skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has a point. The Khan Academy approach is very good for maths, and most sciences. These are cases where you can distil knowledge into a few examples and cases, and it works well. The viewer now has a working, and accurate mental model of whatever they were learning, without having to go through -everything- involved.

However, this approach to history and other topics can be a problem. While some of the criticism is somewhat overblown, it is valid. Distilling history and other social sciences down, to the degree that Khan does is very hard to do properly, and likely to introduce all sorts problems into the mental model of history the viewer has.

It's not a case of "taking sides" or whatever. But, if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models. How much stuff do you think people learn in a classroom, and never have a chance to "relearn". How many incorrect mental models are formed, and then never corrected until catastrophe. The responsible thing to do, if attempting to be come the classroom of the world is to realize that if they are successful, then for many people, the Academy will be their sole source of information for some topics (as in, not the only source of information, but the only source that they go to), and teach accordingly. Either have the lesson be able to provide an accurate and correct mental model, or make the learner explicitly aware that what they are learning is incomplete/unprecise/whatever.
I think this article is very interesting, if only to get a look at what objections might exist to an educational paradigm similar to KA. If we're serious about fighting for an efficient education system, we must be prepared to answer objections like this.

He brings up a few valid points that I haven't thought of before. Presumably, as systems like KA are adopted the amount of total educational material decreases, as individual curricula are replaced by a standard set of materials. This decreases diversity in the type of education available for students, which can be seen as a good or a bad thing. I bet the author would be all for the system if the videos were "conservative" and they were replacing curricula of "liberal" educators teaching our children filthy subjectivist lies.
FYI I read that as "quitifier", as in a stop-smoking app.
37 Signals in their book rework put it really well. You have a business model from day 1. Not everyone is Facebook and Twitter so having a concept of a business model is very important. So yes, having a clear vision of your product is necessary. That vision can change while you are building but you still need to have a starting point.
Flying Sphere
Flying Sphere by　Japan Self-Defense Forces

まるい未来型飛行物体
http://www.mod.go.jp/trdi/research/dts2010.files/S2/S2-1.pdf
Or to put it another way, "do you use bitcoin?". People who use bitcoin are trying to convince themselves and others that it's not a bubble so that the value of their bitcoins continues to increase. It is a bubble though. It surprises me that people still fall for quasi-pyramid schemes and the promise of ever increasing value. How long do you honestly expect this to last?
The fact that the universe is a semi-random collection of atoms and energy is EXACTLY the meaning I find in all of this. Life--particularly human life--is so damn beautiful and rare that every single moment here needs to be appreciated. Trying to live your life a certain way in the hopes of gaining some sort of non-existent afterlife utopia shows a complete lack of appreciation for your own time here among the living.
Yes, can we leave it on please!
Headius, you're awesome and I'm honored that you replied to my stupid rant.

My reply was meant for people that questioned a project like Rubinius when there is JRuby around. And you're right, I only have a very high-level overview of the problems you're encountering, mostly being just educated (or maybe not) guesses.

The reason for my rant is that Rubinius is awesome too and I would rather see Rubinius replace MRI as THE reference implementation - since it's a more flexible environment built from scratch, people will be able to experiment with features more easily.

I do however object to one thing you said - continuations are awesome and I'm sad they got pulled from Rubinius.
Peter, good points -- I'll add the email address with the contact form instead of getting rid of it totally. Going to be adding a case study page that each piece of work links to, that has larger screenshots, more detail and depth on what work was done by myself etc.

Thanks for your input! :D
Apple's iOS 5 Notifications Are Great, But webOS is Still Better
+1 for the idea that history is more than an "incoherent torrent of factoids"

I heard Khan say recently on the Colbert Report that he read the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution as his source before making his video on the subject.

That's fine for his purposes, but somewhere up the information food chain someone must actually read the sources, weigh them, interpret, compare, and do all the other work of understanding and transmitting history. It's hard to imagine that those 'educated' by Khan can take up this work, or if they do, that by the time they become competent, they will regard his videos as anything other than inconsequential in their effort.

However, I do think it's overblown to say that Khan is any more dangerous than Cliff's notes or similar supposed shortcut to education. And I suspect his math and finance videos might be quite good, based on the response, and on the fact that he actually spent time in school learning math and finance. (But I haven't watched them.)
Or maybe some giant half-silvered mirrors north of the building, facing south, which only come out of their underground silos around noon +/- 4 hours.
Seeing how the comments on this thread were so divided, I read the article, and I support the view that it's a criticism that is worth considering, even though it's not highly convincing.

