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Comment by mwcremer | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of the visibly nervous PhD student who walks into their thesis oral defense and sets down an expensive bottle of aged single malt whisky. The chair asks, "Before we begin, I am curious why you brought a bottle of whisky to your defense?" The student suddenly relaxes and says, "Oh, um, I'll explain after we finish." The student confidently answers all the committee's questions and the defense goes smoothly. When they conclude, the chair prompts, "Say, what about the whisky?" The student replies, "Oh that. In my dissertation on page four it says I will give the whisky to the first committee member who asks for it."

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It reminds me of a story that a PhD student stuck a $10 (the value varies) bill into the copy of their thesis that got filed in the library. Some <large # of> years later, they came back to see that no one had taken it.

This sort of just happened and made news. A professor left clues to money in his syllabus and no one got it.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...

And the actual “clue” looked like a borked copy paste in the part of the syllabus telling you about university wide policies that the student would have read elsewhere already.

But sure lazy students don’t read the syllabus

Yeah this was a little viral hit that went down well with boomers, but it was pretty sneaky. Everyone seems to be suggesting that if the kids these days just did what they were supposed to then they could have scored a crisp $50 and had all the avocado toast they ever wanted.

But where exactly was the text and how did the students miss it? These articles say it was "in the syllabus" but don't really go much further. I don't have access to the full syllabus but a snippet showing its immediate surroundings is available:

    ...
    objectives. As a result, skill-based
    courses in music may be exempt
    from Covid-related accomodations
    as a progression in skills must be
    obtained across the semester to be
    successfull in these course. Thus 
    (free to the first who claims; locker
    one hundred forty-seven; 
    combination fifteen, twenty-five,
    thirty-five), students may be 
    ineligible to make up classes and
    coursework beyond the specified 
    number of days as determined by 
    the instructor. Requests will be
    decided on a case-by-case basis with
    specific emphasis on the ability to
    achieve learning outcomes.

    Technology Support: If you have
    problems with your UTC email
    ...

So it was right near the "please contact the tech support department if you need tech support" message. Basically it's in some boilerplate that every course has and nobody reads because they want to actually do their work and don't expect some professor to try to score internet points by pranking them this way. NPR could've done exactly the same thing on that article by adding a clause to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy docs that are linked, but which we all probably ignored and just clicked "Agree and Continue" to view the article.

It's not just that it's embedded in some of the university boilerplate that the students probably have on all their syllabuses, it's that it doesn't read like anything, certainly not a promise of a free $50.

Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.

Also, if I read that, I would assume that figuring out where I needed to go and actually taking time to do that would end up in nothing, so I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't expect to get rich off it, and the chance at (apparently) $50 wouldn't excite me enough for me to waste my time on it.

When i was in college, a chance at say 50$ would totally tempt me to spend a few hours hunting around campus ( Arizona State Uni for me ), i made ~$8 an hour at the time

Sure, it could be a fun thing to do (I'd have done a little treasure hunt for $50, too), but the professor's syllabus doesn't say it's $50 at all. "Free to the first who claims" -- claims what? free what? It isn't even a complete sentence, in the middle of boilerplate that's if anything exceedingly verbose. It doesn't parse like meaningful instructions. That's why I think it's a hokey gotcha, and not an actual sign of "people don't read instructions" (which we all instinctively know anyway??)

Sigh. I never had such luck.

During a first year university computer science course, students were told to line up and sign an agreement for access to department computer labs. Most of the students lined up, grabbed the paperwork when they reached the front of the queue, then promptly signed it. I decided to actually read the paperwork, which earned me the privilege of standing at the side until the task was complete. No sneaky clauses, for the better or the worse, in my humble opinion. I simply had the privilege of standing out.

Not that it really mattered. I walked away learning a different lesson since I already had access to their computer systems. I already asked for permission to access their systems, and was granted permission without doing the paperwork. For the most part, these agreements are intended to handle the typical case, and are meant to inform rather than be a rigid contract. (The irony: I consider trust as sacrosanct, so I often over comply with the rules.)

