How to Hack Yourself a Class | Hacker News Reader

How to Hack Yourself a Class

cestlaz.github.io

25 pointszamansky9 comments

A quick note on what Stuyvesant is for those who don't know.

Stuyvesant High School is a specialized high school in NYC. It is considered to be the top public high school in the city.

Anyways, its computer science program is literally one of the best in the country. Currently, every high school student there learns how to use HTML, Python, and Javascript. Those who want to continue their education are able to take an Advanced Placement Java course and then later on three courses:

a Graphics programming class where we learn algorithms for creating 3D objects a Systems level programming class where we learn C and a Software Development class where we learn web development and databases and pretty much everything about software.

I'm actually a Stuyvesant graduate of 2014 and I can say that if it weren't for Stuyvesant & Zamansky, I would not have been confident enough to teach myself so many things about programming and work towards my dreams. It's a shame that Stuy or the DOE does not give more support for CS.

Further clarification on the meaning of "public" in this context:

Stuyvesant accepts less than 3% of applicants, making it about three times more exclusive than any Ivy, Stanford or MIT. The average SAT score is roughly in line with that of the accepted student bodies of top-ten schools — in effect, Harvard could close its eyes and accept 100% of Stuy applicants and do as well or better than with its normal applicant pool, at least with respect to standardized tests.

Stuy is not typically what you think of when you think of a "public" school.

They key distinction is that most schools of that caliber are very expensive. Stuy sits in a class alongside Hunter College High School and a few others with the relatively rare property of being like $30k+/year institutions while also not charging tuition.

I'm still mad at my parents [only half-joking] that they moved from NYC to the New Jersey suburbs back in 1950, which meant that rather than going to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science I went to a high school where mine was the third graduating class, there was no calculus class, and I was the only one in the class taking three AP exams (not that there were any AP classes offered).

When I went to college, I knew the required English classes would be my Achilles heel. Even though English was my native language--I found writing really hard. I had a decent part time job so I bought an Atari 1040si for word processing. I went through four years if college and told no one about my computer. I felt like I was cheating because the other students were spending hours on the typewriter correcting, and rewriting. I had one teacher who said I should buy a IBM typewriter. After reading my assignments, he figured I had a cheap typewriter, and a modern IBM is worth the investment. Funny how times have changed? After college, I lost Internet in computers and gave the Atari to my brother. He told me it was just too confusing--and threw it away. I has an extremely ambitious girlfriend at the time, and she felt computers were a waste of time. She is now some big wig in charge of Technology, and and the Internet. Hello--Ingrid. She was adorable, but we were really different.

> Imagine Stuyvesant without a computer science program.

Easy when I have no idea what Stuyvesant is.

From quick Googling (and implied by the article) it's a specialized High School in NYC.

http://www.stuy.edu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School

When did advertising your own ignorance become popular on HN? I feel like every article these days has comment from someone declaiming how proud they are of not knowing something (almost always something that could be learned with a ten-second search).

That sentence is fine in its original context [1], the school newspaper of Stuyvesant High School. We didn't replace the url because the current page has some nice additional commentary by the author.

HN users can reasonably be expected to google what they don't immediately recognize, especially when the answer is the top Google result for the name.

1. http://www.stuyspec.com/features/how-to-hack-yourself-a-clas...

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