Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class • Hacker News Board

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#21

Post by hervature » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #2

For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…

In a public lab that is used frequently, I believe this would be viewed quite negatively. Not from a "you hacked our systems" perspective but a "it could have been damaging to other students' education if things had gone wrong". To make the differentiation somewhat more clear, filling up a bucket of water from the bathroom sink to clean something vs. removing all the shower heads and making a super funnel of hoses to spray wash your car outside. The former activity is clearly much less likely to cause issues with other students. If the computer lab was in some basement used by 3 students throughout the year, I don't think anybody would care.

Building on that, many universities have computational resources for any level of needs as long as they are justified. Free network storage to last a lifetime and access to computer clusters that comes with your university email. Upgraded computer clusters for class projects, personal research (like this), or really any legitimate need (as long as you don't say something like "I want to mine bitcoin") is an email away from the university IT. The next level would be the university's super computer that generally needs a short proposal to justify the academic purpose. When these systems are in place now, it is kind of hard to justify these type of things.

Edit: The author of the post put a comment basically confirming that things haven't really changed. He was being respectful (low usage lab, allowed people to stop his programs if they needed a computer, low impact to others, etc.). He was given access to more legitimate resources afterwards at the request of the professor. Not as easy as it is now, but that's Moore's law.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#22

Post by Jtsummers » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #13

Jtsummers wrote: post #2

For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…

> For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? They would wonder why the student went through all that trouble instead of getting time on our HPC cluster.

Hah, fair enough, HPC clusters are certainly more common than when I went to school. In that case, take the "like" to be a generalization (how I meant it): A student (or students) pushing the limits of the existing rules and infrastructure to accomplish something productive or interesting. Yes, it breaks some rules, but what's a typical reaction anymore? Do they get hired by the university or pushed to work with particular researchers like when I was starting school or do they get pushed out or punished like when I was wrapping up college?

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#23

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#24

Post by elengyel » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #12

> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight). What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?

I'd very much like to revive my old code (which I still have) at some point and see how well it runs on modern computers. My guess is that a typical 64-bit ~3 GHz quad-core machine could accomplish the same task in a few minutes today.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#25

Post by QuinnWilton » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

jmercouris wrote: post #11

I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)

My highschool physically removed the right mouse button from the mice, because we were right clicking to make text files that we'd rename as batch files to get a command prompt open.

Some people would just bring their own mouse in to get past the defences.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#26

Post by andai » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

taldo wrote: post #18

SilasX wrote: post #12

> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight). What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?

Or on a single modern smartphone?

On that note, I'd like to share a clip about how fast modern machines are relative to early 90s supercomputers (the relevant part is in the first 5 minutes):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oJ4GcZs7y6g

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#27

Post by toomanyducks » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

valyagolev wrote: post #20

Apart from using hacking to overcome imposed limitations such as these, I am amazed by the number of times I had to use my chops to overcome what was simply a bug. Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it. I was very... surprised when I managed to productively use "javascript:(some code)" in the URL bar of the browser of my…

The web is broken. Someone's website wouldn't scroll (I don't remember the details, and I don't think I wanted to find out --- maybe it was overflow: hidden, but it could've been something else), and the only way I could figure out to deal with it was to open up the devtools responsive design mode and pretend the screen was bigger than it was so that the full page could show, and then use the browser's scrollbar from within that view.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#28

Post by acchow » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #12

> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight). What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?

A quick lookup for CPU speeds of yesteryear shows the Motorola 68040 in those macs did about 35 MFLOPS [1].

If you could parallelize this program to use all 2.6 TFLOPS in a Macbook Air M1's 8-core GPU, you're seeing about 75,000x speed improvement. So a 12 hour "overnight" job may take just over half a second.

[1] https://tech-insider.org/mac/research/1991/1021-e.html

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#29

Post by chungy » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

QuinnWilton wrote: post #25

jmercouris wrote: post #11

I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)

My highschool physically removed the right mouse button from the mice, because we were right clicking to make text files that we'd rename as batch files to get a command prompt open. Some people would just bring their own mouse in to get past the defences.

Doesn't seem extremely effective unless you also remove the F2, F10, Shift, and Alt keys from the keyboard.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#30

Post by prof-dr-ir » Mon, May 03, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #2

For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…

I think that it totally depends on the definition of 'behavior like this today'.

If 'behavior like this' is creatively toying with lab equipment that you have been given physical access to, bending the rules a little bit in the process, to participate in an academic challenge? If it would be up to me then a slap on the wrist would suffice, now just as well as presumably in 1993.

But if 'behavior like this' means breaking into computers, which nowadays are essential parts of a university's infrastructure, in straight violation of rules and conventions on hacking that have been in place since before you were born (say 2000), just to get some computer time to, say, mine whatevercoins? Then a little more than a slap on the wrist would be completely fine by me.