skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get where you're coming from, but I tend to lean more towards the teacher's approach. The big problem in this class was that there was a culture of cheating -- it was the norm, and anyone who joined the WhatsApp group was automatically pulled into it. I imagine many of the students who did cheat would not have done so if it didn't fall into their lap like that.

That's not to say that it's justified or right. Of course they shouldn't even cheated, even though it was popular and easy. But it's a much more understandable mistake to make, when doing the wrong thing is so popular and easy. When 5% of a class cheats, that indicates a serious moral failing on those students' parts. But when 70% of a class cheats, it's harder to believe that they're all so morally bankrupt.

Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I'm a strong believer in giving people second chances and encouraging them to learn from their mistakes instead of immediately jumping to punishment.
> or asking obnoxious questions ("Why did you use a foreach and not a for loop?")

you should be able to explain why you wrote something the way you did; that's not an absurd ask.

perf characteristics of different iteration styles are often significant to the task at hand.
Stopped giving <a shit> about undergrad degrees? No signal to be had?! Somehow I'm not getting that read from the tech industry... what I am getting is a willingness to hire non-traditional candidates. That does not translate to not giving a shit.

If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.
I think it is pretty standard practice to keep cheating confidential (indeed, I think for a lot of universities professors aren't allowed to publicize student names in incidents of cheating). I understand where you're coming from, but college can be an extremely stressful place that can lead students to do actions they otherwise wouldn't have done (or so goes the typical reasoning from universities).
OMG Engineering Tenets
Was it Do Kwon?
Basal metabolic rate changes only a few percent with age (unless there's an actual disease involved). Most people who blame their weight on a "slow metabolism" actually have a perfectly normal metabolism. They just consume too many calories.

If anyone wants to actually measure their metabolism it's cheap and easy to get a resting metabolic rate (RMR) test in most any sports medicine lab. You just sit in a chair for a few minutes while they measure your inhaled and exhaled gasses.
A tool to render and upscale Sierra adventure game background images
I’m surprised at the number of people here justifying or supporting cheating.

It’s not a victimless crime.

Many university courses have minimum requirements to get into. Eg Engineering, Medicine, etc. Cheating to inflate your grades will result in people who didn’t cheat missing out on, or having less chance of, being accepted into their desired degree. Which they worked honestly for, without cheating.
What if the test is not great at evaluating the capabilities of a person to do their future job.

Maybe preventing a person that does not understand differential equations from being a doctor, English teacher, event manager ...

„I literally do not give one flying fuck.“

The person who cheats, will give no f** about your opinion either.
No, none of this is new and it didn't start in Asia. People have always cheated and always will.
> It is a cliche, but truly, they are only cheating themselves.

> Careers eventually filter out (most of) the cheaters.

Some yes. Some no. I cheated in my computer architecture class. I was already an accomplished programmer in Perl and Java, but cpu design was kicking my ass. It required a lot of time and effort, and I had little left over to give. I got the gist of most of the class, but I cheated a lot in order to pass. By doing so, I eked out a passing grade, satisfied that requirement, and got my diploma. And I have had a good career since then, needing absolutely nothing that I learned in that course. I also cheated a little in american history and poli sci.

I needed a diploma, and if I hadn't cheated, I wouldn't have gotten the diploma. And the fact that I understood less of those courses than my grade would suggest, has hurt me not one whit, so far in my fairly lengthy career.

Cheating in some courses is a self-defeating mistake. But your assumption that the only purpose of college is learning course material is a little naive. I got a LOT out of college, in terms of social experience, credentials, professional connections, etc. I did not cheat myself at all.
> Under the terms of his manslaughter plea, Walker will be eligible for parole in 21 years, when he is in his mid 80’s. According to Google, it costs an average of about $106,000 per year to incarcerate an inmate in prison in California. Multiply that by 21 years, and the pricetag for keeping Walker locked up for the next two decades exceeds 2 million dollars.

While low for US standards, 21 years for murder may fall short of justice, but does not seem unreasonable, especially given how old the perpetrator will be when he is merely eligible for parole. Compounded with the evidence not being strong enough to guarantee conviction, I really cannot fault the criminal-justice system in this case. Sure, we can say "we know he's guilty, he deserves a worse punishment", but the legal system cannot work this way.

I also can't agree to the calculus that we're better off using the death penalty because it is cheaper (supposedly it is actually more expensive, because of extra legal procedures, but let's say it was indeed cheaper). Fundamental rights, and the limits of government power, should not be decided based on economics. Doing so would be extremely short-sighted.

