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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#271

Post by monero-xmr »

dang wrote: post #267
Aeolun wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#272

Post by dang »

monero-xmr wrote: post #271
dang wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive

Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860. On a good day, that's the kind of stuff I get to work on.

But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly.

By far the most important is HN's community. We have so many dedicated users who care about the quality of this place, and they send a steady stream of heads-ups about things we need to look at*. That's the reason for your "god mod" impression—it would be impossible for one person, or even a team, to see all these things, but what I'm actually looking at are things that other people have seen and are bringing to our/my attention, whether by flagging them or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. So it's a "given enough eyeballs" thing.

We can always use more such help, so if you (or anyone) notice something that we should probably be looking at, please flag it and/or email hn@ycombinator.com. We usually can look at it pretty quickly—though it may take me longer to reply and my worst-case latency is shameful.

* For example, I've got 3 or 4 emails at present asking about why "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mataroa.blog) has been posted 14 times and keeps getting flagged. Yeah, that's probably something we should look at.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#273

Post by tptacek »

vunderba wrote: post #265
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…

Software development is a trade, not a STEM discipline.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#274

Post by kccqzy »

hintymad wrote: post #219

> 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. Yet Lambda School regularly compared itself to college in its marketing, promising, "The depth of a 4-year degree, the practicality of a bootcamp." I thought people in the US already knew that part of the value of a college is accreditation. Some people would fail in a rigo…

Most introductory courses in a college curriculum are meant to be grand filters. The "Introduction to Computer Science" course is supposed to filter out students who don't have the grit or mental acuity to further their study of computer science. If a student fails at that course, it's a strong hint for the student to consider a different major. That's actually the beauty of college: it's possible to cram four years' worth of courses into a tighter timeline, but if you don't you leave enough room to explore the introductory courses of different fields and declare major on one that is truly interesting to you.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#275

Post by dieselgate »

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…

Interesting to hear more about Insight and the market conditions that impacted them. I’ve a friend who did the program and it worked out well for them - but they were fresh out of an Ivy League PhD so presumably had strong backing however they chose to direct their non-academic career. Always thought it was a good model to focus on academics since the candidate Pool would likely be better by default. Your post mirrors my experience, though, as someone with a non-cs engineering background doing a coding intensive course. The bar is relatively low and only about half my cohort found “success” in software engineering directly. It’s fickle

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#276

Post by kccqzy »

gatinsama wrote: post #9

The model is broken. Too many people want to learn to code, not everyone can do it well. The only way would be to filter many candidates going in, but the negative press would be huge. So you end up with huge cohorts of people who can't code, and you have to make the money back somehow. Good teachers need to know how to code well, and those are expensive too. And, let's face it, the internet is full of great material…

I don't think filtering candidates would cause negative press. In fact the comparison to traditional colleges is stark: colleges like to brag about how "selective" their admission process is. A coding boot camp doesn't need to be that rigorous, but at least they can demand things like a bachelors degree in any field, a few years of work experience in any field, etc. So the target audience becomes more like already reasonably successful workers who want to switch fields.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#277

Post by dieselgate »

hintymad wrote: post #219

> 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. Yet Lambda School regularly compared itself to college in its marketing, promising, "The depth of a 4-year degree, the practicality of a bootcamp." I thought people in the US already knew that part of the value of a college is accreditation. Some people would fail in a rigo…

Interesting point to bring up accreditation. It’s not relevant for software engineering far as I know but for Professional Engineering licensure an individual must attend an accredited school.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#278

Post by monero-xmr »

dang wrote: post #272
monero-xmr wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what makes HN the best place on the internet for whatever this place is, is that the god mod here is so focused on it. I can only assume you have a huge amount of scripts and tools that make operating and moderating this place manageable. I always feel like you jump in seemingly everywhere that has issues. It's quite impressive

Thanks! I'm proud of my moderation browser extension with keyboard shortcuts! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - which is written in Arc by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179860 . On a good day, that's the kind of stuff I get to work on. But there are vastly more important factors. One is that there are other moderators. They just don't post publicly. By far the most im…

I appreciate your detailed response.

If you go on vacation, is there a backup? And if you retire, or God forbid, get incapacitated from some unforeseen event, is there a continuity plan? I assume contingencies exist

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#279

Post by valzam »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #227
pxeger1 wrote: post #147

The government student loan system in England effectively uses an income sharing agreement: with the most recent version, you pay 9% of your income over £25,000/year and if you haven’t finished paying it back within 40 years, it gets forgiven. This scheme doesn’t pay for itself though. (it costs the government money).

Imagine you go and work for a hedge fund straight out of university, have a great year, and earn £1m. Does the government get 9% of that? Or is it capped at the outstanding loan amount? If the latter, and someone earning $1m pays the same as someone evening $500k, it doesn't seem like an income share agreement.

In Australia you have a loan balance based on your degree etc and pay it back with a similar % of income. I assume in the UK it's the same, if you earn 1mio you will probably not have to pay 9% (or do but can claim it back) and be done with any student loans.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#280

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #264
monero-xmr wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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