I've been publicly ridiculed a few times in my life for actually reading something before signing it. Once was a liability waiver for white water rafting. I was yelled at and it was shouted to the group "we got a reader here!!!". Cannot believe how indifferent people are to companies trying to take away their legal rights

Most people neither fundamentally understand (1) what a contract is or (2) what their options are regarding it.

Which is sad, because it's not rocket science.

PS: You should have yelled back "We have an illiterate guide here!" Anyone berating reasonable behavior deserves to be called out as an asshole.

Most people have the (incorrect) understanding that anything and everything in a contract is binding, to the point you could demand their first born child as a deposit for a lease and they'd shrug and say "it's in the contract, so I guess I have to".

Do these contracts actually stand up in court if people sign without reading them and being given due consideration? Can’t find the link but I recall years ago some EULA provisions were found to be unreasonable and void by the courts (US I think).

Yes. There are some rights you can't sign away (e.g. you can't sell yourself into slavery, or use your kidney as collateral), but otherwise yes.

Legally what's important is that you had the opportunity to read the contract before you agreed to it. In HN terms, as an example, you can't legally steal GPL'd code if you don't bother to cat LICENSE.md

Consideration is a hard requirement for a binding contract. Note however that consideration in contract law doesn't mean the same thing as in general usage: in contract law it means "something of value". So a contract promising to give someone a guitar is not enforceable, but a contract promising to sell a guitar for $100 is.

In general the likelihood that the parties have read the contract doesn't have any bearing on the enforceability of it. But most such contracts are also contracts of adhesion (roughly speaking a take-it-or-leave-it offer), and there are special rules for the enforceability of contracts of adhesion. The principle is that they can't be too surprising or too unfair. There's a fair amount of case law about where that line is (which I mostly don't know).

That's when you pull out a blue pen and start striking clauses and making edits, then ask them to initial.

Reciprocate when they want to read the changes you made, if their heads don't explode first.

I will try this the next time I sign something.

they'll say no, and chances are you already prepaid, so they'll take your payment and you'll be stuck somewhere for hours until everyone else is done

Has anyone had a locker at university? As 10000 students attend that university, I doubt the students had any idea where lockers even were.

It depends, at UIC, there were lockers in some of the classroom buildings that were in use. I’d guess that, yes, students would be aware of locker locations.

Many people put answers to assignments and exams in the course material and very few people get it.

Is this a clever way of saying "studying"? :)

I think I remember a story about a professor that said they can stop taking the exam and turn it in if they read a sentence in the exam which was placed like halfway through and only a few people in the class actually did that.

Isn't that kinda the point of these materials in the first place? :)

I’m pretty sure phd dissertation hard copies are never read over in the library anymore. Digital downloads only.

Were they ever read?

An amusing counter example - I was asked to proof a students assignment. I did and the essay seemed weird and I couldn’t work out why, but the content was ok.

Some hours later I realised the work was mine, and had been placed in the library as an example of something (presumably anonymised). Good times.

Well, I do not think I have ever read a dissertation from cover to cover that I checked out from the library, but I did read several substantial sections of quite a few when I was in graduate school. These ones were older and not yet digitized (1960s to 1980s). I had to request them from storage and read them in a reading room. I was just looking for certain kinds of experimental data for my own research and had no reason to read them cover to cover. I agree that people rarely check out hard copies of dissertations anymore but certainly many people do from time to time when needed.

Were these the original hard copies each graduating PhD student must file after they’ve defended? That would involve physically going to some random university to physically check out some random person’s dissertation where the dissertation wasn’t notable enough to be available online. I just can’t see that happening, unless somehow the university you were studying at had the random dissertations that you wanted to read.

If it wasn’t the original hard copy but a copy then I don’t think the $20 bill would be there regardless.

Yes, these were the original hard copies. I was only talking about dissertations filed at the school I went to, so I fortunately did not have to go anywhere. I just had to put in the request and wait a day or two for them to arrive at the reading room from storage.

