The Website That Got Me Expelled
codeword.xyz
codeword.xyz
Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point, some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.
It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-cons into society.
I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...
I'm not sure that this can truly be qualified. The statement that their job entails a stressful situation, does not (inherently) excuse them from inviting it. This is the same argument used by or on behalf of police officers who abuse their post(i.e. He had a hell of a day, witnessed two murders, so it's understandable that he just shot a minor suspect for fleeing). One might forget that they don't need to be a police officer or school teacher, that they made a free and conscious decision to be one and feel no shame for failing at it.
The problem is that individual teachers do not, on their own, have as much ability to make the situation a good one; it takes an effort from the entire system(from other teachers to headteachers to parents to politicians) to change the day-to-day reality, and so it seems as though the situation is "out of our hands".
Shooting a human is a mistake orders of magnitude beyond what I'm talking about. And in this story, it's inexcusable that some of the teachers and the principle were able to de-empathize with the author so much, due to their bruised egos and sense of authority, that they put on a prolonged Draconian push to expel the author. Reminds me of MIT and Aaron Schwartz.
That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.
I went to a Catholic school with a noted hockey program where I was required to recite Jesus' family tree from Abraham through his parents and, in biology, had to remember to mention that evolution was more likely than creation, but God still started evolution (to this day, the words 'alpha and omega' hurt). Personally, I would have welcomed expulsion as between the hockey love and the jesus love, I was not exactly enamoured with the state of my education.
Unfortunately, this didn't happen to you or me. It happened to someone who experienced a massive amount of stress as a result. And over what?? Some dipshit adults who decided to squander a learning opportunity in the name of showing how tough they were??
Matter of fact, my little brother who also went through an expulsion has still not quite recovered. The school suspended him for months in middle school, and I think it has impaired his ability to function as a student. When we tried getting him into the German school system again, he failed his reentry exam out of anxiety (he most likely knew the answers, he just filled in nothing), and another year of schooling at a lower tiered school because he couldn't bring himself to fill in exams for the first half of the school year.
So I certainly would not discount the impact an expulsion can have on a student, and I think that school administrators should not use it lightly. It could work out just fine, or utterly demoralize a student that most likely is already marginalized.
But for my brother, it's a little different. He was kicked out of a public school for altercations with another student, and I would say that the situation was not handled in a fair manner. The school claimed that the reason for the suspension was that the other parents didn't feel safe sending their children to the school anymore, which was bogus since my mother actually went and personally called every single parent in the grade. None of them had any concerns over the incident. I'm suspecting that the school was simply overly cautious since about 20 years ago one student (one of the pastors children) murdered another student by stabbing him on a staircase inside of the school building. Whilst I don't fault the school administration for overreacting and deciding to deal with the problem through sweeping it under the rug, I do think the issue could have been handled more gracefully than sending a 12 year old for police questioning AND a psychologist.
Also I was not making a point about whether my or my brothers expulsion was justified, I was commenting about the effects of expulsion, and how variable they can be depending on the student and their upbringing.
I believe that public school systems should act as an equalizer against how you're raised at home instead of compounding these problems.
That's a commonly held belief, and I think it's a lot to put on the public school system. As a teacher, when I wasn't busy, you know, instructing, I was a mental health first responder, surrogate parent, law enforcer, stenographer, and so forth. I agree that, in general, social services should provide a baseline so that every child has a shot, regardless of what life situation they happen to be born into. I'm just not sure it's fair for that to fall so heavily on the schools.
In practice, this is exactly what seems to happen. And I think this over-reliance is a big part of what brings down low income schools. Even within inner cities, there's effect where the most prominent and successful schools tend to scoop up the kids with the greatest relative advantage and the most challenging students are pushed down to progressively more impoverished schools. We end up with multiple layers of elective and systemic segregation. As Paul Tough put it [1], there are big distinctions within poverty, with those who are the very worst off -- in "deep poverty" in Tough's terminology -- often being the people least effectively served.
The neighborhood schools often serve as social glue within their communities, but they're measured academically against schools in more affluent communities that have the privilege of being focused much so on being good educational centers. When these neighborhood schools are labeled as "failing" for academic underperformance, they're closed down and it can be a very traumatic local event.
Now I'm not saying that schools that aren't educating effectively shouldn't be reformed, or sometimes shutdown. I'm just pointing out that the reality of the role they serve and all they're doing isn't typically acknowledged or supported.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/magazine/obama-poverty.htm...
Measuring difference in student performance between two points in time would provide a better heuristic, and even using that as a measure for funding is silly as it creates a feedback loop. I'd rather see this data being used to identify and study top performing schools and the findings being applied to schools performing in the bottom percentile.
But then this entire problem hinges on how we as a society want public schools to work. Do we want them to act as an equalizer in the sake of social stability and mobility, or do we want them to amplify existing situations so that our top performers perform even better?
Whilst there is obviously already a deep relationship between teachers and their students, another method for taking weight off their backs in the regard of being mental health first responders could be having mental health responders on site, whether that be social workers or child psychologists which is how things are handled in Germany. At my previous school we had a psychologist that was shared across different schools in the area, who would be open to talk about any mental health issues a student might have.
