This is one of those important events in life where you realise that sometimes those who hold seniority over you aren't necessarily as smart as you are. This experience will help you to cultivate a healthy disrespect for authority. We all go through something like this at some point.
The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)
Hey kids (and everyone else) if you're even remotely familiar with tech and you don't stay completely siloed in one space - very extremely frequently you will encounter people "above you" in the chain who are comparatively complete idiots re tech.
You will have to think carefully about how to proceed when you discover this, it's going to be a constant and consistent question of -- "at this stage, is it worth it for me to press this?"
I like this approach and is one reason I’m cynical about organizations that run these types of events where the staff have no practical knowledge. There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.
The fact that this challenge doesn’t have a decision maker who knows that GitHub can host as well as template sites and differentiate between the two is a good sign of incompetence.
It’s so cool that kids are doing these challenges and I wish they didn’t have to get cynical and review the challenge before participating. One thing I look for is who is on the review committee or board. If it’s people with good backgrounds, that’s a good sign. If it’s faceless or people with no background in the topic, then I advise avoiding.
> There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.
Ah yes the "Thanks for the record breaking quarter everyone, enjoy these 4 $5 Hot n Ready pizzas and two bottles of Coke" event.
That is a super good idea, some of our posts have taken off and we have even been contacted by the vp of developer relations for github. I'll contact the rest of the group and see what they think. Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.
>> The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking. Where has the real spirit of innovation gone? The hacker ethics [0]?
> Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.
It's your decision, but I say build your own. You've built an audience, already have outreach into the community and a good story.
> Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking
Yeah that was sad to see :(
I like the attitude that if you don't like the rules, go and make your own thing where you can choose your own rules and not be constrained by those of other people. That's basically the origin story for a lot of successful entrepreneurs.
Maybe the lesson is just that competitions tends to have arbitrary rules and limitations. If you think the rules are stupid, don't participate in the competition.
The rule in question bans template generators. Their teacher didn’t understand that just because you can technically copy a template off of GitHub doesn’t mean that is the only thing GitHub is for.
She then points out this rule in the Official Rulebook:
I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
You only use the template engine if you go through github.io or if you look at .md files in the UI.
So you are not even «technically» using the template engine part of Github.
However root commenters sentiment is still very valid, the sooner you realize how many people who are not particularly smart also work in this business the sooner :D
Developers are starting to become a pretty decent average representation of the population the later years after all.
~~Technically is still processed via Jekyll. To bypass Jekyll you need to add `.nojekyll` on root. Something the authors found out themselves after someone on reddit told them about it. (Not that it would change anything.)~~
edit: On second thought that's probably wrong.
>They did not use the template engine functionality.
Regardless the rule was clear. "No Github." Yes, it's bullshit*. But this should be argued before making the submission.
*Rule also includes Replit. What's even funnier? "Frameworks, such as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress" are allowed. So using a template engine is bad but using a CMS is fine.
> The rule didn't say some parts of Github was okay, the rule said Github was not allowed.
The rule is clearly written with the mistaken belief that GitHub is a templating engine. The person that judged their submission also confirmed their misunderstanding.
I'm not sure what type of competitions you've been a part of, but I have seen several where the rules are changed or re-interpreted on the fly because someone pointed out an error in the instructions or rules.
> I'm not sure what type of competitions you've been a part of, but I have seen several where the rules are changed or re-interpreted on the fly because someone pointed out an error in the instructions or rules.
Yeah, and if they pointed it out before the competition ended, that would count as "on the fly".
Flagging it as erroneous, ambiguous or similar after you are disqualified for breaking it is something I've never seen before, and I guess neither have you.
> Yeah, and if they pointed it out before the competition ended, that would count as "on the fly".
"On the fly" includes after initial disqualification or final results. In some cases it is not possible or desirable to change the winners, but the competition organizers nevertheless admitted the fault and did their best to compensate the team. The organizers of this competition seemingly have done nothing.
The medium post states they submitted their website on the weekend and received no notification that they were disqualified until they reached out to the regional coordinator. At that point, several days had already gone by and the judging was completed. How do you propose they should have handled the situation when they had no idea they were disqualified until after the competition ended?
> > Flagging it as erroneous, ambiguous or similar after you are disqualified for breaking it is something I've never seen before, and I guess neither have you.
