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I did this at university. It was our first comp sci class ever, we were given raspberry pi's. We had no coding experience or guidance, and were asked to create

I did this at university. It was our first comp sci class ever, we were given raspberry pi's. We had no coding experience or guidance, and were asked to create "something". All we had to work with was information on how to communicate with the pi using putty. Oddly, this assignment didn't require us to submit code, but simply demonstrate it working. My group (3 of us) bought a moisture sensor to plug into the pi, and had the idea to make a "flood detection system" that would be housed under a bridge, and would send an email to relevant people when the bridge home from work is about to flood. So for our demonstration, we had a guy in the back of the class with gmail open ready to send an email saying some variation of "flood warning". Our script was literally just printing lines with wait statements in between. Running the script, it prints to the screen "awaiting moisture", and after 3 seconds it will print "moisture detected". In that 3 seconds I dip the sensor into the glass of water. Then the script would wait a few more seconds before printing "sending email to xxx@yyy.com". We then opened up our email, our mate at the back of the room hit send, and an email appeared saying flood warning, and we would get full marks.

10u152 3y ago
Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the next room manually driving outputs and inputs to make it seem like it was working. Very common.
- WWLink 3y ago
  the phrase I've heard is "dog and pony show" lol
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Or “Wizard of Oz” — as a standard HCI practice for understanding human experience
  - chasd00 3y ago
    The industry term is “art of the possible”.
- im3w1l 3y ago
  To me it sounds like a useful thing, for communicating your vision and getting early feedback on whether you are building the right thing. Like uh, a live action blueprint. Let's say the client is like "Email???? That's no good. It needs to be a text message". Now you have saved yourself the trouble of implementing email.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    I've done similar things by manually inserting and updating rows in the database etc to "demo" some process. Like you say it can be useful as a way to uncover overall process or UX issues before all the internals are coded. I'm quite open about what I'm doing though, as most of our clients are reasonable.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > To me it sounds like a useful thing To me it sounds like lying... Context matters a ton though. Are you presenting the demo as if the events are being automatically triggered (as in the OP) or are you presenting as this is your plan? Explicitly. If it is implicit, it's deceptive. If you explicitly do not say what parts are faked, it is lying. Of course in a magic show this is totally okay because you're going to the show with the explicit intention to be lied to, but I'm not convinced the same is true for business but I'm sure someone could make a compelling argument.
    - jballer 3y ago
      How about in the original iPhone keynote, when Steve says “this cable is just here for it to work on our projector” - if you follow closely, there was no phone demo’d that day with screen on and no cable. I’m sure the main board was still external.
      - my123 3y ago
        No, the main board wasn't external at that time. The Wallaby were a different design.
    - turquoisevar 3y ago
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I, too, work with industrial control systems. If any of us did that sort of thing, we'd be fired instantly -- and rightfully so.
  - nullc 3y ago
    There would be no problem if you told the client that you were faking the back end behavior and if the client's motivation is that they wanted to see the workflow to make sure that there wasn't a misunderstanding on what you were supposed to be implementing, then a mocked backend would be perfectly fine for their purposes.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Absolutely true. The comment, however, very, very strongly implied that the client wasn't made aware that the demo was faked. If the client was made aware, then why would they have someone hiding in the next room to "make it seem like it was working"?
gardenhedge 3y ago
Is this cheating? It sounds like cheating and reflects quite poorly on you.
- thewakalix 3y ago
  > It was our first comp sci class ever, we were given raspberry pi's. We had no coding experience or guidance, and were asked to create "something". Garbage in, garbage out.
  - addicted 3y ago
    Wow this is such an awful excuse. Here’s a whole list of projects intended for kids. https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-projects-for-kids/ https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-projects-for-kids/ It includes building out a whole weather station which includes a humidity sensor as one of the many things it can do.
    - unionpivo 3y ago
      > Wow this is such an awful excuse. yes for whomever organized such a curse and didn't give such guidance. And besides curse asked for project to do something. It did. It printed lines. We can call the email gimmick, the marketeering strategy, making a turd look good. Don't blame students for failure of whomever designed the curse.
      - addicted 3y ago
        So did they disclose that all the Pi did was printed lines? The problem with the email isn’t it’s a gimmick etc. it’s that it appears quite clear that the students created the impression that it was the Pi doing it. Your excuse that it’s difficult for first year college students with no coding experience to do something useful with the Rapberry Pi is disproven by the fact that there exist many extremely useful projects that kids with no coding experience can do, so college students almost certainly should be able to do without needing to resort to gimmicks. So I don’t understand your complaints about the course. It’s clearly not too hard which is what you’re implying. And if you’re suggesting that the wording for the project wasn’t clear enough then that’s a huge claim to make considering you don’t know what the wording was. Also, college (at least in the U.S.) was never about playing funny word games with the professor. There’s a level of maturity, reasonableness, and respect that is expected of the students. None of which is indicated in the response here.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Learning those fraud skills needed later in the so-called "tech" industry.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
I did this as well. I worked on a localized navigation system back when I was in a school, and unfortunately we broke all available GPS receivers in our hands over the course---that particular model of RS-232 GPS modules was really fragile. As a result we couldn't actually demonstrate a live navigation (and it was incomplete anyway). We proceeded to finish the GUI nevertheless, and then pretended that this is what you see during the navigation, but never actually ran the navigation code. It was an extracurricular activity and didn't affect GPA or anything, for the curious, but I remain kinda uneasy about it.
motbus3 3y ago
Well, you literally had a backend
- masteruvpuppetz 3y ago
  more like backhand lol
- JCharante 3y ago
  do things that don't scale
cipritom 3y ago
Sounds very familiar... UoM, UK ? :)
bonney_io 3y ago
My version of this involved a Wii remote: freshmen-level CompSci class, and the group had to build a simple game in Python to be displayed at a showcase among the class. We wrote a space invaders clone. I found a Bluetooth driver that allowed your Wiimote to connect to your Mac as a game controller, so I set up a basic left/right tilt control using a Wiimote for our space invaders clone. The Wiimote connection was the star of the show by a long shot :P
defaultcompany 3y ago
There’s a story about sales guys at a company (NewTek?) who faked a demo at CES of an Amiga 500 with two monitors showing the “Boing” ball bouncing from one screen to the next. This was insane because the Amiga didn’t have support for multiple monitors in hardware or software so nobody could figure out how they did it. Turns out they had another Amiga hidden behind running the same animation on the second monitor. When they started them at the right offset it looked believable.
meiraleal 3y ago
Are you looking for a job at Google? Don't be evil. They have enough scammers there already, no help needed, including PR at hacker forums