And governments are already frighteningly powerful. While I believe the death penalty is justified for some crimes, I'd rather see justice fall short, and not give the government the power to make such irreversible decisions.
George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Manifesto (1884)
Read his excellent book Confessions. Because he criticizes unethical/corrupt engineering practices his enemies say he is bringing ill repute upon the profession and violating the terms of his license.
That's an interesting observation: if you are hiring someone whose role is largely high level decision making, like a principal engineer, that skillset is orthogonal to anything you could get them to show you on a keyboard. Almost by definition: the role is simply more than what a single person can do at the keyboard in X amount of time, so testing for that would be an incomplete test.
We are hearing only one side of things here.

I could just as easily read that as someone who no longer practices using their license to give weight to their activism, and then it turns out they didn't even bother to actually keep up that license that they were using to get people to listen to them.

If guess it probably mostly depends on if your think the lapsed license is a legitimate accident or a sign of indifference. Assuming the board is in fact usually forgiving on lapses as is suggested here.
We're going to college at the worst time in our lives. When I was in college I did exactly what you described. I didn't really cheat much (I remember just one time), but all I cared about was grades and getting a job. I couldn't have cared less about learning or retaining anything. And I didn't learn much. This strategy worked out well for me, but it was a huge waste of time.

I'm in my 30s now and I would absolutely love to go back to school to learn. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can appreciate academic material and concepts because I understand how they relate to the real world. Please give me those advanced graph algorithm, database, and real analysis classes that I couldn't appreciate 15 years ago due to a lack of real-world experience.
> Why aren't college courses overloaded with freeloaders? Cause what they actually teach isn't that valuable.

Ha, as a prof, this is a fun thought experiment. But notice your same argument would apply to textbooks at the library.

Why aren't all the library textbooks checked out all the time with huge waiting lists? Because their content isn't valuable?

Only a small part of university learning involves reading a textbook (or watching a lecture), there is also the scaffolding of assignments, assessment, feedback, guidance, and externally enforced deadlines and requirements. Instead of free gatorade, a lecture is more like free tomato seeds. They're valuable but people won't take them because they aren't willing to plant and water them over the course of months.

> Most of what is taught in college has little value or applicability and is quickly forgotten.

I think this is generally wrong, and obviously both of us are entitled to our own opinion, but I'll point out that putting your brain through exercises and experiences that stretch it will permanently alter your brain, even if you forget many of the details that make up those experiences. For example if you put together 50 puzzles, you can forget the details of all of them but still be much better at puzzle-solving.
The “Socialist” Success Two-Step
I haven't read through all the other comments here, but attending class and learning the content aren't mutually exclusive.

I sympathize with the reason why students cheat, but I can't see that those reasons are the same as what you say. You don't need to attend classes to learn the content nor display mastery - I appreciate a good syllabus for that reason where you know what is expected and can learn on your own time. I liked the approach the author of the article took for that reason. But none of this requires cheating.

I can see why this would lead students to cheat, but this looks to me like a strawman in addition to victim blaming (on part of the prof).
I agree that while the professor seemed to be responding well in a lot of ways, his failure to quickly address the situation was terrible. He could have given his lecture on academic honesty immediately after realizing the extent of the problem, even if he needed more time to create all the individualized reports. I have a hard time seeing how that wouldn't have improved the situation, perhaps in ways that he doesn't realize even now. (For example, how much student time was wasted on all this drama, which could have been much reduced by earlier action, with a consequent effect on their performance in other courses?)
The exams were open book, open note and they had a week to complete them.

When people were offered a nearly complete fresh slate, they still cheated. And then plagiarized.

He at length describes how much of his class were blowing off almost every aspect of the class; not attending lectures, skipping assignments, almost never attending his office hours.

Many of them openly say in the whatsapp chat that they didn't do reading, classwork, or study.

This is not even remotely close to behavior of people participating in a high-stakes all-or-nothing, if-I-don't-graduate-I-am-fucked-for-life situations.
Fun example about lazy teaching: Our undergrad's HKN chapter kept a test bank of past exams in Physics, CS, etc. When I was studying for my Physics final I went back to past midterms and realized the professor recycled questions from previous years with some numbers changed up. I ended up filling my entire cheat sheet with the questions that weren't already on midterms but were in the test bank.