I went to an all-day CTF where a team retroactively went from last place to third or second place because the organizers realized the team approached the challenge in a way that wasn't technically allowed but followed the spirit of the competition. The team was promptly notified of the initial judges decisions and had an opportunity to state their case, which was deliberated amongst the staff and accepted.
These high school students, who spent months working on this project, were not given the same opportunity.
Smartness has nothing to do with project requirements. If the requirements say "no Github", you don't use Github. It's really that simple.
The rules don't specify "github.io" or "load .md files", it broadly specifies "Github" the website "that generate[s] HTML from text" in no uncertain terms. If you then proceed to use Github, it's only fair you are disqualified.
No, in fact the rules specify a "Github" among others as examples of "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files" that you are "NOT permitted" (their emphasis) to use.
Translating that into practical terms, it means "no Github", and also "no Jekyll" and all the other examples named and not named.
The Internet also allows such behavior so really it shouldn't have been allowed to use the Internet either.
A reasonable person would realize the key part is "Template engine" and would think they are okay as long as they avoid those. They did avoid that, and still got disqualified. That is why it isn't reasonable
And such a person after being disqualified should learn their lesson to read and understand the rules thoroughly.
The rule in question even distinguishes between "Template engine websites" and "sites that generate HTML"; if you refuse to read beyond the first comma you are being disingenuous let alone being ignorant.
As an aside, "the internet" doesn't automagically generate HTML for you. Unless I missed a memo and we can just get HTML by sticking a cable into the wall. :V
> The rules don't specify "github.io" or "load .md files", it broadly specifies "Github" the website "that generate[s] HTML from text" in no uncertain terms.
And that's just not true; the no-GitHub-whatsoever interpretation that you're pushing simply can't be described as "no[t] uncertain". In fact, I'd wager that a polling would reveal that most folks in a position to interpret the rules would come away quite certain that it isn't forbidden to use GitHub qua code host.
GitHub qua "template engine website" is "NOT permitted". That's certain.
GitHub qua code host? Not only is that, in fact, not stated "in no uncertain terms", but insisting that it's both forbidden and that it's clear that it's forbidden comes across as trying to will your way to truth.
You are not permitted to use sites that generate HTML, period. Even if you use a "site that generates HTML" like Github only as a file repository, that is still against the rule.
Your argument would be fair if the rule read like "using sites, such as Github, to generate HTML are not permitted", but that is not what the rule says.
I am not quibbling about whether the no-GitHub-whatsoever interpretation is an unreasonable interpretation of what's in the rules. I am specifically raising the issue of the hyperbolic and inappropriate use of the phrase "in no uncertain terms" in what you wrote.
Following the rules didn't help them. The rule was no templating tools that generate code. They didn't use that.
It simply seems like they had to deal with a school official who was too dumb to know what GitHub was and too egotistical to admit they might be wrong.
I actually dealt with something similar back in my high school days. I self-taught myself to program starting around age 10 or so. So by the time I was offered and took a "computer class" that had some programming in it in high school, I already knew what I was doing. Far better than the teacher in the class. Every project in the class I found very easy and did perfectly within the parameters requested, often time going way beyond the requirements. The teacher didn't like one bit that I was far exceeding her capabilities and the level expected and would find every excuse to mark me down. Her favorite excuse was to take issue with my comments (where I didn't explain every obvious line of code in verbose text). I barely passed the class.
After that, I changed my mind and decided I wouldn't study computer science in university, instead deciding to skip school altogether. Eventually did go to university after a gap year, but to study design instead. I was completely turned off from learning CS by this one teacher and it dramatically changed the course of life after. I did continue coding and ended up building some cool stuff, including a couple startups before switching to venture capital.
Hopefully for these kids it'll be a trigger for positive change too.
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted.
With Jekyll being there, I can only assume the intention was to mention GitHub Pages as an example, but as it is the rules clearly say using GitHub is NOT permitted. They could've questioned this discrepancy before the competition while reading the rules before starting, and at the very least just not mention using GitHub.
I'm not a web design professional, but they appear to have used it 3 ways-- 1) hosting and URL; 2) GitHub logo/branding on the footer and 3) back office collaboration tool.
I suspect it was uses #1 and #2 that generated the confusion, and while I am sympathetic to their feelings about the competition and DQ, I too might have been confused about whether they leveraged a "Wix-like" function to generate the page.
To you and me it seems obvious, but to someone less familiar the rules clearly say using Github is prohibited, even if it is for the wrong reasons. At that point you should either get clarification of the rules, or take the risk and end up in the situation OP is in now.
