Comment by garrettgillas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by garrettgillas | Hacker News Reader

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When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up.

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I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough systems running and scrounged a router so that we could play multiplayer Warcraft II during class (which was an old game even back then). We pulled this off for about a month before we got caught. It turned out the teacher really didn't care anyway.

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When I lived in rural Mexico, I used to tape pictures of Jesus to the outside of my packages that I sent home so that the shady people in the mail system wouldn't mess with them.

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My old boss used to add useless revisions every time that I sent him an email saying that part of a project was finished such as "Change the font up to 12px on that navigation please. What? It's already at 12? Can you make it 12 and a half? No, 13px is way too big but I want it bigger than 12 so just fix it OK?"...yeah, that guy. Anyway, I found that if I sent him emails at the end of the day, he would not read them until the following morning when he had the most emails to respond to. Therefore, sending him finished tasks at the end of the day meant fewer useless revisions. I found that outlook has a "delay delivery" setting so as I finished tasks through the day, I would que them to send at about 7:30 at night, when I could be sure that he wasn't working. Lo and behold, the endless revisions went down by about 90% and I got a lot more stuff done.

Ok, one more hack from college although it probably won't work these days.

All of the professors in the science department at my university would tape lists of their student's IDs and their test grades outside their office through out the semester including finals. When looking for classes for the following semester, I just had to look at which professors gave better grades on average and sign up for their classes. The difference was quites staggering.

Some professors consistently failed roughly half of their students while others would have over 3/4 the class with A's consistently. Granted, there were some variable to consider like which course was being taught and the fact that some groups of students are sometimes simply better performers than others. But there was no way I was going to see that kind of data displayed publicly and not take advantage of it.

>it probably won't work these days.

Oh, it absolutely works these days; it's even easier. My undergraduate institution publishes median grades for each course.

There's a bit of an uproar though because they're going to start printing the median grades on students' transcripts...

So you actually took the 75% A classes? Did you learn a lot from those profs, or were they just giving the As away? I would figure that, knowing nothing else about the prof, the one with grades in the middle would be the most effective teacher.

In my experience, the median grades are higher for smaller classes, and those smaller classes are often more advanced and populated by graduate students. It's not that the professor is easier, it's that everyone works really hard and learns a lot, because they're motivated by the work itself.

This does not hold true for large classes where the median grade is an A, however; those are usually genuinely easier.

Heck yes did I take them. At the time I had little interest in biology and I felt that it was interfering with my real education, which it was. Nothing against biology, but most of the things that I learned in college that I would call "valuable" (professionally and otherwise) I did not learn in class.

I love the delayed delivery feature. My friend works as a personal banker, and often has to stay late calling on prospect lists* (which had a conversion rate of near 5% - it was really a waste of time). When he was done he was supposed to email the branch manager with the results of the night (appointments, sales, etc.). He liked the OT, but most of the time he already had his appointments and sales met, so I suggested the delayed delivery feature - send the email at 7:30 with your results, get the OT, but don't stay late.

I had a boss a few decades back that used to give me another task or two every time we passed in the halls. Being already overloaded, I wasn't very appreciative.

I started saving all of my questions for him until these pass-by's. I started giving him so much more stuff, that he began seeing me coming and would jokingly say "Oh, piss off!"

I later heard of another colleague who would answer an additional job request with the question "Okay, what DON'T you want me to do?"

This is really sad: as about the same time you were doing the scanning and OCR'ing in '94, I was in a PhD program, and did the same thing thing for our research project in the Wavelet Signal Processing course, because I started it too late. Scanned papers, OCR, and edit, Had a 30 page report in no-time, pure bliss. Always felt bad about it, though.

Yeah, using that hack in college might be a little more shady. I have always subscribed to the belief of "you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer" so my actions were usually fueled by my opinion that the writing assignments that my instructor was giving out were essentially "stupid". I know, that's a pretty crappy form of justification but that was also around the time that I was learning html and graphic design which I considered more worthwhile ways to spend my time.

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