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

261–270 of 354 posts

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#261

Post by dang »

webappguy wrote: post #257
dang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Why not just allow users to do on their own?

For a few reasons: there are lots of ways to abuse those features, which unfortunately some people would take advantage of; we want to preserve the history of the threads rather than have them be gutted or anachronistically edited; and because wholesale deletion would be unfair to the other commenters who participated in a thread (pg wrote about that way back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226).

That doesn't mean we don't care about protecting users with privacy and other concerns—we certainly do, and like I said we take care of these every day. We just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion.

It's fundamentally a tradeoff: we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum with the need to protect individuals. There's no perfect answer, but we're committed to both sides of it. Of the people who ask us for these things, well over 90% end up satisfied. Probably over 99%, but I don't want to make claims I'm not sure of!

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#262

Post by dang »

jonathankoren wrote: post #252
dang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

This is a trash policy. It's reputation laundering as a service.

I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#263

Post by sudosysgen »

jdminhbg wrote: post #223
goat_whisperer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Perhaps you aren't familiar with the term. Graduate Student = someone enrolled in a Masters Program, Post doc, PHD program, etc. I'm familiar, thanks. Why is someone who graduated last year and went into a Master's program different from someone who graduated last year and became a bootcamp TA?

Typically, getting into a graduate program is difficult and has an additional bar past graduation, and unless you are a great student you only TA entry level classes you have to master very well anyways. Especially in CS, graduate student is a paid job, too.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#264

Post by dang »

monero-xmr wrote: post #214
dang wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I was totally unaware that HN mods would treat certain accounts better than others, and give special anonymous edits, totally news to me. I have seen a lot of selective application of HN rules over the (many) years. My 2 cents.

HN mods do not treat certain accounts better than others. Was that unclear in what I wrote? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732867

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#265

Post by vunderba »

tptacek wrote: post #131

I share the same feelings, directionally, as the author --- though I don't believe DoorDash was somehow bad for the world, but: Lambda School was on-par with an average code bootcamp. Students got a taste of programming, but when it came to getting hired, neither the training nor credentials held a candle to a college degree Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. Lambda seems to have been real bad in the aggregate, but I'm war…

No, let's decidedly not.

If you have a disinclination towards purportedly difficult academia such as higher math, you're more than welcome to apply to some kind of a new major, we can call it "software development" where you can fritter away your mortality with impressive courses such as "flexing on others the CSS way" and "Mongo, the SQL to relational databases.", but there are those of us who study computer science with an emphasis on transcendent learning, and not the frontend framework flavor of the day.

Computer science is a STEM discipline, not a trade.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#266

Post by dang »

monero-xmr wrote: post #228
gnabgib wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these features are covered in the FAQ What does [deleted] mean? , Can I change my username? , Can I delete my account? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.

In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people:

We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#267

Post by dang »

Aeolun wrote: post #234
bitwize wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m inclined towards believing highly ranking people are more interested in reputation management, and that’s why they request these things a lot more often. I’ve literally never felt the need to request a change, even though I’ve written a bunch of boneheaded stuff.

In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox. We rarely get these requests from highly ranking people (at least not anyone I recognize as such), and we get the most elaborate and demanding requests from people who don't appear to have much public reputation to worry about, and often are anonymous to begin with. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

We do get occasional corporate takedown requests, often from the lawyers of someone who noticed that someone said a bad thing about their company (or occasionally themselves) on HN years ago. But I try to do less in cases where we're not hearing from an HN user directly, and least of all when they lead with a stick (e.g. legal threats). I do check with YC's legal people though, but they love HN and totally get it and are on the community's side.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#268

Post by monero-xmr »

dang wrote: post #266
monero-xmr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange you can change the username for a specific comment vs. all comments. It makes it so that a comment is attributed to someone else. Very odd.

In case it's of interest, here's the standard language from emails I send people: We try not to delete posts that got replies, because doing so would be unfair to the other commenters in the thread. What I've done so far is reassign it to a random user ID, so it's as if you'd used a throwaway account to post it and there's no link to your main account. Does that work?

Sure, it is just a strange feature that me, being someone who has been posting here a long time, didn't know

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#269

Post by kccqzy »

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…

I think going all in is an important part of it. Cramming a whole CS degree in a few months does require full-time commitment. It can't be a part-time thing while working other jobs.

Preferably the boot camp is in person not online, because physically relocating to the place of instruction is a big part of going all in.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#270

Post by walterburns »

refulgentis wrote: post #230
dustincoates wrote: post #14

I'm convinced that Lambda School was shady, and I'm not debating that, but some of this seems over the top. ISAs as indentured servitude? The shadowy negotiating a company's validation "behind closed doors?" (Where else are you supposed to do it.) The criticism of Lambda School can stand on its own without wading into the extreme hyperbole.

I've followed Sandofsky for years, brilliant mind, and shaves ever more of the aggro edge off it, but it's still there. This is brilliant writing. Absolutely top-notch. This is the most minor of nits: The moment for me was the abrupt shift to a paragraph about "Utah MLM"...then you remember the un-needed reference to Mormon missionary...and you wince, then smile, "Ben...you still got it, baby" Of course it's all fine…

I found the article compelling and illuminating, but I wish someone had proofread it for the grammar. Half a dozen times I had to reread a sentence and concluded it wasn't correct English syntax.
Post reply on HN