Reminds me of my cryptography class in college. Before taking the class I had written a peer to peer encrypted messaging tool for fun and to learn about encryption. It had its own handshake, custom RSA, AES, ephemeral messages, tooling to discover peers...
Anyway in the last year of my CS degree I had a class on encryption, got barely a passing grade on the exam. One of the questions I remember was "What color is the lock in the address bar of Google Chrome that indicates a website is encrypted?", there were a bunch of others like that.
> Rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed,
Contra, "rules" are only effective when they are enforced, and when push comes to shove, most of the keepers of the rules will just discard them when it gets in the way of things they really care about.
Getting the enforcers of stupid rules to waive away rules so things can get done is a valuable skill in anyone's tool chest.
In the article's case, the teacher was being a pain. He didn't consult the team when the disqualifying issue was found, nor did he consult with the TSA to clarify or get an exemption from the rule. The real lesson is to avoid or work around these types of people in any endeavor, they don't want to work with ppl to advance the cause of their organisation, they just love their rules.
> These young people learned a very important lesson: Rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed, even if they don't make any sense.
That is very obviously not the case, seeing how they literally followed the rules.
This isn't a case of pointless rules being senselessly enforced, it's a case of a teacher erroneously enforcing a rule they did not understand in a case where it did not apply.
> That is very obviously not the case, seeing how they literally followed the rules.
They followed the spirit of the rules rather than the letter, because Github was explicitly mentioned as one of the banned templating engines. Had they used an unlisted templating engine, they might have gotten away with it.
Github obviously does not belong in that list, but to the busibodies at the contest, that's irrelevant.
Even if we assume that Github is a templating engine, you also have to recognize that it is also a content hosting platform. Hosting content on github does not in any way indicate that said content also came from github, or any other template package.
This is yet another example of "authorities" making tech rulings without even a basic understanding of the technology they are trying to ban/permit/legislate/tax/etc.
Absolutely. The rule and enforcement of the rule are entirely stupid, but the rule does explicitly mention Github, and that does make this disqualification strictly according to the letter of the law, despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. It's busibody bureaucrats exerting power over something they don't understand.
"Microsoft" is not listed as banned, "Github" is. Like I said, it's stupid, it's unreasonable, it's unfair, it makes no sense, but Github is listed as banned. Clearly by someone who doesn't understand it, and the judge who didn't understand it either just blindly disqualified them for explicitly using Github.
I'm not saying any of this is good; it obviously isn't. But the stupid ruling is entirely justifiable by the letter of the stupid rules. Github was explicitly listed as banned. Stupid, but that's the way it is.
It's good that students learn this lesson now than later.
Right now they get to learn these lessons with no skin off their backs. They're kids, most of the stuff they do is of no consequence one way or another.
Once they enter the real world and the workforce, they get to learn these lessons with prices ranging from reprimands to terminations. Hardly a fun thing to go through.
People have been using this argument against me since I was a child: "this is good for you because the big bad world will crush you", but frankly I thought it was nonsense back then and I still do.
The world is not filled with teacher-type people who will crush you for breaking rules. The world is filled with people who want to get things done, and know that the rules are only there to facilitate getting things done. If the rules get in the way to getting things done, they are ignored.
I see someone doesn't actually have to follow any legal regulations in their line of work.
After your 12th hour straight in an IT call with a bank trying to fix a simple issue multiple compliance officers are on the call all fighting each other, you come to realize the nightmare teacher types do exist.
If you ignore the legal regulations that don't make sense, maybe you'll get fired and end up working at a better job that doesn't have those regulations.
If enough people ignore the regulations, they'll become unenforceable. It's always a good thing to break rules you don't like.
Depends on the work bubble you're in, I've definitely seen places where following asinine rules tempted getting shit done because of the power of gave the enforcer and the disconnect they had themselves from the results of success.
Mostly.gov but some private places that are big enough without true oversight as well
The world is filled with both types of people. There are absolutely people who will crush you for breaking rules, for the sake of enforcing the rules, regardless of validity.
We should foster a world full of people who use their brains to interpret rules.
If we're going to blindly do something because "it's the exact rule written here" then we might as well replace all decision makers with an AI that never interprets anything.
Their teacher was wrong for not interpreting the rules correctly - everyone's aware of that. On top of that the people writing those rules were wrong as well for either assuming that teachers would interpret them correctly, or not being more explicit when writing them.