You can argue that covering WWII to Vietnam in 15 minutes is just mission impossible. But the way it's described in that article does raise concerns.
No idea as I wouldn't do it :) (sorry - cop out that)
The only real problem I have with the Khan Academy is that they appear to be using a mouse to write notes on the digital chalkboard. This is incredibly messy and really hard to understand.

For example:

In the first video on motion, Sal is going on and on about the topic, and is doing a wonderful job. At the same time, he's writing notes. This would be fine, except the first '=' he writes looks like a 'c', and then in his first example, he is literally saying "D is equal to fifty.", while clearly, his writing looks more like "d=60".

Seriously, couldn't Bill Gates buy some new tools for Sal? It really takes away from the production value when I see this.
As someone who has been a teacher and trainer of various kinds, removing your own bias from your teaching does not come naturally or easily. So I think the points made (while exaggerated) have at least a kernel of validity. However, ranting on a blog is not a productive response. Instead, I'd document them as constructive criticism and send them to Mr. Khan directly. I've got to believe that anyone who is passionate enough about education to put the Khan academy together in the first place is also willing to hear suggestions on improvements.
> Without the method types, the compiler will print a warning, infer the wrong ABI and generate the wrong code.

Did you even try my example? No compiler warnings are generated (nor should the be). What do you mean by defined method types? It is simply looking for any selector which matches on any class because there is not enough statically available information to know any different. Messages are always passed dynamically.

Are we talking about Objective-C? Are you familiar with NSInvocation? Or performSelector:, performSelector:withObject:, performSelector:withObject:withObject:? Or NSNotificationCenter's addObserver:selector:name:object:? This is all done at runtime. No special type information is available to the compiler when using these. Objective-C messagse are always sent dynamically, so the only ABI concerns are how the stack is prepared, and not the interface of the class of an object. You can define methods and swap them out at runtime, this feature would be useless if everything had to be known at compile time.

ARC needs to know that the types of Objective-C objects, id still works fine, beyond that it needs to know no other type information from what I can tell.

It seems we are talking past each other. Objective-C is not like C++, though. All methods are virtual, always. The runtime goes through great pains to make that efficient and still allow complete dynamism. This is orthogonal from ARC.
Samsung Won't Comment On Rumor It Is Preparing Bid For Nokia
PubNub Streams BETA - Twitter Verified
"My only exercise is doing market research... my only hobbies are smoking and drinking tea" -Extremely Unhealthy to boot. If you are a billionaire and still cannot afford the time to take care of your health, what is the point of working so hard?
Let us NOT hold this guy up as some sort of paragon of hard work to be emulated.
We use mondrian currently. It supports just about every database that is supported by JDBC (we use it with PostgreSQL). Just an FYI.
I will definitely look at it soon, thanks!

One thing I wonder is how easy it would be to integrate this with a MongoDB or Redis backend.

Other useful links I found on my quest:

- https://github.com/rsim/mondrian-olap (jruby olap queries on mondrian)

- http://www.slideshare.net/rsim/multidimensional-data-analysi...

- http://www.amazon.com/Pentaho%C2%AE-Solutions-Intelligence-W...
> They treated me like shit when I was penniless, now that I have a couple to rub together they won't let me cash a check without trying to suck-up their way into some new type of account.

Haha, I thought it was just me. "Why are you people being so nice to me all of a sudden???"

With regards to the article, I think that they ignored the alarms is important. I once took out $5K cash for a transaction where I had to show some money and an internal this-is-not-normal alarm went off. While it was an inconvenience, I'm glad that the bank did not let me walk out with the money without checking up on me. So I think that the bank from the article was very irresponsible.

I hope that the soon-to-be-ex-customer of the bank publicizes this issue with the media even more. This is the only check on their carelessness.
It is not the superficial appearance, it is the way it is used. Mathematics specifies a particular, limited, well-defined set of actions and relations. It is that character of those 'game rules' that make it mathematical, compared to general language.
To be honest I have no idea. It crawled 13MM users, some accounts can be very old with very old tweets... You can look at the CD_data table and look for the tweet html code and parse the timestamp.
his math and finance videos might be quite good [...] But I haven't watched them

You may want to try watching a few first. Based on the amount of praise Khan received on HN, I had high hopes. So I did watch a few, and I was disappointed. I'm not sure what I was expecting.

