281–290 of 354 posts
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No idea which account you're referring to but I certainly haven't banned anyone for that reason. In fact I just restored your other comments in this thread.
It's insane to read all the vile abuse thrown at you because people are angry at Silicon Valley big wigs and your absolute composure over it. You're a beast, dang, and I highly respect you for it.
Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I taught non-traditional students coming in through state-funded retraining programs at UT Arlington Continuing Education and Texas State Technical Institute (now TSTC) in Waco. The idea was "here are a bunch of laid-off manufacturing workers who want to retrain as SOMETHING with high-tech." The most popular courses were of the very short "here's how to do some things with Unix" vari…
It is incredibly hard to find ANYONE at any of these "coding bootcamps" or online education platforms that has any idea about what pedagogy is (or that it even exists) to the point that I seriously think anyone that makes it out of these programs and lands a job was mostly because they got the focus and time to learn by themselves (due to being in the program) than due to the program itself. They just needed a kick i…
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I think it's worse than not doing it well. It's more like struggling at the basics. The incentives of these camps favor quantity over quality.
Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about…
Your examples are just absurd.
Software development and software engineering is such a vast and broad field that your comparison doesn't really apply. It's more of an indictment of your particular position than anything.
If all you were doing was tweaking Tailwind styles, and installing and managing WordPress, then I suppose your assessment is somewhat applicable.
But for those of us who have worked as proper software engineers (I don't particularly care if this sounds pretentious), I've never encountered more intellectually challenging problems than developing brand-new solutions and algorithms to solve complex issues.
If you had said "doctor" or even "nurse practitioner," then maybe. But the idea that working as a nurse (for 99% of nursing work) is as intellectually challenging as software engineering is just patently absurd. I don't even know what marine upholsterer is so I can't comment on that one.
The same goes for welding, even if we went so far as as to say UNDERWATER welding. This is a position that nobody in their right mind would claim is intellectually challenging. That being said it is highly paid for two reasons: it's a very high-skill job requiring substantial training (in much the same way as getting your ATP), and it comes with a set of significant risks.
Let me give you ONE example. Just one.
I remember my first job out of university as a C++/C# developer. We had a large technically minded QA team. A lot of our feature work was in SDK plugins developed as DLLs which we would license to external companies.
We were running into an issue where it was difficult for the QA team to quickly iterate/field test our work without us having to write custom test harnesses for them.
I remember reading through the SDK reference manual for C# and reading about this concept of Reflection which would allow one to dynamically discover information about classes, methods, properties, fields, events even to the point of examining the actual arguments that could be passed in and their allowable data types.
All of a sudden I realized that I could write an entire dynamic testing harness (which I dubbed "Pandora's Box") that could dynamically generate UI to run tests by pointing it at any of our managed DLLs with support for feeding in CSV to manage regression tests as well.
I did this - I came to the realization, I figured out how to implement it, everything was me. I soon left the company after a couple years, and learned later that it became an important internal tool used for many subsequent years beyond my tenure.
That is one just ONE example of a thousand things that I've personally come up with and developed in my stint as a software engineer. And that was 6 months out of university as a mere associate software engineer.
I also came up with a novel way of doing OCR 15 years ago by combining genetic algorithm spinning up tesseracts with markov probability modeling against a common English corpus which exponentially improved our company's SOTA text recognition. And ON and ON and ON.
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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'…
Thanks dang
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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.
Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.
In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.
It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.
Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
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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.
It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all. Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash. In all my decades of dealing with public forums…
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It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all. Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash. In all my decades of dealing with public forums…
I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
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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'…
Is gnabgib an actual moderator here or did he made a bot account that does regex matching to some words to try to do backseat moderating to farm points?
His account made numerous robotic comments that missed the key context which a human would not have missed.
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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…
Really cool! How different is Arc running HN or your extension from Arc3.1, the last-released version?
Back in the late 80s / early 90s, I taught non-traditional students coming in through state-funded retraining programs at UT Arlington Continuing Education and Texas State Technical Institute (now TSTC) in Waco. The idea was "here are a bunch of laid-off manufacturing workers who want to retrain as SOMETHING with high-tech." The most popular courses were of the very short "here's how to do some things with Unix" vari…
It is incredibly hard to find ANYONE at any of these "coding bootcamps" or online education platforms that has any idea about what pedagogy is (or that it even exists) to the point that I seriously think anyone that makes it out of these programs and lands a job was mostly because they got the focus and time to learn by themselves (due to being in the program) than due to the program itself. They just needed a kick i…
My hope was that the bootcamp might make it easier to find a job, which didn't happen. They put more effort into instruction than into placing applicants. Not sure why; I can easily cover any material that would be covered in a bootcamp myself.