Now in Germany we also have a 3 tiered system, where the lowest performing students go to a "Hauptschule", which focuses on putting students into trades, a "Realschule" which opens up moving into either higher reaches of the trades or moving into a "Gymnasiale Oberstufe", which is the conclusion of the "Gymnasium" that focuses on funneling students into universities to pursue further eduction.
Whilst this tiered system has its issues despite possibility to move into higher tiers later in your educational life, it also allows for dividing up certain problems. Students from a "Gymnasium" are usually assumed to come from a stable background, which means less social workers and stronger focus on academics, whilst students from a "Hauptschule" are usually offered more guidance in exchange for a less strict and more practice oriented scientific curricullum.
I think it was the right call though, it was the wrong place for me. Much MUN and Community Service, but the CS classes weren't strong, and that was the only technical class offered. I went on to go to an ITG, which is short for "InformationsTechnisches Gymnasium" which is a highschool with a curriculum centered around stuff like OO and microcontrollers and UML diagrams.
That being said, I heartily do not recommend expulsion as a rite of passage for high school students. I’m fairly certain the extreme levels of stress and anxiety I experienced shaved a few years off my life.
I'd argue that your son is lucky to have you - you sound like the kind of parent who not only weathered the storm, but turned it into the best possible experience. If I'm ever in your shoes, I hope that my child comes out the other side looking as good as your son did!
Great work.
This felt like a complete non-sequitur. You were talking about education, and suddenly you switch to employment? The purpose of an education is not to serve a boss.
These days, in this capitalist world, most of us do have to subject themselves to the will of an employer or another. So we do have to look good to them. Education as I understand it is supposed to help us out of this servitude, so we can be emancipated citizens and responsible adults.
Remember, an employee is not free. Better off than a slave or a serf, but still not independent.
Free from what? I can choose to quit whenever I want.
You are speaking from a pretty privileged background pretending that employees don't have freedom.
Freedom doesn't mean you should be able to do whatever you want and have society be forced to support you in doing so.
An independent contractor will still need to work to survive. But at least she's free from any boss… if she's really independent —that is, she can afford to turn down contracts.
Pensioners, or otherwise "financially independent" people are even free from lucrative work. They don't need to work for their continued survival. They can instead like look over their grandchildren or do some community work.
I'm sure there are higher attainable degrees of freedom yet. But let's work on the worst problems first. We more or less solved slavery and serfdom. Now there is employment. Next will be the need to survive. Next… I don't know, physical limitations?
It doesn't take much for a regular person to start a business. If they provide a good the population likes at a reasonable price, they will succeed.
> It doesn't take much for a regular person to start a business.
Generally in the order of 50.000€ for your average starting business —even a simple bakery. Not the end of the world for a Bay Area software engineer. A moonshot for minimum wage workers.
Sure, you could ask for a loan. But if you're poor, you will likely not get it.
Compared to those thing, the typical web startup we see in the Bay area innovates little and disrupts nothing. They're just facilitators and middle men. The likes of DropBox, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, even Facebook… none are needed. They only compensate for our asymmetric bandwidth, without solving the real problem.
If you want real innovation, you need to finance fundamental research. You know, things that have no short term benefits, uncertain long term benefits, and uncertain monetisability.
In any case, the US is one of the most militaristic countries out there. It wages war all over the place for oil, and develops nice military devices to secure its supremacy. That's a pretty good drive for technical innovation.
Innovation and invention aren't the same thing. The invention of a technology is only a small component of its success. Combining it with other components to fulfill a good usecase is what makes it something useful. Google is the main player making self driving cars actually something useful,not DARPA funding.
You can continue to be apologetic for other countries being so far behind in tech innovation, but it doesn't change the point that it's happening in the US even though some ignorant commenter thinks the education system gets rid of innovation.
I agree.
I want to stress however that there are many factors that drive innovation. The military setup is one. The economic system is another. Education is yet another. The mass media have substantial influence. Even if it sucks on some fronts, it may be compensated elsewhere.
Simply put, even if our economic system and our education system thwarts innovation, that's not enough to kill it.
Lucky you. Many people don't have that privilege. Some don't have any saving, so switching employers isn't an option. Even in a country with good unemployment insurance, you are generally denied the benefits if you just quit —you have to be fired.
And of course, there are some horrible places where there is only one employer, and your only choice is to work for him (sometimes risking your life or health in the process), or starve.
> You are speaking from a pretty privileged background
May I ask what do you think that background may be?
Being free isn't having someone feed you grapes with a silver spoon while you ponder on which industry you would like to support with your intellectual prowess.
When I say "no savings", I do mean zero. Nothing. Like "I can't buy food this week" nothing.
Then there's social pressure. Why quit your job in these times of mass unemployment? That would be crazy. Even prospective employers will not see that with a good eye: in white collar jobs, you can always say "it was time for me to go", or high-status non-explanations like that. But picture a cashier looking for a cashier job. The employer will want a real reason, and you'd better forge one that doesn't look too bad. (Disparaging the previous employer looks bad, mentioning material constraints often looks bad… following your spouse might not.)
The crime was serious, but not expulsion serious. But authoritive figures often overreact when their very governance is questioned. Which, like the author, is a lesson I've had to learn the hard way (albeit I never landed myself in quiet as serious trouble as the aforementioned)
What crime!
