I convinced my wife to marry me. She was very pessimistic, thinking that I would leave her. It took six months to get a positive response to my proposal and another year of reassurance before we married. We have been married 41 years. The courtship was helpful experience for the marriage.
Did her pessimism ever subside or did you just learn to accept it as part of her?
She still has a bit of fear and uncertainty, which I have learned to accept, but I do not believe she is worried that I will ever leave.
I somehow decided I needed to cheat to pass a certain exam because I was basically crap at memorizing stuff. So I used an analogue wireless headphone, an induction loop around my neck and a mobile phone. Since I lacked an accomplice to dictate, I read aloud the hundreds of pages and recorded myself, careful to preserve and properly serialize things like complex formulas. This was before the era of iPods and SDCard pl…
If only the prof had said "Good news, everyone! I’ve decided to make this an open-book test."
Convincing a department to graduate me with an ABET accredited degree without finishing all coursework. It was significantly easier than deriving the time-dependent wave equation for hydrogen, writing a Java-to-MIPS compiler with two implementations, one in C++ and one in Java, and making an UNIX FORTRAN reactor simulator compile on Windows 95 (lol!)... all with crushingly, untreated depression. Also, survived the Lo…
> It was significantly easier than deriving the time-dependent wave equation for hydrogen
I think that's the craziest one I've heard so far. I can't imagine trying to reproduce a hardware bug in an FPGA with a logic analyzer. How much time did you spend on the bug? Was it something that you ignored for a long time, and then you decided to dive in and spend a couple of weeks on it?
It was about 8 years ago, so my memory is a bit foggy. At one point we had everyone on our entire project working on it, which was about 20 people. We had daily calls with the customer since it was causing frequent outages on their network. I was full time on the bug for a while, and most of that time was spent making meticulous documentation for what happens in every clock cycle in the fpga. I visited the customer's…
Wow, that blows my mind. I don’t even know how to ask the right question, but is there some kind of “formal verification” or “type-checking” that could have caught this issue earlier? Or is that just too difficult, and reserved for medical equipment, nuclear reactors, etc.?
There's more to exams than memorization too, and cheating because you don't like memorization is childish. If the exams really test only memorization, drop the class.
Some classes are on the critical path to graduation. I wouldn't suggest delaying an entire degree because one or two classes have bad exams. Cheating to avoid memorization is childish, but let's not forget that students are usually children, or still in the process of maturing into adults.
University students are legally adults and we’re considered so until recently. I don’t thin infantalizing young adults is healthy.
Admitting to significant academic fraud during a job interview is a very, very bad idea. Furthermore, I would question the ethics and morality of any company that said "Wow, you solved an incredibly tough problem in order to commit fraud. Boy, are we the place for you!"
> Admitting to significant ... fraud during a job interview is a very, very bad idea. After serving his time, that's exactly how Frank Abagnale got a job in the FBI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale
He’s the exception that proved the rule. The FBI never repeated that hiring process on anyone else.
I would allow it (if these kind of skills to design all of this system is the skills that is useful for this job). You are honest to admit it, and if you can make such thing, it is good. Of course that was cheating, but that does not mean that such thing is only to make fraud; you might do similar thing with other thing too.
Once you admit to fraud, though, they have no idea what else you might be lying about -- including the admission itself. They can't exactly call his old professor to confirm that he built and used a cheating machine. Plus, after you admit to doing it once, if I weren't the sort to reject you outright, I'd still call every single person and institution on your resume to confirm all of those were real. Right out of the…
Of course, that is true (although it is also possible to lie without admitting it!). I am only saying how I might do (depending the kind of job).
It was about 8 years ago, so my memory is a bit foggy. At one point we had everyone on our entire project working on it, which was about 20 people. We had daily calls with the customer since it was causing frequent outages on their network. I was full time on the bug for a while, and most of that time was spent making meticulous documentation for what happens in every clock cycle in the fpga. I visited the customer's…
Wow, that blows my mind. I don’t even know how to ask the right question, but is there some kind of “formal verification” or “type-checking” that could have caught this issue earlier? Or is that just too difficult, and reserved for medical equipment, nuclear reactors, etc.?
It was a problem with a clock domain crossing with IP from another company into ours. There were testbenches/simulations for verification, but they didn't test every packet size. In hindsight, everything can be caught, but it's a matter of how extensive the testing is. For example, passing every packet size through would not have showed the symptom. Everything looked normal, and all packets succeed. The key was that the meta data saying whether a buffer was free after transmitting was incorrect and never showing that it was free. So to really see the issue you had to send enough packets of that size to totally deplete the buffers. With a standard packet distribution, such as imix, you never hit that size.