Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fast Crimes at Lambda School

sandofsky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 354 posts

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#191

Post by goat_whisperer »

jdminhbg wrote: post #160
goat_whisperer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy." Lol. TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job.

> TAs in colleges are graduate students. They aren't undergraduates who can't find a job. So they're... graduates who can't find a job? I'm not sure you're making the point you're trying to make here.

Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc.

This is quite different from a using a recent Bootcamp grad, likely without any industry experience, as a TA in a Software Dev Bootcamp. Especially because the main purpose of this is just to inflate job placement statistics.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#192

Post by dang »

DangFksAusten wrote: post #185
networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

Dang has to protect their investment. Which is why this whole site is a fucking scam. Can't possible let someone know they invested in a scammer piece of shit

We delete and/or redact things for users who ask us to (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ), we take care of such requests every day, and we treat every user the same. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732867 in this thread.

Edit: also, here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#193

Post by dang »

bitwize wrote: post #187
networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.

Renaming accounts, redacting posts, etc. are all things that we do for users in general. We make no distinction between "high-ranking" users and others.

We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is.

Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something.

I'm not surprised to see accounts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 being scurrilously silly, but you've been around here long enough to know better.

Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#194

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

bee_rider wrote: post #163
itronitron wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> understand the basics of calculus I think the issue is that many programs expect students to understand 'the basics' of calculus as an academic mathematician understands them, which I would consider to be more suitable as an upper level elective for a CS program. A fun exercise would be to have graduating CS students take the same calculus exams that were required for admission to the program. I would expect that…

I worked with students in a “intro calculus for humanities” type class for many years (as a sort of undergrad tutoring role, so, it was a while ago, I’m old now). Despite this experience it is pretty shocking to me that there are, like, actually adult people walking around who can’t at least do a derivative. Spending too long in STEM academics absolutely warps your view of the mathematical skill floor I think.

At one point, I was able to do 3-dimensional vector calculus on electromagnetic fields. Now, I'm not sure I could do even a basic derivative.

Use it or lose it.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#195

Post by saagarjha »

bitwize wrote: post #187
networked wrote: post #168

The HN comment originally made by 'austenallred in https://www.sandofsky.com/content/images/2024/05/image-13.pn... is still available at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774 but is now by user '_pecl. The ownership of the comment changed between July 3, 2019 and January 31, 2020 according to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://news.ycombinator.com/i... . I guess the author realized it reflected badly on hi…

Hackernews has "protected people", typically high-ranking Silicon Valley types, for whom, if it is revealed they are scumbags, they will run interference, changing account names and replacing their powerwords with [redacted]. An example is the high-ranking GitHub engineer who has an Indian first name but goes by "Alex", who was accused of mistreating women, and actually pled guilty to at least one incidence of such.

Hacker News will do this for basically anyone. Or you can run a script to do it. It’s not particularly special.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#196

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

parpfish wrote: post #115
kbigdelysh wrote: post #107

I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.

I have a similar view and am skeptical of bootcamp claims that they can get anybody a job with X weeks of training. I'm reminded of the ending of Ratatouille when the critic figures out that the motto "Anyone can cook" means "Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere". I'm personally biased, but I feel like one bootcamp program that got this right (for a while) was Insight Data…

I feel like Big Nerd Ranch[0] did well. They had more of a seminar model, although they called their classes "bootcamps."

Unfortunately, they couldn't make enough at it, and have had to pivot away from it. There was a post, hereabouts, recently, that spoke to that.

[0] https://bignerdranch.com

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#197

Post by jayd16 »

IshKebab wrote: post #143
kbigdelysh wrote: post #107

I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.

Yeah my impression is that there are a decent number of people who are probably smart enough to learn to program, at least in an "easy" language like Python, but it's just too boring for the average person. I think law is similar. Do you really need to be super smart to be a lawyer? Probably not. But you do have to be vaguely interested in reading legal texts and... Jesus no thanks.

Most people are smart enough to program, I think. The biggest hurdle is being able to sit down and work on a program for 8 hours a day. All the other skills can be learned.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#198

Post by simplify »

swyx wrote: post #132
simplify wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone being exposed for leading a fraud organization for several years is not the time to call for "empathy". This reads as a astroturf manipulation tactic to make the guilty seem not as bad as they are.

thankfully this account has plenty of credibility and i have no ties to lambda whatsoever. tinfoil hat off. i can want more empathy while not absolving the guy of guilt.

If he was just a subordinate, sure. But leaders are and must be held to higher standards.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#199

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

7thpower wrote: post #166
kbigdelysh wrote: post #107

I was one of the coding instructors at Make School which was similar to Lambda School and was bankrupt couple years ago. Our major issue? It was damn hard to find enough students for our school who were talented enough to understand computer science and had enough grit to finish the program and get a job. Why? Because those students were already absorbed by the established traditional universities.

Counter point, I have worked with a company we’ll call “C” and they have been able to build a pipeline of folks who have been incredibly effective (>50). That being said the program is a bit more than ~3 months and the students go all in, they’re not doing it part time. The students come from different backgrounds, some have not graduated highschool, and they come hungry for better opportunities. We’ve tried this wit…

Teaching is a really time-consuming task, if you want to do it right.

I'm in the middle of creating a series on implementing Universal Links and URL Schemes, for iOS. May be a while, before it's ready. I spend a lot of time, testing the supporting materials, and making sure that I'm giving good info.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#200

Post by VirusNewbie »

I'd take this more seriously if it didn't come across like there was a political agenda.

To say something like "The defunding of public colleges" is egregious. It's just factually wrong. Colleges haven't been defunded. In fact college funding has gone up in many states. It's that tuition has risen more than the funding has gone up.

Also, no mention of thousands of people saddled with debt from many public colleges teaching CS or IT or whatever? That's not a scam either???

Post reply on HN