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Fast Crimes at Lambda School

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Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#81

Post by auggierose »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #70
auggierose wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's face it, most of the time the tools are the problem. That is why, whenever possible, I write my own tools.

Yeah, for learning that's good. But for novel research, not so much. I do a lot of what I always call "fast math on a computer" because that was a by product of me writing my own tools to solve problems in grad school. I didn't have numpy and only very limited BLAS optimizations existed at the time, so I had to write lots of low level stuff. But the actual novel work was pretty small on top of that. In my grandparent…

Well, try running numpy on apple metal.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#82

Post by [deleted] »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #50
duxup wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustration factor is a big deal. I took a bootcamp. One day and another student and I were working on something and 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. She told the teacher "they just get it and I don't". But in truth the other student and I were not "just getting it", we were failing frequently, we had made no more progress…

I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff). One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experienc…

[deleted]

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#83

Post by mistrial9 »

salamo wrote: post #62

It's really too bad. Higher ed needs disruption. The problem is, a responsibly-run university is a slow/medium growth enterprise, not an overnight unicorn. The Vanderbilts and Carnegies of today could do a major public service if they wanted to. Use their names and hire the best researchers in their respective fields and pay them well.

this is happening in great numbers .. behind closed doors, private benefit, legal NDAs, in the case of AI also closely tied to nationalist entities in uniforms. What could go wrong?

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#84

Post by danso »

swyx wrote: post #41
rideontime wrote: post #25

Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred

or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.

He had the habit of running from legitimate criticism years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26813088

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#85

Post by simplify »

swyx wrote: post #41
rideontime wrote: post #25

Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred

or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.

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.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#86

Post by throwanem »

swyx wrote: post #41
rideontime wrote: post #25

Austen seems to finally have given up on trying spin every story about him that reaches HN, no posts in the last 9 months.[0] A sure sign of the dismal state of things at Lambda/Bloom. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=austenallred

or months and months of defending your reputation can wear you down. have a little empathy for the flawed human on the other side of the screen.

Whatever reputational damage he's suffered, he seems to have come by it honestly. What's to defend?

We are all flawed humans. I can empathize so far - but no further, because the thing that comes after "we are all flawed humans" needs to be learning how to manage one's own flawed nature such that its blast radius encompasses blameless others as closely to never as possible. It is not evident Allred has meaningfully done anything remotely resembling that kind of work.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#87

Post by x0x0 »

busterarm wrote: post #12

AppAcademy started with and still does ISAs and has been fairly successful. There have been situations where they've deemed certain participants greater risk and NOT offered them ISAs and asked for upfront payment, but I believe their success has largely been a result of aggressive candidate filtering all the way up to 1/3 of the way through the program after its started. I have first hand experience with their progr…

I hired out of app academy. It was fine -- they were super junior, but that was expected. All of them were successful in other industries and used app academy to retrain into software.

I suspect one of the problems with these programs is they're supply constrained; if you want to scale them, you're betting there's a lot of people with the requisite IQ, self control, motivation, ability to set and carry out long term goals, etc, that fell through the cracks both for college and an industry desperate for engineers. There definitely are some, but it sure doesn't seem like there's a VC-industry or public companies amount of these people.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#88

Post by lopkeny12ko »

I don't understand the controversy.

Sure, you might not like ISAs, but that's not the point. You signed an agreement. The agreement itself is not illegal. If you don't like it, why did you sign it?

Like, what's the expectation here? That you should be able to get a coding education for free? Even if you got a job unrelated to programming, how does that excuse you from needing to pay for tuition for courses you already completed?

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#89

Post by jonathankoren »

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.

ISAs were indentured servitude. That's literally what they were. It was the single most scummy concept that Austin came up with and PaulG endorsed.

Re: Fast Crimes at Lambda School

#90

Post by zenlikethat »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #27
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…

As a former instructor (not at Lambda), I'm kind of inclined to believe it has more to do with the fact that it takes a certain kind of person to put up with the demands of corporate software engineering. Getting both kids and adults (especially kids) to figure out how to program is easy if you understand that most of the concepts are better taught visually through p5js or what have you. Once they leave that sandbox,…

I've been musing lately as well that a challenging part of the job is not just "coding", it's working with other software engineers. Each cat to herd has their own quirks, differences, stylistic choices etc. that sometimes make other cats cringe. I also think there's a big mental shift from "working harder == more output" that's very difficult for a lot of people to adapt to.
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