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Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Your comment basically reads, "I cheated and got away with it, and I'm proud of it too. I'm so awesome! Take that, stupid professor!"

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Finding the exploit and taking advantage of it are different.

"I discovered that if you rip the tags out of a library book, you can just walk out with it and the alarm won't go off!"

For some people, that would be a significant "a-ha!" moment. That doesn't mean they should go around stealing library books.

> "I discovered that if you rip the tags out of a library book, you can just walk out with it and the alarm won't go off!"

I recently went on a tour of my former university's new library building.

One thing that surprised me was that all the upper floors are set about six feet back from the exterior windows ( leaving an internal building-height vertical gap all the way around, so you can look over the railing down to the ground floor ).

When I enquired about this, the response was that it was to prevent the throw-book-out-of-window-and-collect-it-later trick that was apparently common with the old building!

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It hurts, to a small extent, the people who don't cheat. They have six fewer hours to work in, their work gets compared to work which was created under different (easier) conditions. Even if there's no curve, it increases your grade (in expectation), and that higher grade means slightly less (in expectation). It increases what's expected of people next year.

None of this is a large effect when a single person does it, but the same is true of taking notes into exams. Would you do that?

Zooming out slightly: if you think cheating doesn't hurt anyone, why do you think there are rules against it?

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Society isn't a group of people trying to get over on each other, but the small minority who thinks like you have given cause to authoritarians to treat all of us like we are you. It's a real shame you have to destroy to be happy, but at least you're proud of the fact that you want the world to be a shithole. We all need our pride!

Zooming back in, do you disagree with the mechanism I described, by which your cheating hurts people?

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If everyone drives a car, people on average are better off. If everyone cheats, people on average are worse off. That's a very different tradeoff.

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In a ten-player game, (a) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 20 for yourself is one kind of selfish tradeoff; and (b) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 5 for yourself is another kind of selfish tradeoff; and (c) giving one utilon to everyone else while gaining 10 for yourself is also a kind of selfishness.

Cheating is (b), driving is (a). (You seem to be arguing that driving is (b) - I disagree, but it's beside the point.) Capitalism mostly tries to encourage (c). We put some selfishness to work, yes; but we harness the selfishness of Henry Ford, and we punish the selfishness of Bernie Madoff.

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The quantity means that (a) makes the world worse off and (b) makes it better off. That seems like a pretty significant difference to me.

> I never said my actions were capitalistic at all.

I got that impression from one of your deleted comments. Perhaps it wasn't intentional.

> If that makes me into an asshole and the world into a shithole, so be it.

That's not a "so be it" outcome, that's an "oh crap, let's try to avoid that" outcome. As a society, we try to avoid that by punishing (a). You can do your part by not doing (a) even if you think you can get away with it.

It's bedtime, so I'm tapping out now.

Don't hate the programmer, hate the tools. ;)

Or how about: don't hate the tools; hate the cheaters?

~ oh you Sweet summer child.

and what is wrong with that?

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