It's a competition that includes writing code as a team: one of the main things you'd want them to do is to use git and thus a website like Github.
> We should foster a world full of people who use their brains to interpret rules.
It's a competition. Competitions have rules, some of which are simply artificial barriers because of "competition". You can work to change the rules before agreeing to them.
If you disagree that a rule makes sense, provide your disagreement before entering.
Waiting until after you have found to have broken the rules you agreed to, to whine is simply unsporting and childish.
If the rule-breaker is not disqualified, it's unfair to the other participants who worked under those onerous rules to compete only to find out that one participant did less work by breaking a rule.
It’s not that easy. The problem with letting enforcers use judgment is it leads to selective enforcement, where the criteria becomes “who broke the rules” as much as “were rules broken.”
It opens the door to all sorts of bad outcomes. For instance, being a good debater/lawyer becomes at least as important as being a good coder.
I’m not saying judgment has no place, just that it’s not a panacea. It has its own unfairness.
You really can't get anymore explicit than "sites that
generate HTML from text ... such as ... GitHub ... are NOT permitted."
They even emphasized the "NOT" in "NOT permitted" to try and drive the point home for the particularly dense: You are not allowed to use Github, and all the others, period.
Is excluding Github okay? If you ask me, that question is irrelevant. The contest is about making a website by hand, nothing more and nothing less. This is an artificial environment and situation, and you either accept the rules and play by them or don't accept them and go elsewhere.
Incidentally, if you really, really want to use Github in spite of the rules forbidding you: You can just as easily do all your work on Github, even get Github to generate the HTML for you, then take all the results and upload it onto some web hosting server and just not mention you used Github anywhere.
Nobody would be the wiser and you successfully broke the rules you found so objectional (read: cheated, but nobody will know).
> You really can't get anymore explicit than "sites that generate HTML from text ... such as ... GitHub ... are NOT permitted."
> Is excluding Github okay? If you ask me, that question is irrelevant. The contest is about making a website by hand, nothing more and nothing less. This is an artificial environment and situation, and you either accept the rules and play by them or don't accept them and go elsewhere.
It's not irrelevant: it's the crux of the issue. The rule was clearly written by someone that lacks in-depth technical skills and is nonsensical. Ask yourself: would they have been disqualified if they used GitLab?
Saying "oh well that's the rules" is an awful attitude and does not prepare people for the "real world". The real world is full of people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and like to swing around their authority. If you aren't able or willing to correct demands from people who are blatantly incompetent in a low stakes high-school competition, you're not going to have a valuable or fulfilling career.
> It's not irrelevant: it's the crux of the issue. The rule was clearly written by someone that lacks in-depth technical skills and is nonsensical.
That's irrelevant - all the other competitors had to labour under the burden of the rules, allowing one of the competitors to violate the rules gives that competitor an unfair advantage.
If you want to remove a rule that is nonsensical, you do it before you compete, you don't try to get it removed after you have gotten an unfair advantage by breaking it, because they it is too late for the other competitors to get the same advantage.
it is kind of irrelevant, because we don't know anything about the process that led to GitHub being included on the list. Could be lack of technical knowledge as you pointed out, but could as easily be an admin problem, or any other operational problems with clearing submissions, or something else.
> it is kind of irrelevant, because we don't know anything about the process that led to GitHub being included on the list.
The inclusion of GitHub, as written, is clearly either a mistake or the product of ignorance.
The students revealed that they spoke to the person who'd judged their submission, and that the judge doubled-double that they thought GitHub was a solely a temptation engine.
> We were finally able to talk to our school's CTE(Career and Technology) director and explain our situation. I told her about our website and how we were accused of cheating, even though we provided a public GitHub repo containing the history of the project. She then revealed that she had actually judged our project and explained that it was disqualified for using "GitHub, the templating engine"(Yes, she called GitHub a templating engine). She then pointed me to this rule: ...
The inclusion of Github is not a mistake, because Github[1] cites Jekyll[2] (another named example) as a feature and provides features (web hosting and design tools) similar to another example named: Webs[3].
Would it be more prudent to list "Github Pages" as the named example instead of Github? Possibly, being more specific is never a bad thing. However, the organizers deemed it appropriate to just prohibit all of Github for one reason or another, perhaps for sake of brevity since they only have so much time to judge all the entries.
