5 ms·

Business schools redefine hacking to “stuff that a 7-year-old could do” (2005)

82 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

mscarborough 17y ago
Misleading headline, particularly the quotes. In this article no school said any such thing, only the author in creating an analogy. Synopsis: Business schools outsource their student application web app, said web app has bug that allows students to change GET parameters and see their acceptance status early. Exploit is posted to BusinessWeek forums, and at least some of those students who tried the hack were denied admission to Harvard.
- quizbiz 17y ago
  Harvard != MIT
  - scott_s 17y ago
    The students were denied admission to Harvard. MIT came up because the author supervised MIT students creating an application with similar requirements.
  - indiejade 17y ago
    The MS&E program I applied to at Stanford University also routed me through ApplyYourself, which I thought seemed like a really deprecated site. But hey, if it's an MS&E program and a bigwig Uni name, who was I to question? https://app.applyyourself.com/?id=SU-GRAD https://app.applyyourself.com/?id=SU-GRAD All in all, it was an awful, horrible experience (the website application). What a disgrace to supposed prestigious Universities. Not to mention a waste of pompous application fees for many hopefuls.
- omnipresent1 17y ago
  Article definitely did not live up to its title. Author definitely got some eyeballs though....and eyeballs == money?
  - scott_s 17y ago
    The title was misleading, but what he talked about was interesting anyway. In this case, eyeballs don't equal money. This is a Harvard professor's blog with no ads.
    - qohen 17y ago
      Just for the record, Philip Greenspun is many things, but Harvard professor is not among them (he's simply using a blog service run by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, which you can find out about by, as per the article, "hacking" his blog's URL: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ ). Anyway, while not a Harvard professor, "philg" is a very interesting guy who has done a bunch of worthwhile things (e.g. "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", htttp://photo.net, Ars Digita, etc.) that should be of interest to Hacker News readers. He writes well--in books, essays and blog posts--and he writes provocatively, with a mix of snark and self-deprecating humor that many enjoy. In short, he's worth knowing about in my view (and I'm happy to know him). For links to his past and present projects: http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com For background info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun P.S. As many readers here already know, he's also the author of "Greenspun's tenth rule of programming" (which led to the term "Greenspunning"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning
- Goladus 17y ago
  I was not mislead by the headline. It is open to more than one interpretation of course, but it is accurate (and sort of humorous) as written. The whole point of the article is a discussion about the line between "exploit" and "incredibly boneheaded app implementation" and where the responsibility should lie.
mquander 17y ago
Top-tier schools already admit students based on a lot of fairly arbitrary criteria, so it doesn't seem like a very big deal to add "does not tinker with school-related web applications" onto the Harvard list.
- gaius 17y ago
  That is particularly arbitrary considering how many HBS grads were discovered to have been involved in finance scams recently.
Cecil 17y ago
Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=172&tid=146 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=...
edw519 17y ago
"Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house." Wow, that may be the best description of the concerns of the MBA I've ever read. I have my MBA and, to this day, I still don't know how I feel about it. Sure, it covered a lot of valuable theory and it's opened doors, but then again I often wonder if the time would have been better spent in industry, honing my skills in the trenches. The #1 quote I remember from one of my professors, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."
- quizbiz 17y ago
  It seems business is very applicable in the real world, making relationships, making the most of them. Why do more academic courses like Economics or Political Science have such a better reputation?
  - emzo 17y ago
    I have to agree. Even though I don't like to admit it, maybe my time in higher education would have been better spent studying a business related subject. If you're passionate enough about CS/hacking, there's so much info available online these days, you'll learn just as much by immersing yourself in the hacker communities in your own time as you would have studying for a degree.
  - timwiseman 17y ago
    This is a good question. Personally, it seems to me that degrees in business are of a different kind than more academic courses, but not lesser. This difference in kind may explain some of the attitudes that are out there though. MBA's are relatively new in terms of degrees and they are much more applied than most degrees. This is simply different from what other students are working on and people tend to be disdainful of what is different, especially if it is also new. This is just an off the cuff thought, but it seems to fit.
- sbt 17y ago
  Sure. I think it's accepted that you go to business school to network with students with rich parents. A friend of mine applying said that if she didn't get into any of the top 5 programs, it wasn't worth going.
omnipresent1 17y ago
I wonder how ApplyYourself found out which students took a peek? Were they dumb enough not to implement access at the Gatekeeper level but smart enough to some how keep a track, if someone did?
- mquander 17y ago
