7 ms·

The code I shared was so bad, someone got kicked out of the country

32 points by notRobot 6y ago

walty8 6y ago
I think the title is a bit misleading. > ... a while later I found out that the stress of completing all his other courses on top of his master's project had lead him to take the very bad decision of cheating on one of his exams. He'd been caught, expelled from the university, had his Visa revoked, and ultimately been kicked out of the country.
- malux85 6y ago
  Yeah getting kicked out of the country was at best a second or third order effect of the code being bad
- rob74 6y ago
  Yeah... and I'm unsure if he only did it for dramatic effect or if he really feels responsible for the problems this student got into?
- hhas01 6y ago
  “I think the title is a bit misleading.” It got you to read it, didn’t it? I’d say that’s pretty good. As to the rest of it: Gahh. If you’re struggling, talk to staff. There’s no shame in it; you’ve already bared your soul to them by doing a degree in the first place, and they’ve seen it all before.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > It got you to read it, didn’t it? I’d say that’s pretty good. You've just described clickbait.
mcv 6y ago
Sounds like academia needs to insist on better coding standards. Publishing your code isn't worth much if the code is an unmanageable mess. Still better than not publishing your code I guess, but how reliable are scientific results when they've been processed by code of which nobody knows how it works?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  On a more basic level than that it's still far too prevalent to publish almost purely computational papers in applied fields with no code, i.e. in my experience of Tyre modelling even academic models (i.e. no $$$) rarely show the code (let alone comment on whether it's good code or not)
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    HN discussed exactly this a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > how reliable are scientific results when they've been processed by code of which nobody knows how it works? A good argument in favour of requiring the publication of code.
InfinityByTen 6y ago
I've written code in academia in applied mathematics. If I look at it today after 4 years of professional coding, I cringe. I know how horrible my code is. I know how poorly I understood oop and how none of the things were tested. Zilch. Nada. If I were to go back to academia ever again, the one course I am going to take is coding standards and practices for researchers. They should know basics about git, testing, ideally even a review and CI system. Given my experience in how code is handled in academia, I'm very skeptical about the quality of it and I expect to find critical bugs in them if it's written in a non-cs department. It's actually sad that we depend on the code so much for our publications, but how little attention we pay on how to do it properly. My trust went down in academia more and more when I saw how well defined practices were in industry and how it actually helped maintain a reasonable quality of code.
- hvidgaard 6y ago
  Learning git, refactoring, testing, CI, ect. is going to be way too many "credits" spent on that. It's important, but certainly not what they should be spend their time on if they could avoid it. The universities ought to have a CI system in place with guidelines, and preferably staff that can help with it. Ideally there should be some collaboration between the SE students and researchers worth credits for the CS students.
  - GauntletWizard 6y ago
    Every bit of Git, Testing, CI, etc - These are experimental skill. They directly translate into good experiment design. They help you figure out where you went wrong, what you assumptions were, and condense them down into a precise, succinct and yet fully-formed thesis.
    - hvidgaard 6y ago
      It's a mindset, and absolutely not necessary for researchers. If they do not learn that as a part of their PhD, they're not going to learn that with programming.
  - 6y ago
Thorrez 6y ago
Haha, I think I know what inspired this post... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996235
Thorrez 6y ago
The site seems to have been hugged to death, mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20201105071929/theorangeduck.com/page/reproduce-their-results#sourcecode https://web.archive.org/web/20201105071929/theorangeduck.com...
Thorrez 6y ago
Reminds me of this article: > How a hidden coding error fueled a seven-year dispute between two of condensed matter’s top theorists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819420
greatgib 6y ago
In addition with the title (coming from the site), being a little bit excessive, i have the feeling that the author is too naive. (Willingly or not) The student was deported for cheating an exam. On one way you can consider that he had too much stress, but another way to think is that this foreign student did not have good honesty values from the beginning. And was used to take shortcuts. Looking at the messages from the student blaming the author for the code that he had 'received for free', that he made the code even worse, that he did not understood what the code was supposed to do and also looks like did not audit it prior to usage, that he has 'no time to do it from scratch', makes me think that the student itself is to blame and that, as cheating for the exam, was thinking he could just use/copy the work of someone else and complete is thesis with minimal effort and research work.