Whatever the reasoning, the question is ultimately irrelevant. This is a contest, with rules to simulate an artificial environment under which the contestants agree to compete. If the organizers say "no Github", then no Github it shall be; if you don't like it you don't have to enter and compete.
> The inclusion of Github is not a mistake, because Github[1] cites Jekyll[2] (another named example) as a feature and provides features (web hosting and design tools) similar to another example named: Webs[3].
> Would it be more prudent to list "Github Pages" as the named example instead of Github?
It is a mistake because GitHub is first and foremost a platform for hosting code and collaborating. Jekyll is an optional feature in a tiny portion of GitHub's product catalog. Even if they specifically said "GitHub Pages" (which they didn't, so your argument is moot), that would still ignore the fact that Pages <> template generation. The page you link even references that you can use a generator but do not have to:
) Ready to get started? Build your own site from scratch or generate one for your project.
So better written rules would say "template generators like Wix or GitHub Pages using Jekyll are NOT permitted" Do you acknowledge how significantly that changes the interpretation of the rules and how poorly written they are in their current form?
‐--------
Edit: not to mention that the rule is explicitly in the context of template generation. Nowhere do they say "no GitHub (the VCS platform)" as you keep falsely claiming, the rules say "no GitHub (the temptation site)" which is a very different thing.
) H. Framework systems, such as Drupal, Joomla,
Wordpress, Bootstrap, or other current technologies
may be used; however, pre-built templates and
themes for these sites are not permissible. If a
framework system is used, a statement affirming
that the template or theme used on the framework
was built by the team must be posted on an “About”
section or page.
) I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
It's broader than you think. It's "sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files".
Which GitHub does. Hell, even their project right now does it. Because README.md gets translated by GitHub.
But that's cool, because that's just the readme. It won't be on the site site. So GitHub only if you use the repository part. No GitHub pages. Well, no GitHub pages, or if you do, .nojekyll, and README.md is ok, but only if it's not actually part of the site site.
The question is do you start carving out all of these exceptions for GitHub or do you just cut it out entirely. I don't want to deal with that for every single fucking entry. No. This is a high school design competition, I'm not dedicating that kind of time to it. No hosting on GitHub, end of story.
>Ask yourself: would they have been disqualified if they used GitLab?
Does Gitlab generate HTML from text files of some description like Github (eg: README.md -> HTML-formatted presentation)?
If so, yes. If not, no.
Github is only named as one of many potential examples of "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files". Ergo, anything that automagically generates HTML is "NOT permitted".
>If you aren't able or willing to correct demands from people who are blatantly incompetent in a low stakes high-school competition, you're not going to have a valuable or fulfilling career.
Two problems:
1. Kids are still learning. By definition they have no idea nor standing to judge what is competent and what isn't; they flat out /don't know yet/. You need real world experience under your belt if you want to go around declaring rights and wrongs.
2. The students completely missed their mark in how to bring about their objections. They should have read the rules beforehand and brought up questions and objections with the staff before the contest began. You don't complain about this long after the fact, and going off on tangents only worsens your standing.
Perhaps this is adequate encouragement for them NOT to join the work force? Why is being an employee and following arbitrary rules set by less intelligent people than oneself the default way to be a productive citizen?
Smart kids should start a business, and when this inevitably fails, try again. We no longer need an army of rule-worshippers like during the industrial revolution. Learning to reconcile oneself to repeated business failure is psychologically easier and much more valuable to society than becoming a cubicle dweller.
"Workforce" applies to both employers and employees, and employers are still beholden to regulations, contracts, and other requirements mandated from customers and regulatory bodies.
Rule-following constitutes probably less than 1% of what most entrepreneurs do.
Furthermore, mindless rule-following played a rule in essentially every bad human-caused historical event.
Even in checklist-heavy professions like air transport, lots of emphasis is placed on interrogating and understanding those rules thoroughly. I mean even lawyers, the profession that’s ABOUT rules, talk all day long anout the interpretation of and reason for each rule.
The key to the future is people who take ownership of problems, rather than rigidly offloading all cognition to a list of diktats concocted by someone of dubious ability.
That's not the lesson, the lesson is not to become someone like the person who disqualified them down the line. People who have rules instead of brains don't really belong in civil society!
Thank god these people and their ardent supporters aren’t cops. Can you imagine if some clown ticketed you for one of those anachronistic or nonsense laws that are still on the books in some places, like the infamous “ice cream” laws.