10u152 3y ago

Related, I work with industrial control systems. We’d call this “smoke and mirrors”. Sometimes the client would insist on seeing a small portion of a large project working well before it was ready. They’d misunderstand that 90% of the bulk of the work is not visible to the user but they’d want to see a finished state. We’d set up a dummy HMI and have someone pressing buttons on it for the demo, and someone in the next room manually driving outputs and inputs to make it seem like it was working. Very common.

WWLink 3y ago
the phrase I've heard is "dog and pony show" lol
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Or “Wizard of Oz” — as a standard HCI practice for understanding human experience
- chasd00 3y ago
  The industry term is “art of the possible”.
im3w1l 3y ago
To me it sounds like a useful thing, for communicating your vision and getting early feedback on whether you are building the right thing. Like uh, a live action blueprint. Let's say the client is like "Email???? That's no good. It needs to be a text message". Now you have saved yourself the trouble of implementing email.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  I've done similar things by manually inserting and updating rows in the database etc to "demo" some process. Like you say it can be useful as a way to uncover overall process or UX issues before all the internals are coded. I'm quite open about what I'm doing though, as most of our clients are reasonable.
- godelski 3y ago
  > To me it sounds like a useful thing To me it sounds like lying... Context matters a ton though. Are you presenting the demo as if the events are being automatically triggered (as in the OP) or are you presenting as this is your plan? Explicitly. If it is implicit, it's deceptive. If you explicitly do not say what parts are faked, it is lying. Of course in a magic show this is totally okay because you're going to the show with the explicit intention to be lied to, but I'm not convinced the same is true for business but I'm sure someone could make a compelling argument.
  - jballer 3y ago
    How about in the original iPhone keynote, when Steve says “this cable is just here for it to work on our projector” - if you follow closely, there was no phone demo’d that day with screen on and no cable. I’m sure the main board was still external.
    - my123 3y ago
      No, the main board wasn't external at that time. The Wallaby were a different design.
  - turquoisevar 3y ago
JohnFen 3y ago
I, too, work with industrial control systems. If any of us did that sort of thing, we'd be fired instantly -- and rightfully so.
- nullc 3y ago
  There would be no problem if you told the client that you were faking the back end behavior and if the client's motivation is that they wanted to see the workflow to make sure that there wasn't a misunderstanding on what you were supposed to be implementing, then a mocked backend would be perfectly fine for their purposes.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Absolutely true. The comment, however, very, very strongly implied that the client wasn't made aware that the demo was faked. If the client was made aware, then why would they have someone hiding in the next room to "make it seem like it was working"?