"The crime"? Did we read the same article? What crime was committed? Making a low-tech version of ratemypreofessors.com?
As far as not getting the whole picture, I shared everything I could to the best of my recollection. I also had one of the friends who was involved go over it and it was his opinion that I have left nothing salient out as well. It did all happen close to 20 years ago, however, so it's entirely possible that we've forgotten something significant.
What free-speech rights did Canadian students have then?
Do they have more rights now, or less?
Teachers are "public figures", right? Or is Canadian libel law more like English than American?
In any case, I do not think that taking a personal offence is at all an appropriate reaction to someone merely facilitating an anonymous survey.
It's for that reason I think authority should be used as an organizational tool of last resort. Sadly it is the first thing many people reach for when they have a problem to solve.
I'd also direct you to some of the discussions of the subversive hierarchies that evolved under the surface of 2nd wave femenist, supposedly flat, groups.
Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what kids have for lunch around the world.
Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter? This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of course that request was denied.
To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject they're teaching?
Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too. "You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"
There's an inherent barrier to entry that makes drunk biking difficult enough to limit those who can actually do it. Like how often do you see someone drunk on a road bike with clips? How many drunk people bike on busy roads where they're more likely to get killed than the guy in an air conditioned hunk of metal on wheels?
A reasonable person's analysis might conclude that it's better to say, "hey, let's bike to the bar" that's 4 miles away rather than "let's drive," because statistically you're as/more likely to fall down and injure yourself as if you'd walked, and will harm society much less than if you'd decided to pilot a machine that requires a fraction of the bodily coordination to get from A to B.
My girlfriend was injured a couple years ago when she was cut off recklessly by another student, also on a bicycle, and swerved to avoid him. End result was she wound up hitting loose gravel in a construction area, lost control, and ended up face-first into the pavement.
At university, I had a few near misses myself (as a pedestrian). I'd often park in one of the more distant lots and walk to class (one for the exercise, and two because it was nearly a two hour drive--I needed a stretch!), and the central thoroughfare was a wide, cement walkway that was mostly downhill. Most of the cyclists were cautious and traveled slowly, but there were always those (thankfully) few clowns who would race as fast as they could. I'm not sure if they were making a game of us as moving obstacles; regardless, I always kept an ear out behind me and kept far, far, far to the side near the grass!
I'm not advocating RUI but I do not think it should be classified, legally or ethically, as a DUI. Neither is good but there's a huge difference in actual danger between the two. It's along the same lines as "public urination," which is distasteful but usually harmless in context, landing someone on the sex offender registry next to people who did much, much worse things.
> You are being punished because you could have done something wrong, not because you did something wrong.
No, with drunk driving, getting behind the wheel IS wrong, regardless of the outcome. If someone plays Russian roulette, and they live, do you just go, "oh, no big deal, I'm not going to be upset about something that could have happened"? No, you judge every decision based not in hindsight, but based on what is known at the time. Driving while impaired is wrong, full stop. If you repeat the drunk driving experiment 100s of times, you'll see accidents more often than sober driving, but you shouldn't just punish those who get into the accidents, since they've made the exact same decision as those who are lucky and happened not to.
In the "loading the web page" case, it's like getting made at someone for pulling the trigger of a known empty gun because it "could have" instead been a gun that had bullets in it. If the kid loads the webpage 100s of times it will always be the same web page, with no issue. It's not like sometimes it will be a page with a virus on it. So in that case getting in trouble for "what you could have done" doesn't make any sense.
IOW, you shouldn't punish people based on "what they could have done", but you should punish people based on "what could have happened".
http://illinoiscaselaw.com/dui-sleeping-in-car-illinois/ but you can find more. Whats unfortunate is people are TRYING to be responsible and still get in trouble.
I remember once in "technology" class where we were asked to compose a small document with Corel WordPerfect, with a clip art. Well, I mistook "graph" for clip art, and got a weird square where I should have had a pretty icon. And I didn't know how to remove the square (couldn't select it with the mouse, and I didn't think of trying backspace or undo at that time). So I asked for help.
The instant the teacher saw my document, she said "Ahh, he crashed my computer!", then promptly closed the document without saving it. (15 minutes of work, dammit!)
Simply put, she didn't have the slightest idea about what went wrong, and assumed the worst. I flipped the bozo bit at that point, and never trusted her again.
But I wanted to ask you about your use of the term "flipping the bozo bit". I've seen others use that as a derisive way towards people they think less of, but curiously the source of this expression is prescribing precisely NOT doing this behaviour:
> McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit
More generally, though, it was one of those unmistakable proofs that authority isn't always legitimate. This happened often enough that I now decide for myself who has authority over me.
Well, most of society seems perfectly fine with owning and using restricted "jailed" devices, whose existence is justified by the same reasoning...
I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a sort of fuck you.
However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone.
I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher impersonating a student.
My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received.
My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened, when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.
I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out myself.
Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they wouldn't let me go to college.
That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have stopped me.
The killer feature was actually a forum where we could talk bad about teachers using pseudonyms. A lot of them deserved it too. Nothing made me happier than seeing how much everyone hated Mr. Peterson, the teacher somehow put in charge of the students who had skipped two years of math.