Maybe if they did follow rules, I wouldn't have gotten a ticket for "failing to display a front license plate" on a vehicle that had a front license plate...
That's a good parallel to draw. Far too many people believe that the police are always right and you must comply with any demands, no matter how unlawful or nonsensical.
Always hard to tell whether the sarcasm tag is missing. But the entirety of startup culture is "what if we didn't follow these rules that don't make sense". Sometimes you get a failure, sometimes you get spectacular success, and sometimes it dumps a problem on someone else.
But mindless rule-following, however inevitable it is, is also organizational poison. That's how you get situations where you're "doing everything right" but everyone - shareholders, staff, customers - ends up unhappy.
I’m just going to eat the down votes because I know teachers in real life. And they have plenty of things to do besides running a competition. As a group they don’t deserve the flak.
You can’t be so reductive.
This is a competition. This is not a startup. Competitions have rules. There is no evidence that the rules were withheld from these students. There is no evidence that the other kids were judged by different standards. There are probably other kids that read things carefully thought “that’s bullshit” and got on with it because they wanted to win. They could have read the requirements and challenged the rules before things got started in a public forum in an effort to get it changed because it was a bad rule.
Are people here really arguing that they should be given an advantage over the other kids in a competition, because these kids kicked up a fuss? Even Djokovic didn’t get a free pass. And the Norwegian volley ball team were prepared to pay fines and potential disqualification.
Yes, but blind application of rules without context isn't the way. Even courts have to take the original intent behind laws into account.
> I know teachers in real life. And they have plenty of things to do besides running a competition
How does that prevent them from knowing what Github is, as the "person in charge of tech education" at that school? Nobody demands they keep up with every trend but someone able to disqualify teams in a web design competition should probably know one of the 5 most visited development websites in the world.
These teachers crushed some students. They 100% deserve the flak.
If they teach math and can't add or teach english and can't read then they deserve the flak. If a teacher doesn't know the difference between hosting a site and using a template they shouldn't be teaching Computer courses.
Showing kids that the rules are enforced by ignorant people is an excellent lesson. Squashing hope early is a great way to educate the young.
Nope, they learned that stupid rules are there to be broken, just you have to be aware of the consequences and be prepared to fight and sometimes lose.
The students were neither ignorant nor arrogant for interpreting the rules as they did. The person who graded their submission is at fault here, and the students deserve to be told this if they’re reading these comments.
Someone who doesn’t know the difference between hosting a git repo and generating a static site with GitHub is unqualified to judge this project. The real lesson for these students is that there are people in this field who don’t really know what they are doing.
> The person who graded their submission is at fault here,
How? The competitors who adhere to the rules are necessarily disadvantaged compared to the rule-breakers.
How do you now fairly judge a competition when you change the rules after the game has ended? There is no other way to resolve a breaking of a rule other than by disqualification, because if you remove that rule after the game has ended then all the other competitors have worked harder (because they avoided breaking that rule) and will be judged next to the rule-breaker who worked less.
You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github".
And to be even more clear: the stupidity is in complaining about a rule after the game has ended.
Nowhere is this acceptable behaviour - you can complain about the rules before starting the game, you can try to get it changed, you can boycott the game, you can spread awareness ... but when you complain only when you were caught out, then that disqualification is soundly deserved.
> You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github"
You're right, it isn't fair if students were denied the use of industry-standard tools because of the technical incompetence of the competitions administrators falsely believing GitHub is a website generator. Sure, the students are obviously miffed that they were disqualified, but they were obviously following the spirit of the competition.
I hope this rule is amended and further clarified so that it's fair in the future. As it stands, it's very clear that the rule was written by someone who doesn't know what GitHub is and not by someone who doesn't want version control to be used.
) We were finally able to talk to our school's CTE(Career and Technology) director and explain our situation. I told her about our website and how we were accused of cheating, even though we provided a public GitHub repo containing the history of the project. She then revealed that she had actually judged our project and explained that it was disqualified for using "GitHub, the templating engine"(Yes, she called GitHub a templating engine). She then pointed me to this
rule: ...
What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.
I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.
> What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.
If there was no advantage, then the students looked at the rules and said "Yup, those don't apply to us" and proceeded to break them?
It's a competition!
ALL the rules in competition are more or less artificial; that doesn't mean that competitors should expect to break them with no penalty.
> I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.
If it gave them no advantage then they shouldn't have risked their entry being disqualified by using github.
