Live data from Hacker News

Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

alistair.blog

101–110 of 169 posts

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#101
When I was in high school I got a second hand TI86 and started writing code for it… for one of the math-heavy subjects I effectively stopped studying and started writing code instead, on the calculator.

Whenever the teachers would do exercises on the whiteboard I would just do testing of my software, verifying its correctness.

Calculators were allowed, and the teacher kinda encouraged us to get familiar with our calculators (the subject was calculations-heavy) so I didn’t get caught.

Fun times, sometimes I miss TI-basic.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#102

Everyone has to start somewhere. These young lads “worked around” couple of educational platforms. 35 years ago I was hex dumping ZX Spectrum game saves and disassembling the program files to get more lives, infinite lives or just more ammo or whatever. That seemed easier and more interesting than getting good at games themselves. I sometimes wonder if that kind of “not approved” intellectual curiosity can be used to…

I've been doing something similar but in the pursuit of graphics assets. Typical ZX Spectrum game was usually one blob of bytes containing everything it needed to run. I'd load the main game block into memory and run small assembly routine displaying a fragment of code on screen in a form of a window with dynamically configurable width and height. You could "slide" the window throughout whole memory block, which was quite fast, and eventually you'd find out something resembling backgrounds, sprites, fonts. Often they were of different dimensions, hence the dynamic window size. After few tweaks you'd find the offset and the size of assets and you could replace them easily. I'll never forget the Rocky Horror Show play-through with all the characters replaced with their other, rather obscene, versions. Well, not so mature when you think about it, but quite funny it was back then. If anything I've learned quite a few tricks about fitting a lot of assets into very limited memory.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#103
Years ago I was working at a multinational consultancy, and then they suddenly decided to block most of the internet except for a whitelist. We quickly figured out that the whitelist worked with keywords, and since we were programming in java, java was one of the keywords, so if a url was banned, we could access it by adding ?param=java. As twenty something year old developers, we said, challenge accepted, and we built a GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey script that when it couldn't load a page it would reload with the param added, and rewrite all the links and img tags to also add the param. Soon after that the system admin guys gave us a proxy config to bypass the whole ban, but it was fun to do it anyway.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The threat of suing very much loomed in the background if they did not cooperate. Hegarty is just more slick, buttering them up with (well deserved) praises and attention from grownups to get voluntary cooperation.

I didn't really get that vibe, especially when we called Colin. He was super friendly. But then again, we didn't want to test it and we complied immediately =)

Diplomacy often comes across as friendliness. I've been in situations where I've not acquiesced and seen how quickly things can change. As they say, don't take friendliness for weakness. Wonderfully managed by all parties though.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#105
post #36
post #31

Congrats Alistair and Scott! This is an amazing story that made me remember my high-school days. As the authors, I was into programming from an early age, and high school definitely took the second place :) My grades ended up REALLY suffering when I got my first full-time role at a startup while I was 17 years old (parents approved) and on my last school year. Fast-forward many years and I don't regret a thing. I att…

Thank you! Alistair and I have been in startups since we were 15/16, and we've both now finished school and work full time in the startup space. My grades definitely took a down turn the last two years, but I'm happy with my decisions and am loving working in tech!

I think it's fair to say most of us had our grades suffer. My GCSEs back in 06 were terrible, but no wonder, I spent most of my time hacking & writing code. I'm no worse off for it, and I'm sure you won't be either!

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#106

Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million stude…

Can you elaborate on the approach? This sounds really interesting but I don't quite understand from reading your comment and https://earlyscores.com/about/

I think I remember paying some small amount of money (flat fee irrespective of # of years, IIRC) to get my scores quicker via a phone call in 2003,2004,2005. Perhaps I would've been better served by your EarlyScores.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#107
It's a different era now, but back in my day Altavista had just launched Babelfish and a few of us began using it for our French homework. My friend got "caught" due to the "peculiar" nature of his work, and while they couldn't figure out what was happening, we were all warned quite sternly to stop doing whatever it was we were doing. Lesson learnt: only use Altavista to read French ;-)

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#108
This reminds me of back at university we had to use a platform called "Wiley Plus" for weekly physics homework.

To prevent copying, while the equations needed remained the same, the numbers (inputs to what you had to work out) varied across user sessions.

One lad in the course wrote a website that he updated weekly that mimicked the UI/UX, you would plug in the values WP gave you and it would emit an answer.

The following year I took over maintaining it, and ended up in a spot of bother with the administration.

There was also another homework website that some lectures made us use, which did all the shit client side in JS. You could just inspect element and get the answer.

I honestly still don't get the point of those additional homeworks, on top of assignment and lab report workloads at university. They seemed to only exist to loosely tick a box regarding "continuous assessment".

Relatedly, they also implemented 5% credit for attendance by proxy by making us rent these radio " clickers" from the university, each with a unique ID tied to a student.

During lectures, there would be multiple choice questions asked, where the answer was irrelevant - it was a means of counting attendance.

Naturally by the second month people were delegating their clicker to someone else if they needed to skip a class.

A couple of years later, smartphone apps replaced the clickers, and SDR became affordable, granting the university a near-miss from any radio shenanigans.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#109
post #98
post #97

Epic stuff, and I think this experience may well be more valuable than the homework you avoided. Basically you did harder homework in order to avoid easier homework. The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. (Although I also think wat…

> The problem is letting other people use it; of course it's nice to help people, and it's altruistic to do so for free, but some of those people might actually need this homework to learn, and you may have deprived them of that. This, when the scope is limited to yourself, it's very different from when it impacts others. Back when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was super popular, I was in university and had read about…

> you're going to play in the grey space between ethical and not, do so responsibility and don't share the exploits with others

Aka "don't get caught".

One of the times I got in bother at the first university I attended was because I kept logging into their production servers as the root user every morning.

Their admins had left a few glaring holes open that I'd patched (and evicted some fellow travellers), but I kept their SSH keys to explore a bit.

One morning one of them happened to peruse the SSH logs, and spotted a pattern where someone on the student network was logging in every morning.

Didn't take them long to work out something was deeply fucked, and they cut my network access before pulling up the contact info they had on file for me and summoning me to their office for a bollocking.

Luckily for me they figured it would be better for their job security if they kept it purely informal as opposed to notifying the university proper and having me face a disciplinary committee.

They never rotated those ssh keys, and I learned the "don't get caught" lesson as opposed to the "don't do this" lesson.

Re: Avoiding homework with code and getting caught

#110
post #103

Years ago I was working at a multinational consultancy, and then they suddenly decided to block most of the internet except for a whitelist. We quickly figured out that the whitelist worked with keywords, and since we were programming in java, java was one of the keywords, so if a url was banned, we could access it by adding ?param=java. As twenty something year old developers, we said, challenge accepted, and we bui…

I had a very similar situation. For some reason using the python requests library didn't trigger the company filtering, so one afternoon I built a little proxy. Handy when something something random was blocked.
Post reply on HN