The administration threatened to write to the colleges I'd already been accepted to and try to get those offers withdrawn, but as far as I know that was just a threat.
The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days.
If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.
Ended up leaving the updated source on the machines one day before I left the school for high school. Quite fun days, indeed.
We used a piece of software to lock down the PCs, IIRC, called Fool Proof. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be ironic, because it didn't take long to figure out that it kept the clear text admin password in swap. The machines didn't have BIOS passwords, so it was pretty easy to boot into a hex editor and dig it out.
When my teacher found out I did this, he praised my ingenuity and even got me involved in vetting alternative options, despite the fact that I had been handing the password around to friends like candy.
This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences.
(Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)
This being one of those cases.
There's a JS-based fade-in on page load (or at least there was; the author mentioned that it'd be changed at some point) that doesn't bother to have a fallback. And as such there's a CSS rule that sets the post opacity to zero (making it unreadable).
There are many many many websites that don't work without JS that work if you disable both JS and CSS. This being one of them.
That being said, even other than that there are a number of things I don't like about the website. All personal preference, however. (Namely: 85-85-85 font on 255-255-255 background isn't the best, contrast-wise (I have a laptop and am often outside - readability trumps fashion for me); I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; Continuing on the trend of "why do you put so little on the screen", I find the paragraph separation also overkill (1 line between paragraphs or equivalent is fine, and maybe two between sections)))
The line length (measure) on that page is about 60 ems. This is much longer than the optimal value for readability, which is 30 - 40 ems.
> Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7;
As the measure increases, leading (line height) must also increase for legibility, because it's harder to track longer lines with the eye when 'returning' to the start of the next line.
A leading of 1.7 ems doesn't seem unreasonable to me for such a long measure.
For me, type on the web is a lot better than it used to be: tiny type on ridiculously long lines. There are some holdouts though; Hacker News for example.
I just wish that HTML had a sane way to allow client-side preferences (Like, say, line height and width) to be expressed.
When I click a link and see no content, most often I close the tab and forget about it. Is it really that hard to display simple content without JS nowadays?
It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?
As such, when the only reason that a site requires JS to be readable is sloppy coding, yes, I call them out on it.
I enable JS only for things that require it for a good reason, and where I am reasonably sure that they won't be exploited. Doing a fancy fade-in on load (which, by the way, can easily be done accessibly) is not a good reason, and I am not reasonably sure that some random blog won't be exploited.
Yes.
It's sad that Chromium doesn't have a way to disable CSS on a per-domain basis (and browser extensions are potential backdoors so I'm not going to install them).
...
That gives you 16 years to learn how to make a simple, efficient, portable web page.
Yes, I expect to be able to read data without having to execute code.
And, FWIW, the Internet was pretty great in 1999. In many ways (but not all, of course) it was better than what we're stuck with now.
Why would anyone use JS in this case?
Just imagine you're going to the newsstand to buy a newspaper, and instead you get a package containing blank sheets of paper, a microfilm scanner and a roll of microfilm, with instructions telling you to go home, scan the film and print the content yourself. You'd be on fire. You'd write to the publisher, asking them what the fuck they're doing. Even ignoring the additional time and money you'll have to spend printing the newsppaper yourself, it surely must be cheaper to print it all with industrial machines than making an equal amounts of goddamn microfilm and scanners for it! Economies of scale and stuff.
And yet this is normal on the web. Prepping content for client-side JS generation takes similar amounts of time (if not more) to just rendering the page on server. And then they have to send a) the content, and b) JS to render it, which takes more space than a rendered page, and then every client has to render it on its own. They're wasting electricity on every goddamn step of the pipeline, from servers through the network to the client. It's like electricity is free so they can all show everyone a giant fuck you, because hey, if it's free then let's waste it all.
Ok, I got carried away. But my point still stands. Dear JS-first website maker - I'm not willing to view your ads until you start covering my electricity bills for all the coal that got wasted on your idiotic client-side-rendering contraptions.
And with modern tools, there's no reason that anything — even a highly interactive app — couldn't be prerendered on the server.
I'm with you 100 percent when it comes to "I can't read this text document because it needs 45 JS libraries to render," that's stupid. But it's probably stupid because it's over-engineered, not because it uses the browser.
I feel like this is going to become a bigger and bigger debate in the coming years, and I'm eager to be proven wrong, or at least understand the other side. But if I'm building the next great web-based spreadsheets application (I'm not), my immediate and overwhelming success is going to be WAY easier to manage if the majority of my code is being executed on the millions of computers calling in to use it, not on the three servers running in my auto scaling group. Why WOULDN'T I pick that option?
There was a giant multinational hamburger chain where some bright MBA figured out that eliminating just three sesame seeds from a sesame-seed bun would be completely unnoticeable by anyone yet would save the company $126,000 per year. So they do it, and time passes, and another bushy-tailed MBA comes along, and does another study, and concludes that removing another five sesame seeds wouldn't hurt either, and would save even more money, and so on and so forth, every year or two, the new management trainee looking for ways to save money proposes removing a sesame seed or two, until eventually, they're shipping hamburger buns with exactly three sesame seeds artfully arranged in a triangle, and nobody buys their hamburgers any more.