The result? The final contained a majority of questions from that cheat sheet. I still pose this scenario to a couple friends nowadays asking if this would be considered cheating, and the responses are actually a mix of "no, you're just taking what's publicly available" and "yes, you're manipulating the system to get where you are and taking spots from someone with academic integrity".
The fact that much of Western Europe and the USA have severely outdated legacy networks is not reflective of the state of the Internet in urban areas. Here in the much poorer Bucharest, a good chuck of apartments already have fiber to the home, and those that don't still have fiber to the apartment building, and those that don't still have broadband. DSL speeds have not been a thing for essentially anyone in the whole city for >15 years. The situation is slightly but not that much worse for most other cities and towns.

This could easily and cheaply be done in any city in the developed world, and in most rural areas as well. That it isn't happening is one of the failures of the free market and government.
"A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from my students than they learn from me. There are more students than me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although I don’t condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we were all in a major life stuff happening moment."

The world needs more people with multi-dimensional empathy.
I dunno about the 90s, but it definitely feels to me like the industry largely stopped giving a shit about undergrad degrees at some point
TFA links to a 2014 post by Strong Towns [1] that describes exactly such a failure and espouses frustration at the lack of response. This post, among others, was cited as evidence for harassing the author over a short lapse of license (while it was not in active use), which was blown up into an uncharacteristic, disproportionate, and unwarranted demand to publicly sign documents admitting to dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. The existence of such a document regardless of details would be enough to completely discredit and dismiss all of the author's speech. It's rank protectionism and speech silencing in the guise of following rules and procedures.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-p...
Partial Defense of Hearing Voices Movement
How dedicated you are to do a task with no intrinsic value besides getting hired at companies with leetcode-style interviews. I don't think google is better off when everyone they hire has wasted hundreds of hours on a fundamentally useless skill rather than having used that time to learn different skills or just enjoy time with family and minimize the chance they burn out on the job at a later date.

There's other ways to tease out if someone is "dedicated to reaching a goal" like actually asking them questions about their life, daily routine, accomplishments etc. I think these are much better signals than "this person can implement many sorting algorithms and solve towers of hanoi or the egg drop puzzle without a google search to refresh their memory" with an N=1 sample size used to gauge how reliably they can do that. How many people if asked to do this on a job rather than an interview a year later would then go and implement it from memory without double checking they didn't forget some edge case on stackoverflow?

I know grinding leetcode is fundamentally useless because you will immediately start losing your ability to interview once you get hired. If you don't change jobs within a year you'll need to start studying all that crap again for the next interview.
"Shamed publicly and have their career prospects severely damaged..."

The prefontal cortex does not finish developing until age 25 or thereabouts. This is why it is logical and necessary to punish young people differently from the way we punish adults.

"Cheating is not acceptable or excusable, ever, period."

Children develop the ability to lie and cheat around 3 or 4 years of age, although they are very unskilled at it and initially tell lies that are not believable. I think we agree that we can accept and excuse 4-year-olds who lie and cheat, because it will take much longer for them to develop ethics and morals.

The question then is, how do we taper off the acceptance and excuses? Perhaps we agree that it's acceptable at age 4 and unacceptable at age 25, but what about 18? Perhaps people at age 18 still need to learn ethics and morals?

It seems like such a shame to destroy somebody's academic career if there are ways to save it.
The taxi industry had it figured out only on a smaller scale. Rideshare reaches more people and rides than taxis did. In most of America, taxis were never a serious option outside of niche use cases like getting a ride from an airport. Even in NYC, where street hailing is possible, that only ever really worked in Manhattan (and not even all of Manhattan); and medallion caps meant driver supply could never fully meet rider demand, unlike for rideshare, so getting drivers wasn't a realistic problem.

Rideshare expanded the reach of taxi-like services to more regions, people, and use cases. It's now viable to travel without renting a car in many US cities - you can see this by how rideshare affected rental car companies. That's what makes the rideshare business hard: the places where they didn't have existing competition, because that's where the matching is harder and the economics not as easy.

It's a similar story for food delivery: GrubHub/Seamless operated in core areas of cities like NYC for many years (since the 90s in NYC, I think). Uber Eats brings that service to far more places, and that's where the challenge comes from in that business.
For that matter the number of programming jobs that require computer science is pretty low.

For a programming job that requires knowledge of chemistry, it's easier to find a chemist who can program. Likewise physics, math, statistics, electronics, etc.
Pip has had ton of development in the last few years, and continues to do so. I'd say stick with pip, unless there's a specific problem you're addressing with pipenv or Poetry.

