thedevelopnik

“Google should not use badly trained beta ML to guess which person in the world with this name is a serial killer” is not “there should be no search engines.”

Google was very successful with the latter for a long time before they started in on the former.

A lot probably go to work for school districts rather than into private practice.

As someone who owns a 2 bedroom condo and plans to stay for awhile but is still mostly furnished with Ikea, I would absolutely be interested in a buyout option!

You wouldn’t in this case. All her identifying documents were rendered invalid when she was declared dead.

At my last company we had a gRPC pipeline using Uber’s prototool that generated code but it was still a pain to get that code into projects so I wrote https://github.com/gospotcheck/protofact to package up the code into Gems and Jars, etc, for installation and publish them to a repository like Artifactory or any other. There wasn’t an existing solution I could find.

Also convinced the company to make it the first and only OSS project there.

Thanks for pointing this out! I use Firefox desktop but we don’t really have devices to test with and services like SauceLabs and BrowserStack don’t have non-profit plans so it’s difficult to cover all our bases. Something I’m still working on.

Thanks for calling this out. It’s not that obvious, and we need to make some improvements, but there is a way to get access if you don’t qualify by zip code/school.

If a student does not automatically qualify, we offer them basically an appeal form where they can say how much their family makes among other things. And we do qualify a number of students that way.

Partnering with other orgs like BGCA is an awesome idea that I will pass to our outreach coordinator. Thank you!

Thanks! Aly described most of this in a post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27119947

The scalability our volunteer training effort is definitely something we're actively working on figuring out. We're trying out peer mentoring between volunteers and that has gone really well.

It's also a major reason we are chat/whiteboard only.

Aly posted the link to source, if you’re interested in getting involved email me at dave.sudia at upchieve dot org

Yeah, to be clear, we absolutely see it as our responsibility to minimize risk and do everything we can to protect our students.

To expand on #2, we are also open source, with our main app code at https://gitlab.com/upchieve/subway

Our long-term goal is to have engaging, fun feature work for community contributors to work on, and we do have those come up occasionally now, but we can use a lot of help just finishing our conversion of the backend to TypeScript, updating dependencies, small bug fixes and similar work, that we have issues ready for.

We also have a weekly tech community Zoom meeting that I'd be happy to send an invite for to anyone who emails me with interest. dave.sudia at upchieve dot org

Volunteers can set availability, but they can also just hang out on their dashboard. As student requests come in, we immediately show them on the volunteer dashboard where a volunteer can immediately pick them up, and only start texting people if the request is not taken up. We offer optional browser notifications when new requests come in. So it's totally possible to volunteer with us on an ad-hoc basis!

To your excellent point about continuity, relationships are definitely a component of effective tutoring, but in our user research and conversations with students, students themselves told us it was more important to be able to get help when they need it than to be able to get help from the same person every time, and that's the need we've decided to optimize for.

Thanks! I was a teacher before getting into tech and getting to enable those mentorship opportunities on a large scale was one of the main things that drew me to Aly's project.

Dave, UPchieve CTO here. A really cool thing that's happened over the last year is we've gotten lots of volunteer sign ups from retired people, who were really trapped at home from fear of COVID, who have lots of time to brush up on physics/calculus/etc. I don't think that's something we could have predicted about the marketplace of students/volunteers but has helped a lot. Even now that things are opening up, they're staying with us and continuing to pick up lots of sessions. They enjoy the mentorship aspect and brushing up on the academics is a fun thing for them to do.

Destruction of this really annoying planet we live on!

I used to work for Fanatics.com. Together with UnderArmor, they outbid Majestic for the MLB jersey contract. Majestic had had the contract since the 70s.

Majestic immediately filed for bankruptcy. Which was good news for UnderArmor and Fanatics, because they didn’t have any ability to make baseball jerseys. So they bought Majestic for a dime on the dollar since it was bankrupt.

I’m not trying to be snarky here, would like an honest opinion: how do they win on UX? Are there specific things you like there?

I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP.

I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.

How did Dick not get fired long before if everyone thought he was terrible?

Oh right, that company did not learn the lesson of the first one, coding is not as important as being a decent person when it comes to building a team.

Yeah this is good to call out. A couple years ago I used it and got dogpiled for racism and I had to say “ok, I will stop using it, but who am I being racist against?” And I got educated, which was good, because I did not know it is a slur against Roma.

A lot of people use it without knowledge of context, so adding the context is important.

And to support you but from the other side:

I grew up with parents who divorced when I was 18 months old when it became clear they did not love each other anymore. But they both wanted the best for me, and didn't do the petty shit I've heard about other couples where they shit-talked each other to the kid or something. They split time with me evenly.

They both eventually got re-married and are very happy and I have no regrets about how my childhood went in that regard.

That sucks. I called my legislators about it, guess I’ll have to call them again next year as they are closer to re-election.

Hey, the brown M&M’s actually served an important purpose as a signal!

Oh yeah he and I still fundamentally disagreed, but it gave me some insight into Oracle’s position.

Because they’re betting, with a good deal of historical justification, that they can have their cake and eat it too.

US has unfortunately been union-unfriendly since Reagan.

I had the opportunity once to talk to an IP lawyer for Oracle and brought this up. I specifically brought up the S3 compatibility of their cloud storage among other instances.

His reply was “without admitting anything specific, how do you know we haven’t purchased private licenses for anything you just mentioned?”

Yes. There is no appellate court above the Supreme Court. The only way things could change now is if Congress/President passed a new law, and I don’t think API copyrights are near the top of the list.

The latter. Once the Supreme Court rules, that is the law of the land, unless Congress/President pass a new law substantially changing things, which could then have challenges go back through the judicial process.

I just figured out today why a websocket component of an app I inherited wasn’t working correctly. I went through it in my head 50 times, then floated an idea past a colleague while whiteboarding it, then went through the code with a fine tooth comb, had the epiphany, and then read this, and “ your bugs will tell you when you need to improve your mental model” is incredibly resonant right now.

The phone and chat buttons never show up for me. We’re on a non-profit plan so maybe that’s why.

Yeah fair question.

I love their GUI, the way projects are organized and RBAC is handled across them. Creating custom cpu/mem ratio machines.

Little things like VMs in a kubernetes cluster being viewable as VMs (they’re obscured in Azure I’ve learned).

Pricing!

Like, there are very few ways they’re not my favorite cloud provider. Which speaks to how unspeakably horrible their support is that at my current org I am not going with them.

Because at the end of the day, a pretty good infrastructure product that you can get support for wins every time over an excellent one that when it breaks is catastrophic and nobody listens.

I’m spending this week rebuilding all my Azure infra because I learned about 10 different ways they hide ridiculous price increases in what you build and my infra costs twice what I thought it would. But I literally can’t get ahold of someone at Google to help me become a customer.

Meanwhile I’m not even paying for support at Azure yet and when I sent an email about the pricing I got a response from a human who checked up on my satisfaction, and then from her boss, who was checking on my satisfaction with the first email.