Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39911068

Points: 35

# Comments: 0

"deep learning vs. crypto is a clear divide of math people vs creative people."

> the former offends theorycel aesthetic sensibilities but empirically works to produce absurd miracles

deep learning doesn't seem like it should work to people who are entrenched in theory, but somehow it produces great results.

> the latter is an insane series of nerd traps and sky high abstraction ladders yet mostly scams

crypto is full of interesting technical challenges but mostly produces scams.

2. New RAM is not like old RAM.

Macs are dramatically more optimized than they used to be.

I have a MacBook Air (M1) with 16GB of RAM and it runs more smoothly than older systems that had twice that much.

8GB of RAM today feels like what 32GB of RAM used to. 8GB of RAM can handle very process-heavy tasks, like... running Chrome ;)

- Spend less on stuff than they assumed is necessary in a hand-wavy calculation

A lot of people are still reasonably very excited about Bitcoin and crypto.

Yeah, some do a remarkably good job of cheating and would get into hiring stats for sure, but I think we've almost entirely cut that out now.

For example, we used them for our first outcomes report and paid extra to have them "verify" our outcomes report, but they literally never opened the Google Drive file we sent them.

I think it was a great idea set up by well meaning people, but the self-governing aspect and comparisons created ended up in weird incentives that resulted in it falling apart.

The review sites are perhaps marginally better, but the positivity of reviews are almost 100% correlated with how hard schools work to farm for positive reviews, and their business model is selling leads to the schools, so the incentive isn't for objectivity there either.

Honestly the best way, though it requires more work, is to find a handful of recent grads on LinkedIn and ask them about their experience.

You have to remember that (for this outcomes report) nearly every student uses an ISA under which no one is required to pay us unless/until they get a job using the skills they learned. There are a number of people who attend never intending to switch careers, a (large) number who ghost us the day after graduation, and a (large) number who get a job but don't tell us until we get tax returns (so we learn they were hired only after this outcomes report).

Our team works their asses off to work with these students, and is doing everything they possibly can. Slacks, calls, texts, emails, some of which are auto-generated from me personally, and in some cases even physical mail, to try to get them to work with us. If they respond _in any way at all_ with anything other than something that equates to, "I don't want a tech job" they are job-seeking in the outcomes report. We have built tooling to make applying to jobs easier, we find jobs that you should apply to for you, have an outreach generator where our team will write emails to hiring managers for you, and more recently even what we call "job search takeover" where we work with students on resume/portfolio/job criteria in advance, and we will actually do all of the work to fill up your calendar with interviews.

Students who look for a job in any way whatsoever get hired at a very high rate. In my view, if you're a prospective student, that's the information you actually want to understand. The fact that there are a number of students students (most of whom are using ISAs) who never intend to look for a job or don't look for a job is a fair indictment of our business model, but not a fair indictment of the quality of the school or the likelihood of getting hired.

So how should we treat that in an outcomes report? If you're a prospective learner do you want to know about the hiring rate of the people who ghost us or don't intend to look for a job, or do you want to know the hiring rate of people who map to the profile of what you expect to do?

If anyone has ideas of a better way to slice that data to convey the best information to a prospective learner, I would love to hear it.

The team that built our iOS curriculum is _literally_ the team that built the iOS curriculum at Apple. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/calebhicks).

Honestly at this point I’m getting back to work, I don’t think this conversation is fruitful.

https://twitter.com/austen/status/1588336949403611136?s=46&t...