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How not to check the validity of an email address

dellsystem.me

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Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#101

Post by eksith »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #2

I've had something similar delivered to me on a project I hired out. The most frustrating part was not the code but the developers reaction to why it was so bad. He had no idea what the big deal was and thought I was being nitpicky. Worse yet, was an initial claim that it was more efficient to do it that way. That was followed up with a claim that doing it differently wasn't possible. Needless to say, I stopped worki…

It's not possible the teach these people without encountering a massive, irreparable, hack. Nothing short of complete obliteration of their project through their own incompetence will work because the Dunning-Kruger effect is in full swing.

The smartest people I know are acutely aware of how little they actually know compared to how much there is to know.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#102

Post by plg »

there is a huge market (education and higher education) where institutions (sometimes governments) will pay huge money for these sorts of apps, and for whatever reason, the only real players are often of this quality

at my university we use a similar system called OWL, which replaced a system called Web-CT. Both are horrendously slow, with fantastically poorly thought out interfaces.

There is a ton of money to be made here. Low hanging fruit.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#103

Post by girvo »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #7

Gradebusters / Making the Grade, or something with names like that, used to use a Java applet to "secure" the web site with student grades. You could just download the applet and decompile it to figure out their trivial encoding of the IDs and PINs (which were just params in the HTML). Or you could figure out just an ID (typically a student ID number, although more than a few were social security numbers, apparently)…

Education software is literally the worst.

Moodle was pretty ick to begin with, but you should've seen the state of one install I had to work on by the time I got to it.

I still have nightmares.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#104

Post by ramblerman »

kirab wrote: post #74

Am I the only one who thinks that the amount of flaming is kind of unproductive?

It seems to be part of HN culture. Putting down this code make people feel better about themselves. Because obiously this is bad, even they can see that.

There is certainly value to the post but, yes, the flaming gets old - very quickly.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#105

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

m_mueller wrote: post #73
joshfraser wrote: post #49

In college I was hired to build an auction site. I was billing my client $20 / hour and subcontracting out the work to some of my fellow classmates at $10 / hour. I was swamped with other work and didn't have much time to review the code. I just made sure it satisfied the specifications and shipped it. We launched the site and did a few hundred thousands dollars worth of transactions in the first 24 hours. Then somet…

This story almost had me in tears (a mix of schadenfreude and shame for my profession). I hope they learned something not to give business critical work to college students. Makes me think that IT Risk management should be right at the top of what MBAs have to learn.

>I hope they learned something not to give business critical work to college students.

I've had the same kind of experience hiring a 'real' consulting firms. We were sent a PhD, who banged out a pretty standard looking interface for us that worked terribly. Ostensibly we could've sued, but that just takes more time, and doesn't really fix things.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#106

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

girvo wrote: post #103
rachelbythebay wrote: post #7

Gradebusters / Making the Grade, or something with names like that, used to use a Java applet to "secure" the web site with student grades. You could just download the applet and decompile it to figure out their trivial encoding of the IDs and PINs (which were just params in the HTML). Or you could figure out just an ID (typically a student ID number, although more than a few were social security numbers, apparently)…

Education software is literally the worst. Moodle was pretty ick to begin with, but you should've seen the state of one install I had to work on by the time I got to it. I still have nightmares.

Needs disrupting

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#109

Post by krisgee »

dpcx wrote: post #90
einhverfr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a history major, I would agree with you. One of the real issues has to do with the mentality of coding. There are people regardless of background who approach coding as a job, and those who approach it as a craft. You want the latter, not the former. Here's my rule: If you don't look back at code you wrote a decade ago with some degree of horror, you are either an extraordinarily good coder, or you aren't a good c…

A decade is a long time at a single job... Try six months for a good start :)

Six months? I come in after the weekend and constantly want to rewrite the whole goddamn thing.

Re: How not to check the validity of an email address

#110

Post by ceejayoz »

nnnnni wrote: post #99
evincarofautumn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switching it to use a single properly formatted SQL reduced load times to under a second. We need you to change it back because the system that scrapes that page is relying on the page load time.

What's worse is when fake delays are put into the code because (stupid) people think that the computer can't possibly be doing a good job if it retrieves the results in under a second. If it's "thinking", it's working well!

See: banking websites.
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