It was a pointless risk for no gain, from the way you say it.
Are they not? The rules clearly state "no Github", and when confronted with that fact their response is "it's stupid" and to go off on tangents about Github this and Github that.
That's being ignorant of the rules, and being arrogant when you are told to abide them next time.
I actually learned the opposite of what you're preaching in school. I struggled to shorten a report to meet requirements. A friend of mine was 10 pages over the limit and went on to win a laptop with his report.
Some rules are more akin to guidelines, turns out. It's not unreasonable to interpret this instances' rule as "no templates" rather than "no GitHub".
The rule is: "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ..."
Followed by an inexhaustive list of examples: "such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit ... "
Finally closing off with a strongly emphasized: " ... are NOT permitted."
No matter the interpretation, you're not supposed to use something that can automagically generate HTML, which Github absolutely is one such example. Whether you "only" use Github as a file repository is irrelevant, you are not allowed to use Github, nor all the others, nor examples not named.
For what it's worth, I will point out that Rule G (permits use of "state-of-the-art web-based applications") and Rule H (permits selective use of Wordpress, Joomla, et al.) are in conflict with Rule I (this rule) because such tools and underlying tools like PHP and JavaScript are "tools that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files". If rules should be reconsidered, they are Rules G and H.
Sometimes rules are poorly written, outdated or straight up mistaken.
I doubt the original intent of the rule was to disallow GitHub as a collaboration tool since it's the largest coding collaboration tool out there. It's even its primary use case .
Interpreting the rule as what it meant to be seems appropriate to me. The world isn't as rigid as you paint it to be.
If you were to really code a website without tools capable of generating html from text you'd find yourself coding with pen and paper.
"Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted."
That rule is NOT clear; it implies that Github is forbidden specifically as a "site that generates HTML". There's no reason to interpret it as meaning that you can't even link to a service that happens to provide templating and HTML generation, and which you are actually using only as a SCCS.
I would certainly interpret that rule as meaning that you can't use template engines or HTML generators. Which they didn't. I would not interpret it as meaning that you can't use anything provided by a service that ALSO supports templating and code generation. The teacher was a dick.
The rule is "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ... are NOT permitted." and goes on to mention an inexhaustive list of examples which names Github among others.
That is abundantly clear you cannot use Github.
If you didn't read the rules, that's ignorance. If you read the rules and knowingly violate them, that's arrogance. If you unintentionally violate the rules but rebuff fair judgments as stupid, that's also arrogance. If you argue pedantics to try and find loopholes, you're an asshole.
It boggles the mind why "no Github" is such a controversial point.
> The rule is "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ... are NOT permitted." and goes on to mention an inexhaustive list of examples which names Github among others.
> That is abundantly clear you cannot use Github.
This would be like calling someone ignorant and arrogant because they were browsing hackernews at school and a clueless administrator thought it was a criminal website.
> This would be like calling someone ignorant and arrogant because they were browsing hackernews at school and a clueless administrator thought it was a criminal website.
Well if the school specifically forbid Hackernews, and mentioned it by name in the list of forbidden sites ....
"Sorry, the rules clearly state that you can't browse websites that promote hacking or other criminal behaviour, like hackernews. It doesn't matter that HN isn't actually a criminal website, we must always unquestioningly follow rules."
> "Sorry, the rules clearly state that you can't browse websites that promote hacking or other criminal behaviour, like hackernews. It doesn't matter that HN isn't actually a criminal website, we must always unquestioningly follow rules."
It's childish and immature, in a competition, to question the rules only after you have been caught breaking them.
I never said rules should not be questioned, I said that you should question them before agreeing to them, not after you have been caught.
> It's childish and immature, in a competition, to question the rules only after you have been caught breaking them.
How is it childish and immature? They were clearly following the spirit of the competition.
Furthermore there is no indication anywhere, unless I missed it, that they were cognizant of that specific rule prior to the competition. Perhaps they saw "no template generators" and didn't pay attention to the examples. Even if they specifically knew that GitHub was mentioned, they could have reasonably assumed that the rule specifically referred to its tenplating features and that they were fine.
> Even if they specifically knew that GitHub was mentioned, they could have reasonably assumed that the rule specifically referred to its tenplating features and that they were fine.
You cannot claim it's a reasonable interpretation when no other competitor, nor the person who wrote that rule, nor the person who adjudicated that rule ... thought that.
