jdmt

"the chosen approach resolves collisions only up to a certain degree. If, however unlikely, a further key maps to the same hash index, then the request simply fails and an appropriate response is generated. We believe this to be an acceptable behaviour for what is essentially equiv-alent to a cache full/miss."

So it's more like a cache than a key/value store? Nothing wrong with that but to me a key/value store implies that data isn't lost in the case of a hash collision. Pretty cool stuff nonetheless.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for teaching me the italics trick! I promise, I love to learn!

I agree with most of what you said. In fact, it's due to a few of my classes (especially that physics class) that I'd like to become a professor some day. I want to teach kids much better than those few terrible professors I had to learn from (I had no other choice in teacher).

> If you consider the class nothing but useless busy-work, get out of the class.

Trust me, if I could have I would have. Unfortunately these classes were prereq's for the classes (and major) that I cared about. I knew the material well enough to get decent grades and didn't care beyond that. I would have gladly traded a seat for a student who cared (especially a student who couldn't afford to go to college!)

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

>You actually hacked the system to take your time and money and not give you a good result.

And what if I earned 100% on the 2 midterms and a 94% on the final? I got a 96% in that physics class. Other students told me that their exam grades improved after starting to use the forum. Not sure how I didn't get a good result. Again, I'd like to say that rushing to judgement of other people's situations isn't beneficial to anyone. I feel as though my initial post was very on topic and was kind of hurt when it was downvoted within a few minutes. We're all here to help and support each other.

By the way, I'm new to posting on HN and am wondering how you made your text italics?

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

> You however seemed to be espousing cheating the system.

Doesn't that sound similar to hacking the system? We are using a website called hacker news. Not only was collaboration on homework encouraged, but the class actually had its own discussion forum for people to use. However, everyone disliked the forum because it was cumbersome and slow. So I built my own. At the end of the semester I had many people thank me for the website and asked to have it expanded to cover more classes. Using this forum I personally helped many students understand concepts and taught concepts that the professors couldn't teach properly. There were a few subjects I didn't understand and other students stepped in to help. You were not in my class and did not use this forum so I don't think you should rush to judgement about what was/wasn't cheating.

By definition, hackers do things that push boundaries. There will always be disagreement but you don't have to downvote just because you disagree. Voice your opinion, certainly, but please be careful with those downvotes.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

[Original message removed due to another downvote. I guess I will not share personal anecdotes anymore. I feel that downvotes are for off topic or mean comments. I only shared a personal experience that I felt related to the OP's story.]

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

wow, why the downvote? I'm very proud of the website I created. It was what got me started with programming and lit a fire under me to learn new programming languages. I don't share much on HN but a downvote to this post makes me want to refrain from ever sharing.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

Rather than go to class I created a popular custom discussion forum for students to help each other with the homework problems (back in the early 2000's). Ended up teaching myself perl, html, css, javascript and sql in the process which landed me my first job. Never had to do my physics homework (useless busywork) because the answers were posted on the forum. Still received grades of B+ or higher.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

Thanks for sharing. This was an awesome read. I'm surprised the router allowed external connections to access the internal configuration. However, some older routers are pretty poorly designed from a security standpoint.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

Failing immediately is certainly an easy way to handle unrecoverable errors. However, it seems as though your library assumes NDEBUG is never defined. Maybe you should make your own function rather than using assert()?

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

Why do you do things like:

  assert(doSomethingThatChangesState() == 0);

throughout your code? I thought the point of assert was for debugging purposes and you should never change program state inside the assertion.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

I don't disagree that public APIs should be well documented. However, I believe it's very easy to forget to update the comments. Especially in scripting languages without type safety. There is little to remind the programmer that arguments were added, types were changed, argument order was modified, behavior was changed, return value was changed, locking behavior was changed, memory allocations were changed, etc. Obviously unit tests should help catch many of these changes. However, it's still up to the coder to remember to change the comments. When you're behind on a deadline or you're juggling 50 different API changes because you're still alpha I'd say it's pretty easy to forget to update a comment.

See http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.ajax/ if you want an example of on API that could easily have a few typos in it. Who is checking to make sure it's 100% in sync with the code 100% of the time? Not trying to say this example has bugs in the docs but there's a LOT of behavior described that could be out of date.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

This whole problem stems from the movement to privatize prisons. It's a disgusting abuse of power. The lives of many at-risk children (and their families) have been turned upside-down due to greed.

jdmt

13 anni fadiscuss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Submissions

HP WebOS Services Shutdown

comments