  It seems probable that they just looked at the BusinessWeek forums on which the exploit was posted, and denied the applicants who they saw discussing it.
  - omnipresent1 17y ago
    If thats the case, its very unreliable. Denying admission based on a post on a forum...gotta love the digital age.
    - mquander 17y ago
      In an age when many employers seem happy to deny employment based on social networking profile posts and pictures, I suggest that it might teach them an important lesson about the presence of foolish people in positions of power.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Keeping track of what URLs people are hitting is trivial on any application server.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    That presupposes not just that ApplyYourself is in any way competent (evidence points to dubious), but that they are at all communicative with the admissions grunts.
zain 17y ago
Note, this article is from March 2005.
keefe 17y ago
title = troll, rtfa
tezza 17y ago
Hacking :: stuff that a 7-year-old could do Wow, Python makes it that easy! ( just a quick laugh )
dschobel 17y ago
Odd choice for the headline. I think the much more choice quote from Greenspun is this: All the smart young Americans have gone to law, business, and medical school. Companies don’t like to hire old people (> 30 years) to write computer programs because it saddens them to see old folks doing something so degrading. (he's attributing this mentality to the HBS lot) I'm seeing this a lot now that I've gotten into development in the financial industry. I think for some people developers will always be inseparably tied to the stereotypical unkempt and petulant tech-support guy who troubleshoots Windows boxes all day. It's not a particularly well-respected profession unless you're doing the start-up thing in which case you're only respected because of the business aspect (and your potential to become a millionaire by 30), not the cool/hard things you may doing on the technology side.
notirk 17y ago
I'm guessing this bug was fixed, but I applied to b-school this summer (starting part-time in the fall) and ApplyYourself was used for a few of the schools I applied to (NYU Stern, Fordham, NYU-Poly). From a front end/end user interaction point of view, it did not strike me as a well made system. I'm more an IT guy and not a programmer but I know a shoddy website when I use one. I applied to multiple programs at one school and the information could not be shared, it actually lost one of my applications at one point.
pguerin 17y ago
hahaha this reminds me of a discussion I just had today with a student at the business school of my university. He was pissed off at the "IT people" because they know nothing about management and never finishes on time their projects. The way he talked to me was as if it was all our fault and that we were simply lazy. He was agressive to me even if he never worked with me and told me to check the "new york" methodology and the "ITIL" best practices for doing IT services. I haven't found them on google, does someone know anything about that? It's great to live in a world where management loves and respect us! A world where they try to understand what is hard about software development instead of thinking about how much time it takes to "place a button there" :)
- gaius 17y ago
  He's upset that they don't know about his specialist subject, yet is completely ignorant about theirs. And I bet he doesn't get why none of his employees respect him either.
- whatusername 17y ago
  ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure. So standard in fact that http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil maybe returns 1 result that isn't about ITIL in the top 50. If you can't google for something as basic as that - then maybe the bus. guy was right about you being lazy.
  - qohen 17y ago
    FWIW, Google.com has the Wikipedia link up top: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastr... Though it is interesting to see that ITIL originated in the UK, which might explain why not everyone has heard of it. BTW, here's an article from '05 describing ITIL use in the US (and ITIL's history): http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/95672 http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/95672
    - daleharvey 17y ago
nopal 17y ago
As progressively dumber programmers build progressively more complex systems we will see more of this kind of attempt to paper over coding mistakes with lawyers, sanctions, policies, and laws. How very true.
- asciilifeform 17y ago
  And this would have been the submission title, too, if it weren't for the nonsensical 80-character limit.
aptimpropriety 17y ago
One of the more interesting parts of the college application process (there weren't many) was comparing the websites of top-tier schools. Echoing what the writer said - it's amazing how poor the structure, workflow, security and general design the web systems of these schools with $X-billion endowment are. MIT stood out as an exception; the rest I dealt with were par at best. Fast forward two years - I now attend an ivy league school with what I would consider a laughable website and data storage system. "You must close your browser to log out of the system" - I don't even have to probe to know it's bad.
lallysingh 17y ago
Huh, if they were disqualifying students for modifying URLs, I wonder how hard it'd be to scan the results for all students applying.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
buugs 17y ago
I thought the fandango thing was pretty much fair game as that is one of the first thing people learn, or should learn, about web scripting is what can be controlled by the browser versus controlled by the server. And in a perfect world the programmer would have made up the price lost not the theatre nor fandango.