You are correct that getting dissertations from far off universities is often impossible. Many universities do not loan their dissertations via interlibrary loan, so unless it is online or you are willing to travel to their campus, you can't get access to it. ProQuest is another option, but they do not have everything and it costs money.

I've heard the 20 dollar bill story many times but I have never found anything like that in an original hard-copy dissertation. If I recall correctly, I have found things used as bookmarks, like receipts or scraps of paper, and the cards in the back cover are often stamped at least once a decade. That seems to suggest that other people have read them over the years, just not as often as other materials.

I had heard that some MFA student had written in the library copy of his thesis, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.” Alas, I was part of the two MFA cohorts whose theses were electronically filed which means that it’s unlikely anyone will ever read it even if I did become famous.

We had a PhD student who removed a random different page from his thesis that got sent to each of his committee members.

I went into my thesis with a preprint of a paper exposing a fraud in my thesis chair's lab, literally in my back pocket... As a confidence booster.

When editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley would go to Olsson's, which then had the biggest bookstores in Washington, DC, and leave slips redeemable for $10 or $20 inside copies of the books that "everyone" was taking about and supposedly reading. He never had to pay out.

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions.

They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”

But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”

The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”

About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.

One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way.

Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.

That’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”

I had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian).

Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet.

Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”

Yes! Let us give children the world's worst UX, and then mock them for its inevitable failure!

This worksheet is from the school of thought which sees education as a way to train you to be a better person, and by "better person" I mean "a mindless and compliant drone for some corporate or government bureaucracy".

I don't know how you could oveethink this that badly.

It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

If you throw out the instructions that's cool too, but sometimes reading all the instructions instead of discovering them as you go will help things go easier.

You might catch intent behind previous instructions that makes them easier to follow.

> It's about reading instructions all the way through if you're going to follow them.

Sometimes understanding the entire process is important. When this is important, it behooves the designer of the form to draw attention to the fact, to make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing.

This, however, is the precise opposite of what the Following Instructions Quiz genre seeks to accomplish.

It would be one thing if teachers consistently used it to apologize for the inane bureaucracy that students will experience later in life. Perhaps this is a lesson students need -- but it's seldom so affirming; the message, rather, is that interacting with this quiz in a natural way is a flaw, you are flawed for doing so, and you would be better if you were a paperwork robot. Conform. Obey. Follow instructions.

Many schools systems have this as an explicit goal, and others do it somewhat implicitly. Songs like We don't need no education didn't spring up out of nowhere.

An English teacher did this to us. The first big problem is about half of the students knew about the trick because friends in one of her earlier classes told us about it. So half the class got 100% not for reading the instructions but for having friends willing to go against the spirit of the task. The second problem was that it was intentionally formatted to look like the instructions were the paragraph at the top of the page and everything below were tasks. The teacher had a huge grin on her face about the whole thing, apparently happy that she was able to outsmart a group (well, half a group) of children. A classroom relationship between the teacher and students should be built on trust and fairness, both of which she damaged that day.

Same here. Probably 80’s. Kids those days too. I was the fastest reader so the first to prance around.

Isnt there a movie called Exam that does nearly the same thing?

In my university, in the department where I worked as a post-grad, worked someone who had pulled such a trick in their dissertation. That person was later hired by the university, worked for some years, and was suddenly confronted by a colleague who demanded the bottle. That dissertation actually contained something on the topic of their research, and that page finally found its reader.

(Yes, that guy did produce the bottle as promised, from his words.)

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions.

They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.”

But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.”

The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.”

About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny.

Two different teachers did this at my school (two years in a row). The second year, nobody fell for it. I felt a little bad for that teacher.

I suppose the teacher was glad though.

Yeah, I had that about 3 or 4 times in school. By the third one, people were just flat telling the ones that fell for it not to continue, and why.

Lmao, sounds like it went viral with a certain demographic

Yep, early 6th grade for me.

The version I recall was something like a doctoral candidate shows up to their defense, points out that no member of their committee had claimed the free bottle of scotch mentioned in their dissertation (implying no one on the committee had read the diss. closely), and so candidate was allowed to drink the scotch during the defense.

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