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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

Thumbs done on posting the solutions. That's programming class etiquette 101. From the fact that 64 people upvoted this post, I assume I'm in for some downvotes but what's right is right.

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Did you actually look at the notebooks? There are no solutions, just the exercise questions.

The student needs to enter their own code to the section that says "YOUR CODE HERE":

https://github.com/dibgerge/ml-coursera-python-assignments/s...

If a free-class asks you not to do something, it's etiquette 101 to follow that.

Not if that thing goes against the more fundamental principle of sharing knowledge.

Also: copying someone's solutions is self-destructive if you want to learn something, but that's still damage you do to yourself only. The reason MOOCs care about this is because they desperately try to place themselves in the credentials game - they want their paid certificate for the free course to mean something, so that you'll want to pay them. This is not obviously bad, but it's also not obviously good.

MOOCs care because they want to be in the credentials game, but some students want to be in the credentials game too. Suppose you want to apply to a job in ML even though you don't have prior work experience in that. You do have a certificate saying that you completed all the lessons and the homework and tests.

The meaningfulness of the certificate could mean the difference between you getting the job or not. If it's common knowledge that it's easy to cheat on the course, then you're likely not getting the job.

I am not sure looking at others solutions is even self destructive. That’s how reading the manual, literature, open source programs work. If people didn’t look at other people’s solution we wouldn’t get Einstein (if he didn’t build on Maxwell, etc)

we are talking about basic assignments to further understanding of a well understood topic. Doing the assignment itself is critical to the educational experience of truly understanding that topic, reading a solution robs you of that

I'm glad that we share the same understanding. By any chance do you have any teaching background?

As for myself I had 8 years of industry experience, followed by 4 years of teaching, then back to industry.

Not op but not only would it rob me of knowledge if I finished a course by looking at others' solutions but it also feels "dirty" to do it that way.

never formally, but TAing in grad school and tutoring math/physics since high school has definitely given me a profound respect for teaching and helping others learn

That is a false analogy. This is in the structure of a class not some paper or industry. There is a reason the teacher doesn't want you to straight up look at solutions, maybe to generate a sense of intuition yourself. A lot of CS courses also have a project component where you get to use whatever resources to make something new.

Who are you to judge how someone monetizes a thing. It's a free resource, feel free to not do it if you don't agree with their policy.

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