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Admin
I have unsubscribed from the daily wtf after several years of reading.
I thought there was a rule against posting student code.
Admin
The scariest thing is, "That Guy" went on to become POTUS.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/01/03/can-glenn-survive-2013-without-mentioning-‘that-guy’/
Admin
The assignment was to make an android app, or to crudely scrape a source of restaurants with an unrelated language?
Admin
captcha: damnum - damnum stupid for not wearing shoes in a lab setting.
Admin
Which would you rather hire:
A.) "That Guy" who enthusiastically took full initiative to deliver the work, yet obviously has some things to learn about writing good software.
B.) The other guy, whom knowingly allowed someone else to complete the assignment for him despite knowing it would turn out bad, and then waited until the last minute to hack together a quick solution (in perl) to cover his own ass which may or may not have been any better (we have no way to know.
I'd personally take A. He obviously has the drive and at least an average ability to think like a programmer, both of which are harder to teach than improving his coding skills.
Admin
Ok.... ?
Moving on.
Admin
Now you're that guy who reminded me of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWlVOutml-M
Admin
Wouldn't the rule be a suggestion.
In this case, the WTF isn't his code; it's his logic. He incidentally created a DoS attack program.
Admin
Sloppy editing today.
Admin
Also, TRWTF is returning a 503. Obviously, it should be a 418.
Admin
Good lord, you went to college with Marlo Thomas?!? You are an old bugger, aren't you.
Admin
Not to mention that "the classroom computer", with a keyboard, was running Android.
Admin
I wanna see that computer.
Admin
Do Android tablets with keyboard attachments count?
Admin
I'm not quite that old, but I am old enough to understand the reference.
Admin
Yeah, I wondered about that too. Brian and the other members of the group just let this one guy, who they all apparently knew was not particularly competent, take on the entire task? Not only did no one else attempt to assist in any way, but they didn't even bother to check on his progress until the night before the assignment was due? Whatever bad things you can say about That Guy, the rest of the group were pretty foolish and irresponsible. At least TG took some initiative.
Admin
Not to mention we're supposed to believe that as students they had 3 weeks to build a location aware android application with a database it was also up to them to find in a complete "dealers choice" situation as to how to get said data, which almost certainly wouldn't contain lat/long directly?
Even if the level of polish can be orders of magnitude shy of an Urbanspoon, and they were 2nd semester seniors, that's a rough assignment.
Not impossible. We had some doozies, but there's a lot of layers to that onion.
Admin
Do you really think the error messages should differentiate between DoS and DDoS? Is it possible over the course of 3 weeks that the developer had more than just the one IP address?
All the WTFs in this article and that is the part you focused on? C'mon people.
Admin
Because you'll be doing the same with management your whole life.
Admin
perhaps That Guy is actually The President's Daughter
Admin
'The assignment, due in three weeks, was to build an Android application that chose a restaurant at random, given the user’s location. "I suppose you could use Yelp," the professor said, "but I’d look more favorably on more unique solutions."'
Was that really the assignment? If that was the entire spec or even it's essence, then my solution would be simple. Something like:
There, I have randomly selected a restaurant using the user's location.
Admin
Ah, so you're THAT guy.
Admin
I'm rather puzzled by the "querying every 5 minutes" part for several reasons.
Why was it necessary to query every 5 minutes? Presumably once every few days would be sufficient to keep the data current.
Why did he use a cron job to query at all? Why not just query when the user made the request to select a restaurant? Presumably if he's using a cron job than he must be saving the data somewhere, and retrieving it when a request is made. This adds a bunch more work that wouldn't be necessary if he just queried when a request hit.
How did one query every 5 minutes look like a denial-of-service attack to CityEats? Granted it's a lot of requests for this sort of app from one client, but wouldn't that just be a microscopic blip in their logs? It sounds like he's just retrieving one town's worth of restaurant listings each visit, so, maybe dozens of db reads and a couple of pages of output? How many hits do they normally get that one more every 5 minutes crashes their server? And if they're saying that it was a DISTRIBUTED DOS attack, that means that to CityEats this looked like one additional hit every 5 minutes, coming from a variety of IPs at this college? They can't handle one student every 5 minutes from this college using their site?
Maybe the answer to #1 and #2 is "because That Guy is an idiot". But what about #3?
Admin
One of my management professors in college once said that an important skill for a manager is to be able to quickly distinguish the important from the trivial, so that he can concentrate all his time on the trivial.
Admin
Please, show a little sensitivity. I had a son who was That Guy, and I assure you, it was no laughing matter.
Admin
Huh.
All of the vulgar jokes. All of the sexist and racist remarks. All of the meandering, irrelevant arguments about politics, religion, and everything under the sun. All of the lame repeats of a few jokes that weren't that funny to begin with (Irish girl, Paula Bean, president's daughter, etc) But the thing that makes you give up in disgust is because they posted student code?
