[pigbucket]

>I’ve seen a lot of what passes for excellence in high schools, and it’s not good enough.

I’ve encountered many brilliant students in college, with straight A’s through highschool and stellar SATs, who cannot string three or four sentences together into a coherent paragraph. I am now trying to realize a vision of a Khan-inspired service for writers who are not getting the help they need from school. This is probably not the time for a shameless plug, because my site, as a site, still sucks, but if any student here wants free, quality reviews of their writing projects, you can get them at http://www.essayjudge.com

I say “free,” and mean it, but if you want to abuse the service, then I may ask you for a return favor in the form of development advice.

At present, you can submit writing quickly at the site using anon/anon as uid/pwd, but for HNers who don’t want their writing and the attendant review published, you can google-email me (bbquigley). No promises if I’m inundated, except to try my best.

[jergason]

You sent me my password in the confirmation email in plain text. Please fix this security hole ASAP by hashing the passwords.

Edit: The content looks great. Sorry, didn't mean to sound snarky, but that is a scary first impression of the site. I have some more comments that I tried to email to the contact email address, but my email was retured. Is there an email I can use to contact you or someone at the site?

[pigbucket]

Thanks for the feedback. On my immediate to do list. No excuse, but I didn't build the site, and the process of trying to fix its bugs since I took it over while completely changing its focus has been especially onerous for me. Please use my personal email in my comment above.

[ZoFreX]

Emailing a password plaintext in a confirmation email is completely orthogonal to whether or not it is hashed in the database! I agree that neither should be done, though.

[ars]

I've been answering questions on stack overflow and the number of people who write completely incomprehensible questions is amazing! They just have no idea how to write.

Sometimes a foreign language is the reason, but not always.

[abiekatz]

Thanks for the offer. I think having a quality editor critiquing your work is key to improving your writing ability.