32 points by notRobot 6y ago

I think the title is a bit misleading. > ... a while later I found out that the stress of completing all his other courses on top of his master's project had lead him to take the very bad decision of cheating on one of his exams. He'd been caught, expelled from the university, had his Visa revoked, and ultimately been kicked out of the country.

malux85 6y ago
Yeah getting kicked out of the country was at best a second or third order effect of the code being bad
rob74 6y ago
Yeah... and I'm unsure if he only did it for dramatic effect or if he really feels responsible for the problems this student got into?
hhas01 6y ago
“I think the title is a bit misleading.” It got you to read it, didn’t it? I’d say that’s pretty good. As to the rest of it: Gahh. If you’re struggling, talk to staff. There’s no shame in it; you’ve already bared your soul to them by doing a degree in the first place, and they’ve seen it all before.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > It got you to read it, didn’t it? I’d say that’s pretty good. You've just described clickbait.

mcv 6y ago

Sounds like academia needs to insist on better coding standards. Publishing your code isn't worth much if the code is an unmanageable mess. Still better than not publishing your code I guess, but how reliable are scientific results when they've been processed by code of which nobody knows how it works?

mhh__ 6y ago
On a more basic level than that it's still far too prevalent to publish almost purely computational papers in applied fields with no code, i.e. in my experience of Tyre modelling even academic models (i.e. no $$$) rarely show the code (let alone comment on whether it's good code or not)
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  HN discussed exactly this a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261706
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> how reliable are scientific results when they've been processed by code of which nobody knows how it works? A good argument in favour of requiring the publication of code.

InfinityByTen 6y ago

I've written code in academia in applied mathematics. If I look at it today after 4 years of professional coding, I cringe. I know how horrible my code is. I know how poorly I understood oop and how none of the things were tested. Zilch. Nada. If I were to go back to academia ever again, the one course I am going to take is coding standards and practices for researchers. They should know basics about git, testing, ideally even a review and CI system. Given my experience in how code is handled in academia, I'm very skeptical about the quality of it and I expect to find critical bugs in them if it's written in a non-cs department. It's actually sad that we depend on the code so much for our publications, but how little attention we pay on how to do it properly. My trust went down in academia more and more when I saw how well defined practices were in industry and how it actually helped maintain a reasonable quality of code.

hvidgaard 6y ago
Learning git, refactoring, testing, CI, ect. is going to be way too many "credits" spent on that. It's important, but certainly not what they should be spend their time on if they could avoid it. The universities ought to have a CI system in place with guidelines, and preferably staff that can help with it. Ideally there should be some collaboration between the SE students and researchers worth credits for the CS students.
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  Every bit of Git, Testing, CI, etc - These are experimental skill. They directly translate into good experiment design. They help you figure out where you went wrong, what you assumptions were, and condense them down into a precise, succinct and yet fully-formed thesis.
  - hvidgaard 6y ago
    It's a mindset, and absolutely not necessary for researchers. If they do not learn that as a part of their PhD, they're not going to learn that with programming.
- 6y ago

Thorrez 6y ago

Haha, I think I know what inspired this post... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24996235

Thorrez 6y ago

The site seems to have been hugged to death, mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20201105071929/theorangeduck.com/page/reproduce-their-results#sourcecode https://web.archive.org/web/20201105071929/theorangeduck.com...

Thorrez 6y ago

Reminds me of this article: > How a hidden coding error fueled a seven-year dispute between two of condensed matter’s top theorists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17819420

greatgib 6y ago

In addition with the title (coming from the site), being a little bit excessive, i have the feeling that the author is too naive. (Willingly or not) The student was deported for cheating an exam. On one way you can consider that he had too much stress, but another way to think is that this foreign student did not have good honesty values from the beginning. And was used to take shortcuts. Looking at the messages from the student blaming the author for the code that he had 'received for free', that he made the code even worse, that he did not understood what the code was supposed to do and also looks like did not audit it prior to usage, that he has 'no time to do it from scratch', makes me think that the student itself is to blame and that, as cheating for the exam, was thinking he could just use/copy the work of someone else and complete is thesis with minimal effort and research work.