I don't think it's analogous to a developer taking advantage of modern consumer hardware to do the work computers were designed to do, because it's not necessarily a worse product you're delivering. If your internet connection is spotty, it's likely a better experience in some ways. It just seems like people have these brilliant machines capable of executing all of this code (more or less) out of the box, but we're treating them as thin clients because... why? Because some people won't upgrade their OS/browser? Because the method of delivery is the same one that's used to inject banner ads and flashy video ad thingies? If that's the case, then it seems like the whole "server-side rendering" option is getting to sound pretty good for advertising, too. Then where are we?
In {the burger case}, {removing sesame seeds} is an act that makes {the product} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.
And in {this case}, {punting things from server-side to client-side} is an act that makes {power usage, wear and tear, security, battery life, bandwidth use} objectively worse, just in a way that will hopefully not make it worse enough to affect demand.
* Security: Yes, there's not too much argument that can be made for unquestioningly allowing arbitrary code execution on your computer. I think part of this will improve with browser enhancements, so long as they go more in the direction of sandboxing than in the direction of "Hey let's give Chrome access to everything in your computer right?!" Doing important stuff server-side is probably safer for users. That said, I'm bad at security. I just don't know enough about it, so I can't put up much of a fight.
* Bandwidth use: I'd actually be really interested to see some research on this. Needing to download a different version of jQuery/AngularJS/Backbone for every website you visit is certainly not particularly efficient, but I wonder how long you need to be on a website before they've sent you more HTML data than you would have had to deal with pulling down the Javascript and just pushing JSON data into it. For the mobile web at least, you win.
* Regarding power usage and wear and tear, I don't consider it a crime to make a computer do computing, which may be our main point of disagreement. If I've got a 2+ gHz processor and a few gigs of RAM, what else am I going to be using it for? Almost all of my apps are web-based, and I'd rather hear my fan rev up a little bit while Firefox renders a big graph instead of waiting for a server to generate a picture of one and just send it to me.
You are not me. (Not to mention I am not against doing most things client-side. I am specificially against Turing-complete languages being required on the client side. Things like charts are fine.)
I do not see why things should be done multiple times when they can be done once. You're offloading visible costs to places where they are hidden and then calling it gone.
I was talking to a young person that sometimes buys her mobile data plan in 20MB prepaid chunks, complaining how fast Facebook eats through that data.
Now I don't have Facebook (or a data plan, my ISP has "hotspots" all over town), I was curious and asked her how much Facebook does 20MB buy you, anyway?
She said sometimes when she does a full reload of the page it costs 3-4MB. I told her, did you know that's enough data to fit the entire LotR trilogy, or the bible? (either of them are about 3-5MB, zipped plaintext).
I agree that the things you say could potentially save a lot of bandwidth, but the reality is, in practice they really really do not, not by far :-)
For one reason, because that one computer can usually do it (or at least most of it) once, and instead you're forcing millions of people to redo the same computation themselves. That's just... wrong.
> But if I'm building the next great web-based spreadsheets application (...) Why WOULDN'T I pick that option?
Well, in this case this is the right way, because you need to dynamically interact with data entered by the user (in this case, people usually make another error - they send data to server that there is no need for; but that's another topic. [0]). You're writing a web application. But a web site, like landing pages, blogs with articles, etc. have exactly zero reasonable needs for rendering everything client-side. It's just making the same compute millions of times because someone was too lazy to compute it once.
[0] - actually, it's not. One could notice that most of the problems with current web come from two things: sending the code that should stay on the server to the client, and sending data that should stay with the client to a server.
I was more disagreeing with the concluding assertion that "with modern tools, there's no reason that anything — even a highly interactive app — couldn't be prerendered on the server." There's no reason it couldn't be, sure, but it's way harder when the clients are just as capable -- and, once things start getting busy, probably even more capable.
Whether or not to take this approach is to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Some tools are too interactive and have too tight a feedback loop to make any sense without javascript. A spreadsheet is an example where I'd probably choose to break support for no-javascript, but it's less clear-cut than, say, a CAD application. An example where I'd opt to support clients without javascript is a todo-list application, or a twitter-like.
Of course, this has always already been the case! That's why we don't stream our webpages as images (or video, if you need to scroll), but instead offload the work of rendering a graphical representation of the symbolic HTML representation to the client-side browser.
It's a pretty solid idea (apart from the Browser Wars), and one of the ideas that made the WWW viable.
The ridiculous part, however, is where people somehow decide that we should wrap more and more and yet another layer of abstraction onto it.
It's not that web servers have grown less powerful and therefore need to offload more work onto their clients. The demands on web servers are higher today, but they've also grown more powerful, and we came up with some pretty clever scaling technologies to deal with those higher demands. But offloading code execution in the form of client-side JS is not really one of those, in practice.
Yes, the idea could technically be used to accomplish that and make less work on the server side, but really, take a look at this page, or any (bloated) page like the problem we're describing; That's not what's going on here, it's about the same amount of work on the server side, nothing's being offloaded, just more work on the client side.
At least the Flash-only-interface websites that plagued the web 10 years ago offered us UI elements that weren't possible in HTML back then (for better or worse), but today's JS bloat truly doesn't add anything that can't be done in a much leaner, less client resource-intensive way.
