You seem like a great professor(/“junior baby mini instructor who no one should respect”, knowing American academic titles…). Though as someone whose been on the other end of the podium a bit more recently, I will point out the maybe-obvious:
Of course I can't ensure they aren't just having AI do the projects, but I tell them that if they do that they are cheating themselves
This is the right thing to say, but even the ones who want to listen can get into bad habits in response to intense schedules. When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night… well, I certainly would’ve caved far too much for my own good.
IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race…
For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
Yes, I expect that pressure will be there, and project grades will be near 100% going forward, whether the student did the work or not.
This is why I'm going to in-person written quizzes to differentiate between the students who know the material and those who are just using AI to get through it.
I do seven quizzes during the semester so each one is on relatively recent material and they aren't weighted too heavily. I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz. I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad, so I'm trying to remove that for them.
The quizzes are still somewhat difficult (and fairly frequent) so you have to still get your stuff done (and more consistently than the cramming encouraged by a big midterm/final)
I do spaced repetition in lectures, my homeworks are typically programming problems and, as I said in OP, rely on the student committing to doing them w/o AI. So spaced repetition of the most important topics on quizzes seems reasonable. (It's an experiment this semester)
> When push comes to shove and Multivariate Calculus exam prep needs to happen but you’re stuck debugging frustrating pointer issues for your Data Structures project late into the night…
Millions of students prior to the last few years figured out how to manage conflicting class requirements.
> Millions of students prior to the last few years figured out how to manage conflicting class requirements.
Sure, and they also didn't have an omniscient entity capable of doing all of their work for them in a minute. The point of the GP comment, in my reading, is that the temptation is too great.
Ok well hopefully the new kids just grit their teeth and ignore the changing conditions, then? Surely once we inform them that they should be better people they'll snap out of having personal failings!
I love random folk etymologies, especially when they posit sinister conspiracies along the way -- thanks for the concise correction. Wikipedia confirms on both counts:
According to Ek, the company's title was initially misheard from a name shouted by Lorentzon. Later they conceived a portmanteau of "spot" and "identify".
It also kinda blows my mind how common it is to listen to a ton of Spotify without paying, NGL! It just seems like such an absurd value proposition to me, even now as it matures from its growth days. All music??
In any case they have an agreement with copyright holders. Anna Archive does not.
IP laws are broken, keep extending protection, and do not prevent distribution exclusivity.
I could sell a license to Bob who can sell my arts to you. But I won't give a license to Alice to even be able to enjoy the art for the fee I charged Bob, and I can tell Bob to do the same and not give it away to Alice at any cost. The law would say that's fine, and let's even arrest Bob if he ever sells to Alice.
Great article, thanks for sharing! Lang is a gem, and definitely my fave celebrity Origami artist (what a world). He has a website with both his art and scientific work, for anyone who's curious for more: https://langorigami.com/math-science-posts/
Thanks for the link. Just a minute perusing and I'm already intrigued by a post on something that I had also observed but not thought to frame in quite the same manner: https://langorigami.com/article/optigami/
...whelp, this thread is gonna get shut down. Everyone was being reasonable, but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse.
non-democratic states like north korea
And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too. AFAIR the list of openly non-democratic states is quite small: Saudi Arabia, some microstates like the Holy See, and ~6 non-micro "Executive constitutional monarchies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy#List_o...)
No. It's about iran, so it'll get stuck on the frontpage for a while. If this was about israel, then you'd have point.
> but all it takes is one person to say some out-of-pocket shit like "the country currently massacring protestors is the real democracy" for it to descend below HN's standards for political discourse.
The US has massacred people, even protestors. Are you saying we are not a democracy?
> And FWIW, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is ostensibly a democracy, too.
There is a difference between one claiming to be a democracy and another that actually is. No?
It honestly blows my mind that some people read about a national government killing thousands of protestors in the span of a few days amid a backdrop of decades of authoritarian repression and think "meh, NBD, other countries have done bad things too".
EDIT: But WAY more importantly, c'mon the HN admins are not super biased. I disagree with them on lots of policy decisions, but implying that they're a secret Zionist influence is goofy. They delete political threads of all kinds with gusto unless it's incredibly important or somewhat tech-related.
that is its always Iran/China bad and at the same time they Kidnap a foreign leader and its all wow look how great we are.
I mean... I guess it depends on what you consider "the media"? I certainly don't consume any media that reacted with anything but shock and horror. With CBS under attack I suppose that's fragile, but I think it's important to appreciate the freedoms we do still have. When people say "all the media in AUTHORITARIAN_STATE supports the federal government on IMPORTANT_THING", they don't mean "a plurality of popular TV networks" -- they mean all.
oh the indignity of not having internet for 118 hours, personally didn't have it for much of my childhood
...I think you're coming from a good place, but you're failing to grasp the seriousness of a nation state shutting down telecommunications. Besides the immense power it shows, it also implies a level of desperation and/or severity-of-intent.
It's very, very different than a nation losing access to the internet because of technical issues (or, in your case, because it wasn't invented/popularized yet).
And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.
For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.
For anyone who isn’t aware/remembering, this is certainly made with the security of PyPi in mind, python’s main package repository.
NPM is the other major source of issues (congrats for now, `cargo`!), and TIL that NPM is A) a for-profit startup (??) and B) acquired by Microsoft (????). In that light, this gift seems even more important, as it may help ensure that relative funding differences going forward don’t make PyPi an outsized target!
(Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.)