gardenhedge 3y ago

Is this cheating? It sounds like cheating and reflects quite poorly on you.

thewakalix 3y ago
> It was our first comp sci class ever, we were given raspberry pi's. We had no coding experience or guidance, and were asked to create "something". Garbage in, garbage out.
- addicted 3y ago
  Wow this is such an awful excuse. Here’s a whole list of projects intended for kids. https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-projects-for-kids/ https://all3dp.com/2/best-raspberry-pi-projects-for-kids/ It includes building out a whole weather station which includes a humidity sensor as one of the many things it can do.
  - unionpivo 3y ago
    > Wow this is such an awful excuse. yes for whomever organized such a curse and didn't give such guidance. And besides curse asked for project to do something. It did. It printed lines. We can call the email gimmick, the marketeering strategy, making a turd look good. Don't blame students for failure of whomever designed the curse.
    - addicted 3y ago
      So did they disclose that all the Pi did was printed lines? The problem with the email isn’t it’s a gimmick etc. it’s that it appears quite clear that the students created the impression that it was the Pi doing it. Your excuse that it’s difficult for first year college students with no coding experience to do something useful with the Rapberry Pi is disproven by the fact that there exist many extremely useful projects that kids with no coding experience can do, so college students almost certainly should be able to do without needing to resort to gimmicks. So I don’t understand your complaints about the course. It’s clearly not too hard which is what you’re implying. And if you’re suggesting that the wording for the project wasn’t clear enough then that’s a huge claim to make considering you don’t know what the wording was. Also, college (at least in the U.S.) was never about playing funny word games with the professor. There’s a level of maturity, reasonableness, and respect that is expected of the students. None of which is indicated in the response here.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Learning those fraud skills needed later in the so-called "tech" industry.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

I did this as well. I worked on a localized navigation system back when I was in a school, and unfortunately we broke all available GPS receivers in our hands over the course---that particular model of RS-232 GPS modules was really fragile. As a result we couldn't actually demonstrate a live navigation (and it was incomplete anyway). We proceeded to finish the GUI nevertheless, and then pretended that this is what you see during the navigation, but never actually ran the navigation code. It was an extracurricular activity and didn't affect GPA or anything, for the curious, but I remain kinda uneasy about it.

motbus3 3y ago

Well, you literally had a backend

masteruvpuppetz 3y ago
more like backhand lol
JCharante 3y ago
do things that don't scale

cipritom 3y ago

Sounds very familiar... UoM, UK ? :)

bonney_io 3y ago

My version of this involved a Wii remote: freshmen-level CompSci class, and the group had to build a simple game in Python to be displayed at a showcase among the class. We wrote a space invaders clone. I found a Bluetooth driver that allowed your Wiimote to connect to your Mac as a game controller, so I set up a basic left/right tilt control using a Wiimote for our space invaders clone. The Wiimote connection was the star of the show by a long shot :P

defaultcompany 3y ago

There’s a story about sales guys at a company (NewTek?) who faked a demo at CES of an Amiga 500 with two monitors showing the “Boing” ball bouncing from one screen to the next. This was insane because the Amiga didn’t have support for multiple monitors in hardware or software so nobody could figure out how they did it. Turns out they had another Amiga hidden behind running the same animation on the second monitor. When they started them at the right offset it looked believable.

meiraleal 3y ago

Are you looking for a job at Google? Don't be evil. They have enough scammers there already, no help needed, including PR at hacker forums