Even your spreadsheet example. Sure, run the calculations client-side, that only makes sense, no need to throw out JS with the bathwater. But what sort of calculations are we talking about, realistically? For a medium spreadsheet, a few hundreds of summations and multiplications. Nothing of the kind that should make a 5-year old computer even blink. But whatever these types of apps are actually doing they manage to crawl the jankscroll already even on an empty document, let alone when you try to use it.
And large bitmaps are rather bandwidth inefficient, and inaccessible to boot.
I don't mind markup. I mind tech that doesn't include fallbacks, and I mind people using Turing-complete languages for things that can easily be done using a less powerful language. (Turing-complete languages tend to get abused by people to the point that people want them to be executed quickly and with little memory use (which means that the language implementation gets complex, and hence buggy {simple laws of probability}), and almost any vulnerability can generally be exploited by a suitable script in a TC language, and TC-languages can be used to do unexpected things.)
HTML is decent. HTML+CSS is worse than HTML (for the same reason that COMEFROM is worse than GOTO). Markup is better than HTML in many ways, or rather most formal specifications of Markup-like languages are better than HTML. (Unfortunately, most variants of Markup aren't specified beyond "do what I do")
I've been tempted for a while to write a Markup browser. (Mop? Markup-Over-tcP? )
That's the entire reason why js and html and friends have become so popular. You essentially have full applications that have been developed by people who recognize that the bottleneck wrt to a networked application's responsiveness is not cpu cycles and memory in 2015 but internet latency. It's sufficient here to send a small text file and have the client fill in the gaps and have the client ajax for updates than have the server do the heavy work. I think you argued elsewhere, this is a waste of processor time redundantly rendering content, and thus, a waste of energy needlessly (as in real energy, from electrical into waste heat). As a tree hugger, I have to admit I find that argument somewhat compelling. I think a balance needs to be struck between user experience and use of resources. It might be your balance line lies further towards the "saving of resources" than mine's does.
And you can do most of a thin client, if not all, while keeping sane bandwidth use. (Note that almost all cases where bandwidth use would be excessive for a thin client in a web setting, said bandwidth use would also be excessive for a fat client in a web setting.)
It's mainly that current tech has settled on the brute-force approach of "let's stream every pixel and then try to compress it" as opposed to saner approaches (vector graphics, remote compositing, that sort of thing). But note that there are, for example, remote desktop protocols that work well (for most things) over a dial-up connection!
That doesn't mean that websites shouldn't use javascript — I'd not want to use a todo list application that forces me to reload the page on every click — but it's still useful to support that functionality, because some day I might need to access my todos from an environment where I can't use javascript for whatever reason.
People claim that it's too much work to support something so niche, but if you architect your application well, using progressive enhancement, you get support for no-javascript environments, plus a ton of other stuff like server-side prerendering for latency reduction, accessibility, SEO, text-based browser functionality — all virtually for free.
Not that this should be applied everywhere dogmatically, it's not worth supporting no-javascript environments or scrapers in your browser-based photo editor.
It would be even better if servers would return raw data in xml format, with a linked xslt transform to convert it to a structured document, and css to manage the presentation with javascript to control the interactivity, but that idea died long ago, but some modern applications are finally replicating most of the good parts of that system.
I was more wondering what you meant by prerendering things, because even when one opens an html page in your browser which is on your local drive, the client is doing rendering (typesetting, and such). That is an extreme...so, it sounds like you were asking for a return to the pre-ajax internet, which you say here that it doesn't fit everything.
So I think we don't really disagree here, I could have misunderstood you?
The separation of back-end and front-end, via the exposure of APIs on the backend, has led us to a world where the front-end requires a bit more thought, on how to represent and transform the data to render the content and theme correctly.
Why? Modularisation & de-coupling = greater maintainability + rule of single-responsibility is better applied. This will become more and more the case with the widespread adoption of microservices.
In this specific case, we could argue against the few lines of JS that provide a nice effect upon entering the page, but you can't argue about de-coupling and breaking down the mammoth codebase.
(Once again, I'm writing about web pages, not web applications (and no, a blog is not a web application).)
Modularization, decoupling, "rule of single-responsibility", etc. are meant to produce simpler, more maintainable code and better, slicker software. But instead, they're taken out of context and abused. Modern web codebases are getting more and more complicated, not less. What people are doing today is not good engineering. It's the architecture astronautics' equivalent of Kerbal Space Program.
<rantyrant> So from a personal standpoint, if I'm on your sales page, I want to know what you're offering, and why I should be intrested in what you are offering. I'd be fine with that being a plain html site with nothing but a few paragraphs and some bullet point lists. Maybe a table or two as well, and a link to somewhere I can give you money.
Now the last thing I need is for that part of the page to zoom in, wiggle around or do any other bogheaded things a designer with just enough jQuery to be dangerous could think of whilst they're being "creative" with it.
Now from a marketing perspective, this is incredibly stupid. A sales page is a machine for turning prospects into customers. There's a single design purpose if there is one. If someone come over and tried to paint flowers on the tip of my soldering iron, I would cut them. If someone decided to replace my PSU with a music box because the music box looks a lot better, I would not be pleased.
