He was publicly shamed, banned from Kaggle and he lost his job (and I guess he's basically unhireable right now).
I wonder what would be your family reaction, if these things don't sound like consequences to you.
A lifetime ban would not be out of the place here, considering it went on to win the competition with no admission until caught.
Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.
[Citation needed]
You picked a random sample of ratio'd comments from a platform which is big on performative wokeness to strengthen your opinion, which still fails to explain how Pleskov managed to zugzwang his way into pulling off a Kobayashi Maru style move and the failure of the platform to monitor such abuses. Only time will tell, whether or not he has avoided being a part of the Dark Triad; without condoning his behaviour ─ what more can he do to atone for his sins?
So what's the problem?
The prize was $10,000, not "fun".
More importantly, Kagggle does competitions across dozens of industries. If a culture of getting better at hiding your cheat pervades the platform, that could impact finance, transportation, and medical research. In those scenarios, lives would either be threatened or at least subject to sub-optimal systems.
I compare this to my favorite sport, Formula 1 racing. In F1, teams of engineers with nearly unlimited budgets spend an absurd amount of effort doing everything in their power to bend the regulations (the "formula") to squeeze out some extra advantage.
For example, in this past season Ferrari was suddenly outperforming the pack (and their own recent performance) and it was clear something had changed on the car, they had power in places they didn't before. What finally came down is a clarification of the rules around fuel-rate metering, without directly calling out Ferrari. After the clarification, Ferrari power was back where it used to be. Nothing more was said of the matter by the FIA.
What we all _think_ happened is that Ferrari, knowing the fuel rate meters ran at 10kHz, discovered they could pulse their fuel pump so that the low-end of the flow rate cycle happened during that sampling interval. This means they could increase their overall fuel rate beyond what was technically allowed, due to how that technical requirement was being measured on the car (and reported back to the FIA).
Is it in keeping with the spirit of the rules? Of course not! Does it make for an interesting engineering puzzle on top of an already-exciting sport? Sure does!
Clearly I'm in the minority here, but I think this sort of problem-solving approach can be useful. If you're looking to compete against a field of entrants who are all looking for obvious and well-understood approaches to solving the problem at hand, I think sometimes the best solution to stand out is to look where the other teams aren't looking.
To use your F1 analogy, this isn't the equivalent of tweaking the cars in whatever way possible is within the rules. This is the equivalent of completely cutting across the grass and bypassing 90% of the track, which is indeed illegal and would get you penalized.
Jesus fucking christ. He fucking ran MD5 on some shit he pulled down from a web crawler.
Over-training a model on the validation set would be a lot more "brilliant", and even that is a dumb script kiddie level hack. Maybe finding an algorithm that computes weights s.t. the preimage of the training algorithm on the training set matches the result of training with truly random weights using the validation set. That could be a "clever hack". And even then _brilliant_ would be.... a real fucking stretch.
In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains.
Look at this crap on Twitter:
“Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”.
“Kagglers will still love to have you back”
“It's great that you realize your mistakes. Looking forward to see your comeback with more cool DS solutions and ethics than before.”
“Thanks for doing this. It's okay to make errors in judgement, we've all been there to varying degrees. Y'all be gonna be fine.1!”
Those are the worst. I’m not so crazy about these below, either, although there’s just a hint of steel in them, at least:
“I’m glad to see that you had a change of heart after sleeping on it and that you will be returning the prize money. I hope you will consider donating to or volunteering at a local animal shelter as well. Atonement here is more than returning the money and apologizing.”
“I hope this can be used as a teaching moment as well. Many people clearly look up to you because of your work. What can we learn from this? Something to ponder in the days to come.”