82 points by asciilifeform 17y ago

Misleading headline, particularly the quotes. In this article no school said any such thing, only the author in creating an analogy. Synopsis: Business schools outsource their student application web app, said web app has bug that allows students to change GET parameters and see their acceptance status early. Exploit is posted to BusinessWeek forums, and at least some of those students who tried the hack were denied admission to Harvard.

quizbiz 17y ago
Harvard != MIT
- scott_s 17y ago
  The students were denied admission to Harvard. MIT came up because the author supervised MIT students creating an application with similar requirements.
- indiejade 17y ago
  The MS&E program I applied to at Stanford University also routed me through ApplyYourself, which I thought seemed like a really deprecated site. But hey, if it's an MS&E program and a bigwig Uni name, who was I to question? https://app.applyyourself.com/?id=SU-GRAD https://app.applyyourself.com/?id=SU-GRAD All in all, it was an awful, horrible experience (the website application). What a disgrace to supposed prestigious Universities. Not to mention a waste of pompous application fees for many hopefuls.
omnipresent1 17y ago
Article definitely did not live up to its title. Author definitely got some eyeballs though....and eyeballs == money?
- scott_s 17y ago
  The title was misleading, but what he talked about was interesting anyway. In this case, eyeballs don't equal money. This is a Harvard professor's blog with no ads.
  - qohen 17y ago
    Just for the record, Philip Greenspun is many things, but Harvard professor is not among them (he's simply using a blog service run by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, which you can find out about by, as per the article, "hacking" his blog's URL: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ ). Anyway, while not a Harvard professor, "philg" is a very interesting guy who has done a bunch of worthwhile things (e.g. "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", htttp://photo.net, Ars Digita, etc.) that should be of interest to Hacker News readers. He writes well--in books, essays and blog posts--and he writes provocatively, with a mix of snark and self-deprecating humor that many enjoy. In short, he's worth knowing about in my view (and I'm happy to know him). For links to his past and present projects: http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com For background info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun P.S. As many readers here already know, he's also the author of "Greenspun's tenth rule of programming" (which led to the term "Greenspunning"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspunning
Goladus 17y ago
I was not mislead by the headline. It is open to more than one interpretation of course, but it is accurate (and sort of humorous) as written. The whole point of the article is a discussion about the line between "exploit" and "incredibly boneheaded app implementation" and where the responsibility should lie.

mquander 17y ago

Top-tier schools already admit students based on a lot of fairly arbitrary criteria, so it doesn't seem like a very big deal to add "does not tinker with school-related web applications" onto the Harvard list.

gaius 17y ago
That is particularly arbitrary considering how many HBS grads were discovered to have been involved in finance scams recently.

Cecil 17y ago

Slashdot thread: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=172&tid=146 http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/2341213&tid=...

edw519 17y ago

"Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house." Wow, that may be the best description of the concerns of the MBA I've ever read. I have my MBA and, to this day, I still don't know how I feel about it. Sure, it covered a lot of valuable theory and it's opened doors, but then again I often wonder if the time would have been better spent in industry, honing my skills in the trenches. The #1 quote I remember from one of my professors, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

quizbiz 17y ago
It seems business is very applicable in the real world, making relationships, making the most of them. Why do more academic courses like Economics or Political Science have such a better reputation?
- emzo 17y ago
  I have to agree. Even though I don't like to admit it, maybe my time in higher education would have been better spent studying a business related subject. If you're passionate enough about CS/hacking, there's so much info available online these days, you'll learn just as much by immersing yourself in the hacker communities in your own time as you would have studying for a degree.
- timwiseman 17y ago
  This is a good question. Personally, it seems to me that degrees in business are of a different kind than more academic courses, but not lesser. This difference in kind may explain some of the attitudes that are out there though. MBA's are relatively new in terms of degrees and they are much more applied than most degrees. This is simply different from what other students are working on and people tend to be disdainful of what is different, especially if it is also new. This is just an off the cuff thought, but it seems to fit.
sbt 17y ago
Sure. I think it's accepted that you go to business school to network with students with rich parents. A friend of mine applying said that if she didn't get into any of the top 5 programs, it wasn't worth going.

omnipresent1 17y ago

I wonder how ApplyYourself found out which students took a peek? Were they dumb enough not to implement access at the Gatekeeper level but smart enough to some how keep a track, if someone did?