So why did it ever become a thing to do that to one of the most essential parts of your business? The part you point your advertising money at. The part that can very well be the difference between you going the way of the ipod or the way of the zune. Go nuts on your About page if you really have to keep your designer busy, have your faces zoom into it and spin and put the text into maquee tags and what have. But please, for the love of god, don't, don't ever do that to your sales page, because you're wasting my time and your money on that.
I blame marketing professionals with an IQ of 50 and designers with delusions of grandeur, CSS3 on the holster, jQuery in their hands, trigger happy on anything customer facing, spreading more $ signs through the site than the rap business.
</rant>
There seems to be a force that always pushes technology to crud up with bogus features until the brink of usability.
Probably caused by the fact that developers tend to develop on above-average machines, and therefore will always target slightly above-average requirements, dragging everything upwards.
I chose this template for my blog because I liked the clean, simple layout. I've been meaning to remove some of the JS functionality and fix some styling stuff for a while now. I didn't realize the fade-in thing rendered the site completely unviewable without JS. I'll be fixing it soon.
And again, the fade-in (although I don't like said effects personally) isn't the problem. The problem is that said fade-in is done via JS with no fallback. (Note that you can generally do fade-ins via CSS, IIRC, or just add a noscript tag that overrides it to full opacity)
I suspect that there is other functionality that I'm missing without JS (No sidebar? Buttons to the side that do nothing?), but it's kind of hard to tell.
I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to "Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated toilet.
The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output.
My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label: "Functional Specifications".
The principal returned my cards and never said another word.
If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime, the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear and disproportionate overreaction, he's glad to have had the experience. So don't be cowed. Have fun.
There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took down.
This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10 years!
After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at the poorly chosen http://oasisband.net if anyone was curious.
A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.
Err, cyber bullying?
For mature learners focusing on a topic of interest, great. For young learners build a general foundation, not so much. Now, it's a different conversation to cover curriculum, but that's not of MOOC's concern.
And, to wit, "adults not recollecting fond experiences" is double-edged. There are few other times in people's lives where they are essentially forced to rub shoulders with such a cross-section of their culture. These experiences do afford experience in cross-pollination which have positive benefits as much as they cause angst for participants. If parents are able to shield their kids from "others" a certain solipsism is a consequence. During formative years, there is a value to broad cultural experience that should be balanced with providing a safe and nurturing environment for the primary task of learning.
If you think about it, a lot of why employers require college degrees is that it vets many life skills around being organized and having it together enough to earn a degree. Factor that out and you have MOOCs for the knowledge * the life skills. So the life skills themselves (such as meeting deadlines, working in groups, showing up on time regularly, learning how to learn, etc.) would have to become some hybrid of MOOC for study habits and a long-running college-experience LARP for the social interaction.
If the question is more along the lines of how can a MOOC be part of the effective development of a desirable, hire-able person, then this is a big discussion.
There are all sorts of areas needing review. What's a cost-optimized way to get to a balanced personal portfolio that looks good on paper (resume)? Do resumes matter when performance can speak volumes (your github repo, your stack-exchange + hacker news profile, your start-up you did in high school?
Beyond that, are those things true indicators of appeal for hiring HR/recruiters, managers, peers during interviews?
Is all of this actually helpful in estimating the likelihood of positive performance? It's all very hazy. Each thing bodes well, in ways, for the total, but most people are flawed, to some degree, if measured by other people. Myers-Briggs type personality profiling is rough pigeon-holing, but there is an underlying truth somewhere that different people will just resonate or "dissonate" with each other. Maybe one of the most effective things a person can develop, beyond their fundamental knowledge and technical acumen, is the ability to empathize with other people; to be able to bridge those personality divides.
That brings me back to how there are few better environments, potentially, to get hands-on experience in navigating personality and culture difference than well-integrated schools.
If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts).
Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.
And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.
As far as I've seen parents have way more clout in public schools not only do they also pay the bills (via taxes) but public schools are part of the wider political systems (local politicians, local PTA equivalent) through which parents can reach the school and its administration with consequences.
While parents do pay the bill in private schools said schools tend to consider the right to pay them a privilege (for the parents/pupil) and act accordingly with respect to complaints. And parents paying the school directly tend to dislike "seeing their investment wasted".
The private schools were different because the parents knew each other. If something bad was happening word spread quickly, and parents who were paying thousands of dollars to provide their kids a better experience than public schools would yank them in a heartbeat if it looked like their money was wasted.
This American Life devoted an entire episode to covering one of them...
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/419/p...
Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.
Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.
Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content, distribution - even on slips of paper - the works.
This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes.
More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic, 100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons.
And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so hilarious.
OP, get into media, stat.
Oh, and OP? You are hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.
"I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.".
* Being very introverted he hates doing the "people stuff" that is necessary to run a media empire
* While he is good at PR, he loves computer programming more
* He did PR in a way that worked quite well at a high school, but doing it professionally requires different/additional skills (say, people skills)
* While he has all the necessary competencies to run a media empire in principle, our society has some strong expectations how such people have to be (say, more extroverted, less nerdy).
* He has a very anarchistic way to run PR, which succeeded in its own way at the high school (see article), but does not work in a professional environment, where a different style is excepted, where he's not good at.
anyway, until OP tries it we'll never know :) thanks for elaborating on your reasoning for me though.
