Fast Crimes at Lambda School • Hacker News Board

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#301

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:02 AM UTC

Scaevolus wrote: post #300

dang wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually when people say that, they're putting more on other persons ("they fucked up") than they would on themselves ("but, circumstances"). If you're not doing that, I respect your position. But that's a hard karmic row to hoe. Personally I'd rather bail people out because I might want to get bailed out myself in the future.

Why bother with performing edits and customized redactions and renames when it's easier to simply delete the comments or accounts?

Because there's value in preserving history and this value grows as the site ages.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#302

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:06 AM UTC

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…

> In fact it's the other way around—at least to judge by the HN inbox.

That’s hilarious, and a look behind the curtain I didn’t expect to get when making this post.

It does leave the question of why, but I cannot begin to imagine either.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#303

Post by Suppafly » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:09 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #183

Suppafly wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a third member of our group (who had other issues) was really frustrated and took it out on us and then went to the teacher University courses for programming generally get around this issue by having a CS110 type course that functions as a weed out class where people can find out if they have the ability to do the basic problem solving and logical thinking to succeed in that path or not. I imagine it's hard to impl…

I've got mixed feelings about "weed out" classes. Their utility is apparent if you want to just cut numbers down, but I'm not sure they automatically produce the best results if we're hoping to get all the people who could "get it". My college weed out course experience (20+ years ago) was the first programming class I ever took. It was a C class where a dude read from the book. There was limited to no other resource…

I suppose I was lucky 20 years ago, because the instructor for my weed out class really enjoyed the topic and included a lot of historical information and stuff, the people who dropped it or failed, did so because they thought computer science would pay well but didn't have any technical skills and weren't willing to pick up any. A lot of people just don't have the logic thinking skills for STEM type programs or have no idea what programming actually involves and these sorts of classes work because they are relatively easy for the people who succeed but still allow the people won't succeed in the field to find out early on.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#304

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:11 AM UTC

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…

Got to love that it appears all based on the title given on HN, because the original post under “Don’t mention AI again” stayed up and got lots of comments.

While technically being against the ‘rule’ against editorializing titles, I guess in this case it was to make it less sensational xD

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#305

Post by ipsum2 » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:24 AM UTC

swyx wrote: post #136

rideontime wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the linked article? I'm struggling to empathize with this fraud, especially after listening to the interview mentioned.

skimmed it. was a fan of @fulligin since before he became a citizen journalist and have followed it closely, i didnt really see much new info here in my browse thru. i'm not saying to empathize WITH THE FRAUD lol, just responding to GP about why austen stopped answering qtns. yes he fucked up, now give the guy a chance to build Bloom into something legit instead of constantly reading the most negative take into simpl…

Should SBF be given the chance to make FTX legitimate too?

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#306

Post by dang » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 6:47 AM UTC

zck wrote: post #289

dang wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 . Really cool! How different is Arc running HN or your extension from Arc3.1, the last-released version?

That's a good question because Arc the language is distinct from HN the application (and both were released all those years ago).

At the language level, we've changed things but not super much. It's maybe 30% different.

At the application level there have been many changes and it's more like 80% different.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#307

Post by com » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 7:42 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #301

Scaevolus wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother with performing edits and customized redactions and renames when it's easier to simply delete the comments or accounts?

Because there's value in preserving history and this value grows as the site ages.

This thread has been a bit of an eye opener for me in terms of community management and engagement. Bravo!

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#308

Post by youngtaff » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 9:28 AM UTC

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.

It's capped at the outstanding loan balance (principle plus any interest due)

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#309

Post by networked » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 10:28 AM UTC

DistractionRect wrote: post #245

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…

In light of the flaming, I'd like to underscore why it's entirely reasonable to redact the author of the comment in question: the author outted themselves as knowingly and egregiously violating a ToS for another site, and using//promoting services which are at best unethical, but probably illegal (residential proxies//large scale proxy services are usually built off the backs of botnets//malware). This isn't, IMO, fa…

I think this is correct. My intent was to point out it looked like 'austenallred realized he'd admitted to doing wrong. I knew HN could redact a user's data at their request and wrote my comment accordingly, but I didn't make it explicit. Unfortunately, my comment became a magnet for accusations against HN staff and 'dang personally.

The lesson seems to be to anticipate moderators being accused of conspiracy and malice more when you discuss moderator actions. This appears true not just where the stakes are high, like in startups, but everywhere. If you talk about something that may look like special privileges but you know is normal, acknowledge it to save the moderators some trouble. It may deter some of the accusatory comments and give the passerby a more accurate impression.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#310

Post by ekidd » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 11:31 AM UTC

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #43

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…

> I've yet to see ANYONE (myself included) do an excellent job teaching the kind of programming employers want. I saw another comment here about how "programming" is simple, but teaching architecture and putting things together is hard.

Dartmouth College once had a course called CS23 (Software Engineering) that was infamous for introducing students to "real world" development. The first half of the course was dedicated to C++, with weekly assignments like "implement this data structure class, given the .h file."

The latter half of the course was a 5-person group project with teams chosen by the instructor. The project ran 5 or 6 weeks. And with one week to go, right as the students entered finals, the professors would make a change to the spec. Every time. It was definitely deliberate.

Grades were partly team-based (which sucked if you had a bad team) and partly individual (especially if you had a bad team).

The students who went through this were smart, highly motivated, and had at least 2 or 3 other successful CS classes first. Non-majors almost never took the course.

Time after time, I saw this course turn CS majors into people who could work on real team projects. Not all of them; even in a solid Ivy League CS program some people were a menace to their group. But I'd watch my younger friends go through the experience, starting out naive and coming out with actual instincts on how to ship something.

In a lot of ways, I don't think CS 23 was always well taught. Our professor was a Lisp programmer teaching C++ and his .h files often contained serious errors. But the genius of the course design was that slightly dodgy teaching only added to the overall experience. The course was intended to be a high stakes team project under realistic conditions. Bad team assignments, bugs in the spec, a changing spec, the whole nine yards. And the students were as prepared and qualified as any students could be, going in.

But I think there's a kernel of a good idea here. Once students can program, the best way turn them into developers is to make them build and ship something as a team.

(Dartmouth also had solid theory classes in the major, but that's a story for another day. You couldn't graduate without having done a real project and having written a lot of mathematical proofs.)