Admin
My daughter complains about this all the time. And I always reply that this is training for real life. When you get a real job, odds are that you will have no choice but to work with others. And a large percentage of them will be idiots. You need to learn how to make the best of it.
Students are always whining, "When am I ever going to need calculus in real life?" And maybe they won't. Maybe for most it is a sterile, academic exercise. But then you give them an assignment that really does reflect real life, like learning to work on a team that includes idiots, and they whine, "This isn't fair! It's not clean and neat and sterile like other academic exercises!" :-)
Admin
This article is bad and the editing is bad and this site is getting badder and you should feel bad.
Let's try and do better, ok?
captcha: praesent -- This website is praesently going downhill fast.
Admin
I am pretty sure the reason for this is that you will most likely have to face such situations in a work environment. In university you can often chose who you work with, in a company not so much, and if the company decides to hire retards, and decides to have you work with those retards, you are going to need to be able to work with them. Although it is in fact much easier to work alone, any substantial project will require you to work with others, others who might not have the same skillset as you do, and you have to deal with that
Admin
Indeed...
Query on demand is a bad, bad idea. I could just hold down the F5 key (or something similar, depending on whether or not this really is an Android app), and cause a DoS. I'm assuming that the scraping job is pretty heavy, so even running it ten times in a minute probably causes quite the load.
Going through every page one-by-one for every restaurant every five minutes is one hell of a load.
Admin
Wait... you're not the president are you?
You're right... I guess I've been mostly fortunate to work with technical people who I respect, so my view is likely to be a bit biased in that regard.
Still seems a bit harsh though. Especially on the lone shark types.
Admin
Attempt at starting a meme from that stupid sexual harassment TDWTF from a week ago or so. (or I should say the stupid overreaction comment thread)
Admin
(Sorry, I should have been in reply to this ^.)
Attempt at starting a meme from that stupid sexual harassment TDWTF from a week ago or so. (or I should say the stupid overreaction comment thread)
Admin
It's not fair, you keep setting me assignments. But I'm too hungover to do them, except when I'm too drunk to do them. Can it be a bit more like real life?
Admin
Admin
Surely TRWTF is having a group project and letting one person (the one you trust least, apparently) run with it without a contingency plan. If I'd been in a group with 'that guy', I'd be doing it myself (hopefully with the rest of the team) despite the fact he's run off to do it himself.
I'd resent him getting marks for my work, but there's nothing worse than getting shyte marks because some nitwit is incompetent. I'd say TRWTF here is Brian waiting until the last minute before starting to do his own version....oh, and probably not trying to reach 'that guy' to find out where things are at fairly regularly.
I could believe people arguing this point, but when your marks are gonna be affected by El Stupido doing the whole of the groups project then you have little option but do the option yourself (and try to convince the rest of the group to jump on board).
Admin
Admin
Short: Universities create a problem by graduating shitheads, but at least they set up group projects which recognise you'll probably end up working with those fucksticles (and hopefully teach you to cope with them somehow).
Admin
Admin
Admin
Admin
Again, the MySQL API is not part of the language; it's part of the standard library. And the original MySQL API was a very thin wrapper around the C MySQL API.
I'm not even a fan of PHP, but these are just stupid complaints that could be made about a lot of languages and libraries.
Admin
I'm confuse of why people would think of him as wrong for updating every five minutes. I can only think of two reasons. 1) He wanted to account for someone who is constantly moving as being in a different location would change which restaurant is closer. 2) He wanted to account for multiple people using the application to determine if the system can handle a certain amount of people.
Of course, the lesson here is to use mock locations and an offline databases for that for such test.
TRWTF, he fail to edit his program to poll once on activation and possibly on changes of location.
/Devils-advocate
Admin
Admin
Psh. My Software Engineering professor did a pretty darn good job. I think his introduction day to that course went something like:
"Hello. Welcome to Software Engineering. Here, we're going to forget everything we've learned in every other class. You won't be writing for performance or fun; you will be working with a team of people who you probably don't get along with all that well in an attempt to satisfy a client who doesn't know what he wants, and seems to think he told you something different than what he actually did. Who will be that client, you ask? Why, me, of course.
"During class, I am going to be helpful. I will answer questions. I will guide you. I will care for and nurture you.
"Outside of class, I am your client-from-hell. I will change my mind without telling you - you will need to schedule regular meetings with me to make sure that I haven't changed my requirements arbitrarily. I will argue with you about what I actually told you to do - you'd better have a voice recorder at all meetings. I will set impossible deadlines for useless features - you will need to know when to tell me, 'No.' I am basically going to make your life miserable.
"I guarantee you, you will hate me by the end of this semester, but you will love me the first time you have a client or a boss like me - likely at your first job. Now, on to your semester-long project!"
He was right. None of us were happy by the end of that semester. But man, did it help when I got an actual programming job.
Admin
Admin
Admin
Too late now, another stupid meme was bred in thedailywtf-comments-dungeon!
Admin
Admin
FTFY