It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.
Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not have the upper hand after all.
Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access everything and used it to read students' programs for grading.
One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the teacher. He gave us all copies of the file.
We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the computers till the end of the quarter.
IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.
My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school (age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line (using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd-party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks.
Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense, because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years.
Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with DOOM and COD sprites...
So... ratemyprofessors.com ?
There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4 JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-related event.
On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.
Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.
Several things surprised me. I think the biggest was that being a good teacher is much harder and requires more talent (and good judgement!!!) than programming. Sure, there is never a time as a teacher that you have to concentrate the way you do as a programmer. However, the decisions you have to make, under intense pressure, are very, very difficult. The consequences can also be severe if you get it wrong.
Students usually ("usually" is a vast understatement) do not see the big picture. Often they feel they are being picked on, or unfairly treated, when in actuality they are being lovingly treated by a teacher who is trying to help them.
Teachers take enormous abuse every day. It was a surprise for me to have students actually hate me (for years!!!) because I wouldn't let them rampage through the class, ruining things for other students. And like I said, you are doing your absolute best, but because the student can't differentiate between behaviour that works well for the group and behaviour that doesn't, they can resent your interference. And they convince all their friends to do so as well. One small discipline issue in a class can result in 10s of people literally hating you for years (or even for ever!)
And teachers make mistakes. The job is really, really, really difficult, so you are bound to make a ton of mistakes (especially when you first start out). I made a point of apologising for my mistakes (sometimes publicly), because I believe strongly that improvement starts with the ability to acknowledge failure and I wanted the students to gain the courage to admit failure. Some students respected this. Some students despised me for it.
One student in particular was so offended that I had given up the teacher-like air of infallibility that he completely lost all respect for me. I was stubborn and decided that the student was entitled to his opinions, so I took his (very unfair) criticism without comment. My colleagues were not so tolerant and took the student aside (for several hours) to explain the hurt he was causing. In the end, that discussion with the student helped him a lot and he did much better in school after that.
As a teacher, you are used to this kind of thing. It is an every day occurrence. Students irrationally (and occasionally rationally) flip between loving you and hating you. You make mistakes and have to just swallow the consequence that probably a group of students will hate you forever because of it. You just try to do better the next time (knowing that given the complexity of the decisions there is a good chance you are going to fuck it up again a few times before you get it right).
Occasionally students are cruel (whether knowingly or unknowingly). One of your jobs as a teacher is to help the student know that there are real people, with real feelings on the other end. It is a difficult lesson for both parties. If you fail to communicate this (as I did with that one student) they may go through life thinking that other people's feelings are not relevant to their own internal sense of justice. As a teacher you would be very irresponsible to allow that to happen.
It's a difficult job....
I'm back in the same area of Japan as I was when I was teaching. I'm doing contract programming now, though. One of the things that makes me very happy is meeting my former students on the street, or at a bar. They often call me over and chat with me. It reminds me why I loved that job.
It's possible that the head English teacher was the one who wrote the original Winston's Way, however, and may have taken it more personally as a result. I'm not sure though.
I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.
[0] - https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/06/remar...
Oh, there will be repercussions. You just won't know about them right away. Repercussion #1. You will be on a list. Have fun flying or leaving the country any time soon. You might eventually do it, but it won't be fun.
Immediate repercussions are almost preferable.
Exactly. As soon as money enters the picture, all civil liberties tends to be thrown out. Yet, students should IMHO be encouraged to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. How do you teach a society democracy if not through activities like this?
And this is reflected in the low voter turnout.
> I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal) repercussions if I want to.
Using this as an example of "strong" freedom is so sad. Really. That should be a basic requirement for any civilized society. Yet, as another poster mentioned, it's probably not even true.
There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone from getting into school or getting a job.
It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind.
To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus.
The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.
I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some bathrooms.
In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see its remnants in http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz. They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :(
http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html is priceless.
Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his lesson and secured things after that.
Related: http://voidnull.sdf.org/ (unafilliated)
Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could have found a more productive and healthier hobby.
Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society (when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.
Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer than you might expect them to be.
I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.
Of course, it's hard to get information on how the students are personally relating to you. I also would have welcomed a way to get feedback without invoking a confrontation. Elsewhere in this thread I describe how it is inevitable that some students will come to hate you (either by mistakes on your part, or because of problems that the student is having personally). You have to accept that it is part of the job, but I would have welcomed some way to see if there are any common threads that I could work on.
Of course, just like any profession, some teachers can't deal with criticism. Just look at programmers. Tell Joe Blow that his design could use improvement and instantly they turn off. Some will take it as a cue that they need to submarine you politically so that you aren't a threat to their job. :-P
Wow, the man invented central banking independently.
A shitty system.
I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.
> 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity
It wasn't.
> Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity?
Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.
Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again.
Good read starting with the 1500s here:
THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS:
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACYI was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time.
Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome.
I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site.
// As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.
People are still asking that now, to be fair. But the Web was certainly well into the public consciousness in North America by 1997.
(One thing I remember is that my website had a campus map easily accessible from the home page. Once the Communications department took over website responsibility from IT a year later, that disappeared not to return for many years, heh. https://xkcd.com/773/ )