mquander 17y ago
It seems probable that they just looked at the BusinessWeek forums on which the exploit was posted, and denied the applicants who they saw discussing it.
- omnipresent1 17y ago
  If thats the case, its very unreliable. Denying admission based on a post on a forum...gotta love the digital age.
  - mquander 17y ago
    In an age when many employers seem happy to deny employment based on social networking profile posts and pictures, I suggest that it might teach them an important lesson about the presence of foolish people in positions of power.
tptacek 17y ago
Keeping track of what URLs people are hitting is trivial on any application server.
- blasdel 17y ago
  That presupposes not just that ApplyYourself is in any way competent (evidence points to dubious), but that they are at all communicative with the admissions grunts.

zain 17y ago

Note, this article is from March 2005.

keefe 17y ago

title = troll, rtfa

tezza 17y ago

Hacking :: stuff that a 7-year-old could do Wow, Python makes it that easy! ( just a quick laugh )

dschobel 17y ago

Odd choice for the headline. I think the much more choice quote from Greenspun is this: All the smart young Americans have gone to law, business, and medical school. Companies don’t like to hire old people (> 30 years) to write computer programs because it saddens them to see old folks doing something so degrading. (he's attributing this mentality to the HBS lot) I'm seeing this a lot now that I've gotten into development in the financial industry. I think for some people developers will always be inseparably tied to the stereotypical unkempt and petulant tech-support guy who troubleshoots Windows boxes all day. It's not a particularly well-respected profession unless you're doing the start-up thing in which case you're only respected because of the business aspect (and your potential to become a millionaire by 30), not the cool/hard things you may doing on the technology side.

notirk 17y ago

I'm guessing this bug was fixed, but I applied to b-school this summer (starting part-time in the fall) and ApplyYourself was used for a few of the schools I applied to (NYU Stern, Fordham, NYU-Poly). From a front end/end user interaction point of view, it did not strike me as a well made system. I'm more an IT guy and not a programmer but I know a shoddy website when I use one. I applied to multiple programs at one school and the information could not be shared, it actually lost one of my applications at one point.

pguerin 17y ago

hahaha this reminds me of a discussion I just had today with a student at the business school of my university. He was pissed off at the "IT people" because they know nothing about management and never finishes on time their projects. The way he talked to me was as if it was all our fault and that we were simply lazy. He was agressive to me even if he never worked with me and told me to check the "new york" methodology and the "ITIL" best practices for doing IT services. I haven't found them on google, does someone know anything about that? It's great to live in a world where management loves and respect us! A world where they try to understand what is hard about software development instead of thinking about how much time it takes to "place a button there" :)

gaius 17y ago
He's upset that they don't know about his specialist subject, yet is completely ignorant about theirs. And I bet he doesn't get why none of his employees respect him either.
whatusername 17y ago
ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure. So standard in fact that http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil http://www.google.com.au/search?q=itil maybe returns 1 result that isn't about ITIL in the top 50. If you can't google for something as basic as that - then maybe the bus. guy was right about you being lazy.
- qohen 17y ago
  FWIW, Google.com has the Wikipedia link up top: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastr... Though it is interesting to see that ITIL originated in the UK, which might explain why not everyone has heard of it. BTW, here's an article from '05 describing ITIL use in the US (and ITIL's history): http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/95672 http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/95672
  - daleharvey 17y ago

nopal 17y ago

As progressively dumber programmers build progressively more complex systems we will see more of this kind of attempt to paper over coding mistakes with lawyers, sanctions, policies, and laws. How very true.

asciilifeform 17y ago
And this would have been the submission title, too, if it weren't for the nonsensical 80-character limit.

aptimpropriety 17y ago

One of the more interesting parts of the college application process (there weren't many) was comparing the websites of top-tier schools. Echoing what the writer said - it's amazing how poor the structure, workflow, security and general design the web systems of these schools with $X-billion endowment are. MIT stood out as an exception; the rest I dealt with were par at best. Fast forward two years - I now attend an ivy league school with what I would consider a laughable website and data storage system. "You must close your browser to log out of the system" - I don't even have to probe to know it's bad.

lallysingh 17y ago

Huh, if they were disqualifying students for modifying URLs, I wonder how hard it'd be to scan the results for all students applying.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

buugs 17y ago

I thought the fandango thing was pretty much fair game as that is one of the first thing people learn, or should learn, about web scripting is what can be controlled by the browser versus controlled by the server. And in a perfect world the programmer would have made up the price lost not the theatre nor fandango.