From: Aaron Kimball
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 4:21 PM
To: cse490h - Mailing List
Subject: [CSE 490H] Internet resource usage guidelines

Sportsfans,

I hope everyone is making good progress on their assignment. A number of you
have gotten very good at finding external resources to help you -- in
particular, the Hadoop web site (http://hadoop.apache.org/core/) has a
number of good documents and a wiki to help you with your programming, and
I'm glad that you're taking advantage of it. Some of you have also discovered
the Hadoop user group email list. Though this is not a requirement for this
course, signing yourself up for core-user@hadoop.apache.org and reading the
threads will certainly increase your understanding of how Hadoop is used in
practice. (See http://hadoop.apache.org/core/mailing_lists.html)

With that having been said, there are a few ground rules for external user
groups that you should keep in mind:

1) Do not ask the list to do your homework for you. This should be obvious,
but it needs to be said. You can ask questions as to how Hadoop works, or
how examples of particular features work, but do not ask leading questions
that actively solve a portion of your current homework. Any source code you
see on this list (or anywhere else on the Internet, for that matter) may not
be used in your assignment. This is considered plagiarism. Your submission
must be 100% your own code.

(Obviously, if you ask "How do I enable feature X", and the answer is
"conf.setSomeFeatureX(some_magic_parameter);", then that one-liner is okay.
But whole methods, etc., are not. If you feel like you're pushing the limit,
you probably are. If you're unsure, ask Aaron or Slava.)

2) Your source code is private. Do not send any source code to external
mailing lists for reviews. Just as you're not allowed to share source code
with other students, submitting it for feedback from external developers is
off limits.

3) If you get any external help on a project, make sure you describe it in
the writeup you send to us with your submission.

4) So what happens if you ask "How does (general feature) work," and someone
responds with a great 20 line cookie-cutter method that you only need to
tweak two lines of to make it fit your assignment?

First, thank the person on the list who helped you. Then study the code they
wrote. Then go play Halo for two hours (or go do something else for the rest
of the evening). After that, rewrite the whole method yourself starting from
scratch. Do not refer back to their source code. If you could keep it in your
memory for several hours and then reconstitute it yourself, you're okay. You
must still document this in your writeup.  You're on your honor here.

There are a lot of well-meaning souls on the Internet, but the best thing
for you all is to actually internalize the knowledge so you don't need to
rely on them as much in the future. These guidelines are intended to strike
a balance between not leaving you isolated, but not allowing you to let
others do the real work for you.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Cheers,

- Aaron