Sure, to you and me, we know what the intent must have been, but you cannot change the rules after the competition has ended because that is unfair to all the other competitors who abided by the rules.
> You cannot claim it's a reasonable interpretation when no other competitor, nor the person who wrote that rule, nor the person who adjudicated that rule ... thought that.
You're just throwing around blind speculation. The students didn't even know they were disqualified until they reached out to the regional coordinator, how would you (an uninvolved third party) know if anyone else was disqualified or the thoughts of any of the staff?
Edit: we also don't know what the person who wrote the rule meant because the students were only allowed to talk to the person who graded their submission and made the mistake in the first place. It's possible the person who wrote the rules meant "template generation features on GitHub" but just wrote it poorly. The rule in question is within the context of template generation, not VCS or anything else.
) H. Framework systems, such as Drupal, Joomla,
Wordpress, Bootstrap, or other current technologies
may be used; however, pre-built templates and
themes for these sites are not permissible. If a
framework system is used, a statement affirming
that the template or theme used on the framework
was built by the team must be posted on an “About”
section or page.
) I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
I'm more than okay with a little unfairness if it means stupid garbage rules like that can be removed, even retroactively. If I had to suffer through emailing source code back and forth with my collaborators because version control was banned, I would be beyond caring. Taking a competition so seriously that you prioritize "unfairness" over such blatant stupidity is far more childish than anything in the article.
> It boggles the mind why "no Github" is such a controversial point.
The rule gives a list of examples that are not allowed because they generate HTML.
It seems clear to me that you shouldn’t use these tools for HTML generation.
This is the spirit of the rule, if not the letter.
No reasonable person would interpret this to mean that you cannot use Github to host your source, because it has no bearing on the competition whatsoever.
You're going to need to cite a source for that one, skipper.
On the (what appears at this point to be the not unreasonable) chance that you just made that up, and on the topic of what not to do: false quotes on HN.
> You're going to need to cite a source for that one, skipper.
This comes pretty close: making fun of the person who enforced the rule that GitHub is not allowed:
> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for hosting code collaboration and version control through Git, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer.
That's not a quote. Where can the words "it's stupid" be found?
Here, let me show you a quote:
> > lecturing everyone "No, you really want to have 0 risk, you fools"
> On HN, please don't use quotation marks that make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. It may seem a minor point, but we've found that it's important for clarity and respect.
See, if you're going to make fun of someone because you think that they are ignorant of some piece of tech, then people are going to point out that you're no smarter, when you were ignorant of the rules.
Not to let your attempt to change the subject and retreat to the motte from the bailey go unnoticed, but I wonder: who is it that you think you're replying to?
I'll quote rules and other such things verbatim for accuracy, but I'm not going to quote entire paragraphs of some random writing verbatim since it's not worth my time.
The words "quote", "quotation", "mark", etc. do not appear anywhere within the HN Guidelines[1], to include any rules regarding quotation marks (there aren't any).
To call out someone's behaviour is not name-calling as defined in the HN Guidelines[1]. Did I call the author an idiot or a moron or anything to that effect? No, I called out his behaviour as ignorant and arrogant, and called him a kid because he is a high school student which I presume to be less than 21 years old.
On that note, the HN Guidelines state: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."[1]
As such, please interpret "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted." in the strongest way possible: That using Github and other examples named and not named are not permitted.
> The words "quote", "quotation", "mark", etc. do not appear anywhere within the HN Guidelines[1], to include any rules regarding quotation marks (there aren't any).
No, but they do appear in the two links I gave—which describe the sort of behavior that HNers are expected to observe, regardless of whether it's written in a mod comment or on a mod-controlled page titled "Hacker News Guidelines".
If you think that's an inappropriate standard, then bring it up before just going ahead and doing it anyway, or leave for greener pastures. You succeed by being knowledgeable, considerate, cooperative, and also knowing where to draw your line in the sand—versus digging in (to defend the use of made up quotes and name-calling).
Reflexive respect for authority is how we get authoritarianism. Your comment has been downvoted so much it's barely legible, and that's exactly the reception it deserves.
Of course you don’t actually have to be in compliance. You only have to pretend to be in compliance. Maybe they’d have a chance if they argued that they used Github, instead of GitHub, which must clearly be a different website.
Your bitterness bleeds through your sense of reason.. Rules that are fundamentally broken are not meant to be followed, they are meant to be publicly ridiculed and laughed at.
The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)