AFAIU the actual PSF development team is pretty small and focused on CPython (aka language internals), so I’m curious how $750,000/year changes that in the short term…
EDIT: there’s a link below with a ton more info. This gift augments existing gifts from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Citi, and they soft-commit to a cause:
Planned projects include creating new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, improving on the current process of reactive-only review. We intend to create a new dataset of known malware that will allow us to design these novel tools, relying on capability analysis.
> (Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.)
You might be confusing the Python Steering Council - responsible for leadership of Python language development - with the PSF non-profit there.
The PSF is lead by a full-time executive director who has no other affiliation, plus an elected board of unpaid volunteer directors (I'm one of them).
Microsoft employees occasionally get voted into the board, but there is a rule to make sure a single company doesn't have more than 2 representatives on the board at any one time,
The board also elects a chair/president - previously that was Dawn Wages who worked at Microsoft for part of that time (until March 2025 - Dawn was chair up to October), today it's Jannis Leidel from Anaconda.
Meanwhile the Python steering council is entirely separate from the PSF leadership, with their own election mechanism voted on by Python core contributors. They have five members, none of whom currently work for Microsoft (but there have been Microsoft employees in the past.)
Wow, I didn't know you got a spot on the board, that's a great choice on their part! Thanks for giving your time.
Yes, I was talking about Wages -- the day-to-day is surely complex, but I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper. I will grant that I used "running", which is quite unclear in hindsight! "Responsible for" or "leading" seems more accurate.
She seemed great as policymaker and person, but when I last checked her job was literally to be Microsoft's Python community liason, and that just struck me as... dangerous? On the nose? Giving the reigns to someone from a for-profit, $1.5B corporation whose entire business depends directly upon the PSF's work also seems like an odd choice. Again, I'm sure they're great as an individual, and during normal operations there's no competing interests so it's fine. It's just...
I guess I just have a vision for the non-profit org guiding the world's most popular programming language that doesn't really mesh with the reality of open source funding as it exists today, at the end of the day; the "no 2 representatives from the same company" rule seems like a comforting sign that they(/y'all!) share that general philosophy despite the circumstances.
Us board members voted to put Dawn in that position.
The position doesn't have much additional power at all - the chair spends a little more time with the executive director and gets to set the agenda for the board meetings, but board actions still require a vote from the board.
If we felt like an employee of a specific company was abusing their position on the PSF board we would take steps to address that. Thankfully I've seen no evidence of that from anyone during my time on the board.
If anything it's the opposite: board members are very good about abstaining from votes that their employer might have an interest in.
> I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper.
That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.
Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.
There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.
Nodding along with everything you wrote here, but one minor point for anyone who might read the bylaws and get confused. https://www.python.org/psf/bylaws/
> Section 5.15. Limits on Co-affiliation of Board Members. No more than one quarter (1/4) of the members of the Board of Directors may share a common affiliation as defined in Section 5.14.
The PSF allows three board members to share an affiliation, 13 seats * 0.25 ~= 3.25.
BTH, that's one too many, and I helped write/recommend the original language. When I was on the board, three felt like too many, even though everyone was wonderful, and it was Google, not Microsoft, that hit the limit.
The DSF (Django Software Foundation) recently adopted a two-person limit, which I recommend more boards consider.
A) I'm assuming you meant "TBH", but please correct me if I have an acronym to learn.
B) Hacker news is crazy -- I didn't expect to spawn a thread that would get responses from actual board members, ex- or otherwise! I'd like to take a brief moment deep down into this thread to echo what I said to Simon above: thanks for giving your valuable time to help grow the best programming language & community to ever exist :)
...ok I guess I grant that technically the leader of the board is not the board itself, but that feels a bit pedantic. A prime minister/speaker of the house/etc. isn't the unitary executive of that chamber wielding absolute power, but they are still obviously the leader.
I assume you have more experience than me in corporate governance, but this is such a fundamental truth that I've just gotta stick to my guns. The executives serve at the pleasure of the board. That's what the board is.
Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.
Well, besides the compliments I paid her above, no I do not. I don't think you're right to be offended at the implication that anyone could be coerced into putting their 6-figure job ahead of the non-profit they serve in the right circumstances, but TBH the worry of unconscious bias is just as real and doesn't require any ethical breaches.
There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again.
As I said above: I don't think there's evidence of any significant conflicts of interest so far, either from Microsoft, Anaconda, or any other firm. That said, I hope I can at least convince you that comparing concerns about corruption to a belief in a trivially-false scientific claim is going too far:
The fact of the matter is that the senior-most member of an important non-profit was/is employed in a lucrative, full-time, relatively open-ended role by a firm whose profits depend directly on the work of that non-profit. There's no accusations in that statement, and thus no room for it to be written off as a conspiracy theory.
In terms of why it matters: wouldn't it at least deserve a raised eyebrow if, say...
- The chair of the WHO was employed by J&J?
- The chair of the ACLU was employed by a political party?
- The chair of Make-A-Wish was employed by a Hollywood agency?
Microsoft was serious about supporting Python as far back as 2006, because IronPython was a real effort in Redmond. (I'm wondering how they think of it now.)
IMO the natural fix is to expand your trusting, “this is for you” approach to the broader undergrad experience, but I can’t imagine how frustrating it is to be trying to adapt while admin & senior professors refuse to reconsider the race for a “””prestigious””” place in a meta-rat race…
For now, I guess I’d just recommend you try to think of ways to relax things and separate project completion from diligence/time management — in terms of vibes if not a 100% mark. Some unsolicited advice from a rando who thinks you’re doing great already :)
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