However, like a sibling comment, I've also heard god things about Poetry. Probably worth giving it a spin somewhere and seeing if my initial thought still holds.
> Given all of this, why wouldn't you cheat?

In my state college they had zero tolerance policy. You caught cheating, you're out.
The Outsiders: There's a reason things have gotten so dumb
I've given Stop Making Sense an annual (and sometimes a bit more) watch every year since the 80's. I find it so evergreen and uplifting when I'm feeling a bit down.
I've never understood people's attitudes towards cheating, which is perhaps why its so prevalent. People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it. When people cheat in school, we just kind of go "well, yeah, kids do that, I guess we'll give you a few warnings first."

If someone is caught cheating how do I know they didn't cheat in previous classes, but got away with it? Do you really want to go to a doctor who, regardless of if he knows his stuff now, is the kind of person who can live with cheating? As I've grown older and seen more and more people get away with not a moment of weakness, but a deep, unfixable character flaw requiring planning and sustained effort to gain an advantage over people foolish enough to be doing things fairly, it makes me wonder why anyone chooses to tolerate this.

Who wants to get a degree from a university that knowingly and willingly passes students who cheat, but just makes them retake the course or in this case do what sounds like essentially extra credit. But rather than prevent people from participating in systems they have demonstrated are not trustworthy enough to participate in, we just give them a stern lecture and extra work, or an asterisk in their hall of fame record, or make them say they're very sorry.
I clicked on this thinking to read about William Blake. (Him of "Tyger, Tyger burning bright...What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?")

The name seems entirely unrelated, however.
From doing some cursory research, it appears the software in question is called MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) and is currently being provided as a service [0].

Since it is intended to be used by instructors and staff, the source is restricted (though "anyone may create a MOSS account"). According to the paper describing how it's used [1], "False positives have never been reported, and all false negatives were quickly traced back to the source, which was either an implementation or a user misunderstanding."

Sources:

[0]: https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss

[1]: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...
I have seen more 'For rent' signs in the last 3 or 4 months than I have in the last 15 years I've been living here. No idea how that translates to rent prices though.
Doing a hashmap lookup is already very much like using a bloom filter: for any addressing scheme, if an element exists at a particular location, then either the key exists or it's a false positive. If no element exists, then there's no way the key exists. Adding an extra bloom filter would then come down to trading off space usage against a different probability of false positives, in addition to an extra lookup, and I think one would have to contrive an extremely unlikely scenario for it to make sense.
*50 hours
I can't speak to what goes on in FAANG recruiting, but I was involved in hiring for a smaller company that recruited heavily from regional schools. we absolutely knew which schools were harder, as most of the younger engineers had graduated recently from that same set of schools. obviously GPA doesn't tell the whole story, and we preferred to decide based on work experience. but for junior hires and especially interns, there's not always a lot of signal to decide on. all things being equal, we would prefer someone with a 3.0 (or even lower, with a good explanation) from the rigorous stem school over someone with a 4.0 from the well-known party school. which is too bad, I'm sure there were some very bright people who went to the "party school", but their grading policy made it very difficult to distinguish them from their peers who barely had a pulse.
Will they bump the version number to 6?
This is not statistically significant. There are 130,900 public schools in America. Roughly 130,880 of them have never been shot at. It sucks for the ones who have, but they are 0.015% of the total.
> I've certain encountered teaching in my own classes,

This kind of mistyping reminds me of those example of people whose names fit their job but it's rare to find such an apropos example.

Sorry to derail your point but the juxtaposition of "ch" and "t" here is perfect.
Fix bugs as soon as you find them
Yeah, some bootcamps will hesitate to even admit you without a college degree. And I got offered to skip a technical interview just because I had a fancy degree on my resume that has nothing to do with cs.

Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small percentage gets through and sticks with some small percentage of students.

My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long time to settle into an adult brain.
Governments are like Religions. Every one of them arrogantly thinks their way is the superior way to do things (Across all sides of the political spectrum), despite the existence of contradictory governments with perfectly functioning, and sometimes better functioning societies.

For some reason it seems like the Internet pisses governments off of all stripes, since a Global, free, meritocracy where everyone can compete on an equal playing field is like giving them the finger. And while governments can keep a tight leash on their own citizens with rules and regulations, they can’t make the rest of the world do whatever crazy nonsense they feel like. In this example, Canada will just be left behind in the 21st Century economy.