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Comment by philh | Hacker News Reader

Idle speculation:

> "The key sentence here is, 'Please note that you cannot make more than 2 submissions per week.' It is our understanding that this is to say that one individual can at most upload twice per week. Otherwise, if the limit was set for a team, the proper text should be 'your team' instead," Wu wrote.

I wonder whether, to a native Chinese speaker, this really does sound like it's talking about individual people, and saying "you" when one means "your team" seems really bizarre. Can any Chinese speakers weigh in?

(Even stipulating this, the affair still sounds more like malice than incompetence on the part of Wu.)

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I agree with your last remark. Regardless of the letter of the law, any ML researcher who could possibly win such competition should clearly understand its spirit. They had to know that they were training on the test data, a cardinal sin in machine learning.

just growth hacking a competition, right?

Exactly. This is machine learning chapter 0 stuff. To think a team of machine learning (most likely) PhDs innocently misinterpreted the rules is naive. More likely, I imagine the researchers felt pressured to obtain results significantly enough to let their morals take the sidecar.

Especially when you consider that the first failure mode should be to ask for clarification if you are unsure. It's completely unreasonable for them to claim they read the rules, and upon their singular reading of the rule, they were completely sure that the limit was for individual participants and not whole teams. That there was not even any microscopic amount of doubt that maybe, just maybe, it was for whole teams.

This sounds like they are trying to cover their malicious intent with an "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" kind of trick.

Once upon a time, English had both singular and plural second-person pronouns; "thou/thee" and "ye/you" respectively. Over time, the use of the first three declined drastically, and "you" is the only one in popular use today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_personal_pronouns#Arch...

Chinese, however, still uses both singular and plural second-person pronouns; 你 (nǐ, lit. you) and 你們 (nǐmen, lit. you all) respectively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pronouns#Personal_pron...

Note that the above is drastically simplified and I recommend reading the links for more information.

English is relatively unusual in merging its second-person pronouns, although the use of the second-person plural in more formal or polite situations (aka the T-V distinction) is extremely widespread.

However, the matter of personal pronouns is such a fundamental aspect of grammar (at least in Indo-European languages) that it was literally the first piece of grammar introduced when we studied French. (It may not have been the first chapter, since the first chapter may have been limited to stock phrases and some pronunciation guides; it's been way too long). I find it highly implausible that any foreign speaker that has a working proficiency of English could somehow think that "you" is not used for both individuals and groups.

I have seen some very strange errors in English written by native Chinese speakers; however, it does seem implausible that every single person on their team interpreted the sentence in exactly the same wrong way.

Even if that's the case, they would have noticed the inconsistency in language when they were forced to create multiple logins to submit more frequently.

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