that unlike fission, making a fusion bomb is easier than making fusion power, so the military funding dried up before it made much progress, like a person's interest in a porno once the fun part is done.
> That's the price, not the cost.

I think my next sentence makes it clear that I understand they have margin. Quoting one sentence of my post, and then "disagreeing" with it in a way that is covered by my next sentence.. is such an unfortunate discussion tactic.
New Windows Subsystem for Linux malware steals browser auth cookies
How do you actually measure 2x or 10x workload while keeping quality the same?

It's _very_ easy to measure how fast it takes a ticket to go from "in progress" to "done" but measuring whether code has bugs, or leads to downtime or is just impossible to parse is a different problem.

If you never need code to be readable or documented I can write it quite quickly. If you want something other humans can have a hope of maintaining, that might take a bit.
Despite this teacher's miraculous extraction of some character growth from a handful of the cheaters, I still think he should have just failed all of them as soon as he had an airtight case against them. There is no moral or practical justification for tolerating cheaters. They make a mockery of honest students and the higher education as a whole. They're a menace to the society into which they're released with a stamp of approval they have stolen rather than earned. They deserve only failure and humiliation, and if they consistently received it there would be far fewer of them.

We must assume they don't care about learning, so if we want to cram some knowledge into them anyway, hit them the only place they apparently care about: their transcript. Either they'll shape up or be rightfully denied the (ever more scant) honor of a degree. The heroics of the author here cannot be scaled, and we shouldn't be asking anyone to go to that extent. Just fail the bastards. You're only recording what's already true.
Any idea how compressible that is?

If it's something that compresses really well (eg text data in a database), then live compression filesystems (eg ZFS, likely others) could potentially help make that workable.
> I don't have the option to do what I want

I was replying to a college student. Someone going to college does have the option of which major.

I am also referring to people in America. I understand that Americans have a lot more opportunities than people in other countries.
Folks around here point to that scapegoat a lot, but our local vacancy rate is <3%, suggesting that foreign speculation is not a real issue.
"Most web apps dont have pretenses of being simple. They want to use tools that have room for growth, that have deep capabilities."

No, that's completely false.

Most web "apps" are just text and images, and would better be thought of as documents, which after all is what the web is for. Re-inventing that out of massive piles of JS is strictly worse than what we already had, and in fact still have if only we would choose to use it.

Yeah, sure, there are definitely real app-y things on the web, and here on HN we're biased towards those as mental reference points because they're cutting edge and exciting. But those things are emphatically NOT "most" of what the web is.
You're right.

I am curious though what the frame of reference is for someone who cheats on the assignment where they promise not to cheat.

Perhaps there are people who make it through life with a sense of learned helplessness or even possibly a cultural mandate - basically, something that represents a higher authority to that person than the Western standard of justice, ethics and fairness.

I'm fully in favor of true justice, shared ethics and fair and compassionate treatment - that's a conversation for another time.

If that's not reality for that person, then to have a teacher attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have an impact on their success in a Western society. I'd guess that failing them and possibly expelling them would not.

I'm curious what you think?
My employer hires a batch of new college grads every year, and they spend time in their first year on different rotations. I spent some time recently with one, going over some advanced CS topics — and started by talking school coursework.

It was eye-opening. I had a miserable pandemic, juggling childcare and online school for my kids with my own job. But this colleague had gotten interested in CS somewhat late in college and had only had a few in-person CS classes before the switch to online. In the colleague’s words, “quality declined a lot then.”

There’s a new cohort of college students who’ve been given a terrible education, and have a lot of loans to pay off. I don’t condone the cheating in TFA, but the professor seems to have a formalist rigidity to academic honesty while teaching a course online in a way that’s almost designed for cheating. And rather than admonishing students when he became aware of what was happening he spent time (days? weeks?) analyzing the chat while the behavior continued.

I empathize a lot with students who’ve just been through a terrible educational experience. The effort this prof has put into plagiarism detection could arguably have been better spent on improving course materials and grading mechanisms to render cheating rare/ineffectual.
See I came out of college learning the exact opposite lesson. I optimized for learning as much as possible, and didn't care at all about grades.

Turns out 90% of the shit I learned in college was a waste and GPA matters quite a bit.

There are still jobs that's ask my GPA 10 years in. And your first job determines your second one, and I imagine I lost out on somewhere between 70-250k in compensation at least from having a bad GPA.
Curves typically ignore outliers (because otherwise they would be useless, there’s always that one kid) so unless everyone except you is cheating you’re usually fine

There's a big range between "that one kid" and "everyone". In some of my courses it'd be easy to believe 15% were cheating in some way. Another comment in this thread put the share at 50%. How's a curve going to deal with that?
well after education usually salary can be upgraded, so it’s a benefit for employee. if employee does not educate himself, he may stay the same level with no salary bumps. sucks for both parties I guess?
The only thing that is sad; earthworms are yet *another* vital cog in the ecosystem...

And when it rains, they come up and many die in gutters and concrete they crawl upon and cannot find dirt again.

Obv this is good for the Early Birds, but the worms are important for the soil..

(one thing humans havent really paid attention/cared about is what the blankets of concrete do to kill a healthy soil in an area...

---

Also, I am surpised nobody mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8 <<-- The whole premise of DUNE
The right is for limited government like the left is against wars.
Anyone paying attention knows it's all BS.
I expected saying that would be unpopular. But I'm hardly alone in this attitude, and so it pays to learn how to write.
> If that's not reality for that person, then to have a teacher attempt to engage with them seems more likely to have an impact on their success in a Western society. I'd guess that failing them and possibly expelling them would not.

An excellent point.
To follow your analogy, media will only report on the car colors on the podium, and job interviews will require the badges to get a foot in the door.

For an observer POV, the decades of engineering that led to that Ferrari never really take the spotlight. Also I'd argue people will pursue the Ferrari whatever it costs when they could really work that road race with a red painted Subaru. Here again the branding is taking the front row.
There is also one thing about coding interviews that no one ever talks about: how there are so many bad interviewers out there.
And break a lot of websites whose layout is tightly coupled to the details of font sizes.
That’s a “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” title if ever I saw one. Successful, though: I clicked through find out what the heck it’s supposed to mean.
I am not British, but the TV license thing confuses me. Apparently you need a license if you own a device and use it to watch live streaming on Youtube (its not always obvious what is being live streamed or just a video) and I guess anything on Twitch.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...

My country has a couple of public broadcasters and we don't have to pay a fee, but they do show ads.
This is the thing that I have the most passion for. I like computers and electronics. But it's dwarfed by other passions that I have that I would much rather be doing. No bills are being paid by me wanting to bike or write in my journal.

And I know it's a sentiment that isn't unique to me, since a lot of my friends from similar backgrounds share this feeling. You choose the major that you can tolerate and also pays well.
Segoe UI is such an underappreciated font.
High school physics course notes, with JavaScript simulations (2018)
The government can just commit to a certain level of funding for them. Plenty of countries have state owned broadcasters that revive government funding.
I think "Canadian" here stands for the stereotype of Canadians as overly nice, apologetic, etc. (and that the author is in fact Canadian though he teaches in America)
Happens all the time and those threat feeds aggregation platform that have a black box ML confidence generator for IOCs aren’t trustworthy either.

In this day and age, if people don’t put emphasis on TTPs and still only rely on old style threat intel, they will become obsolete.
has society also deemed it necessary that all undergrads must take anthropology? I was not aware that this was put to a vote.
You know the saddest thing is that people don't even know how to cheat properly.
Even without unions the pay in MLB and NBA would be high because owners compete to get the players that can win games. The ability to sell one's labor to the highest bidder is what a worker needs to be compensated fairly.

Unionized or not, tech workers will do well when their companies are profitable, and they will pay cuts or pink slips when their companies are unprofitable and investors get less patient, as they are now.
Public broadcasting exists in the US without this kind of fee. PBS+NPR get some funding indirectly from the CPB which gets tax dollars but they are primarily funded by donors.
> I am curious though what the frame of reference is for someone who cheats on the assignment where they promise not to cheat.

It seems likely their notion of a promise is non-binding.

P.S. W.R.T. promises and ethics, Kant has an interesting point of view. For example: https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/the...
I'm not conflating. I'm arguing that what we put into our car is energy & we should measure that & make that clear & make what we pay for it clear.

If we also include work in what we show consumers, consumers have minimal ability to assess & understand the comparative advantage of their vehicle. It's an implicit factor.

> which would you choose? I mean, the choice is obvious, you'll get three times as much plowing done with the motor.

And it should be clear to consumers to. But it's not, because we use different unit-scales for EV's & gas & consumers never get to understand how obviously much better EVs are. There's a lot of people who wouldn't know what to pick. They wouldn't understand the relative energy consumption of the two picks. Trying to make that clear, trying to establish a clear frame of reference is exactly why I'm arguing for using "gallons" of electricity: to make the efficiency clear & obvious to everyone, not just us two geeks.

And because we should understand what the market delivers, and learn to set expectations for the grid. If people understood what $0.63/kWh electricity was really asking, I think we'd been more likely to demand & drive green energy investment.

Your scenario feels like a clear case of why we need to do exactly what I'm saying, & find common, portable frames of reference we can use to talk about what we put into our cars. Not just what we get out. This idea has a lot of resistance, so I want to re-emphasize the other part: most EV drivers would also quickly see their vehicle has <3 "gallons" of energy in it, and it'd be much clearer just how much less energy it uses.
Great idea, and that is the plan. Within 2 weeks my goal is to have this open sourced and distributed as a parser module for use in any client or backend.
exactly, you are paying for current skills. If employer is fine with current skills, and employee wants a better salary, which would require new skills, who should make effort?
What an brilliant business plan to get money out of rich people. One hundred dollars for a bottle of water. LOL. I always found it very funny that the over-priced Evian water is the word "Naive" spelled backwards, but this takes the first price. Good job to whomever cooked up this idea. I am impressed.
Does that mean you can only have 6 Ted Cruz statues?
Accept that what has happened to you in the past can’t be changed. So instead focus 100% of your energy on what you can do now and in the future to improve your situation. You might not succeed. But it is still the best way to live your life.
It is a tax, but they did not want to call it a tax, so they called it a “license fee” that they figured few would opt out of since almost everyone used to like watching broadcasted TV.

Now that the assumption is false and many do opt out of the TV license by not having a TV, they are grasping at straws to still be able to collect the tax from as many people as they used to be able to collect from.
is there an alternative to pip that improves on things? sort of like yarn for python?
Ubuntu the best looking one. no bias.
I’m honestly surprised to see so many responses in this thread that diverge so wildly from my own.

It was inappropriate for this instructor to join the chat and silently surveil their students. When they saw the students exchanging information like that the first time after forgetting about it, they should have posted a warning on the thread and left.

Some of the energy of analyzing their students cheating would have been better spent looking at how to make the assessment of learning more resistant to a student sharing a screenshot of a question.