I think on HN a lot of people love the concept of online education that Khan represents, but many have not bothered to seriously try it.
Answer: because they had another product that was making more money.

They never actually came out and said it in the article, but it sounds like the thing that shut down was just squeaking by and distracting their core, profitable, business.

So while plenty of us would be happy to be running this abandoned product on our own as a sole developer/marketer, it wasn't a big enough thing to make a dent in their already thriving company. So they dropped it.
I was disappointed not to see RAII on his list. I'd gladly leave C++ behind if I could keep my RAII and the well-designed STL (a great idea and implementation which is unfortunately uglified by C++-imposed verbosity.) Actually, I'd happily leave even the STL behind, but I always miss RAII.

Rust supports RAII, but it might be premature to include Rust in this kind of comparison.
> sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.

For the record, I like the Khan Academy and they do a lot of good; but I still think that's really unfair to say that given that the article brings up a really important point (regardless of its style of writing): Khan Academy history lessons are so abbreviated, that key, important points and figures in history are skipped. Why is this not good? One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future. Now this is an extreme example that no Khan like outlet actually does, but what if they skipped over Jim Crowe laws in their history of the US?

Going on somewhat of a tangent, reading this article reminds me of this TED talk about filter bubbles.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

Essentially Khan Academy and other ventures like it, may be inadvertently creating dangerous filter bubbles.
As a web programmer with a degree in Fine Arts... YES. They do.

When you really get down to it, the web is about using visual media to communicate ideas. So is Art. Likewise, both disciplines have a heavy technical component. Both have mixed audiences... most people care about the tech side, some just want to experience the final product. Both disciplines also start with a blank page, and build it into the final product. The final products of both disciplines are greatly improved when the audience is engaged, and can be revolutionary when the audience collaborates.

So do web designers need to understand art? Yes!
Today, big Internet portals are supposed to resolve to AAAA (IPv6) DNS queries in their main site. Thus, if your computer is enabled, it should try to access it using IPv6. It's also a good chance to see if AAAA responses to any machine (IPv6 or not) would cause any trouble in their OS or applications.

It's also some type of marketing to make the crowd aware about it. Many companies may have started on IPv6 because there was a day dedicated to test it.
These are the reasons behind the Daubert motion, like the one that Google is filing against Oracle.
Starting a website based on how profitable you think it is, or how profitable strangers on the internet tell you it is, is the worst idea I've heard in a long time.

Internet business isn't a get rich quick scheme.
The value of Stanford, MIT, CMU, etc. isn't that the professors are so good at teaching; it's that they are smart student aggregators. Nothing motivates you like not being the smart one anymore.
Yes! I've been using this method for years. But, similar to the article's premise, I actually have four different hash functions, of increasing complexity. Then, all I have to remember is what's the URL, what's its general level of data security, and what's the hash function for that level of security. The simplest hash is trivial to apply and can be done in real-time, but the most complex hash actually requires me to spend a minute or so to calculate.
I don't mind the contact form personally, I get it that spam sucks and it's an easy way to help prevent _some_ spam. The bigger problem is the field labels being inside the input elements. Once you enter them and put anything the labels go away at which point you no longer have any reference for what was supposed to go in the fields. Also, if js is disabled as it was when I first entered the page you have to erase all the crap in the inputs before you can fill out the form.
Experience tells me that Apple will integrate iCloud deeply into all their Mac OS X applications, and many 3rd party apps will use iCloud by default, and not offer alternative options (such as Dropbox).

Will I be able to write apps for Android which can access data stored in the iCloud? I will be very, very surprised if we can. Similar to how it is very difficult, verging on impossible, to sync my Android phone with iTunes.

Apple clearly do not want their systems to integrate nicely with others, except where they feel they really have to. The iTunes / Blackberry problems from a few years ago proved to me that Apple will do anything it takes to stop interoperability, except where they want it.
If you don't decide to send me a load of bitcoins I will say that you should consider investing in robotics startups. It's a burgeoning industry which has a lot of growth projections and great social paybacks too.
"if the Academy really does want to be "the classroom of the world", then it -should- go into enough detail to build accurate mental models."

We have no context about the video here. Is it for 4th graders? High schoolers? For me, elementary school consisted of brief snippets of historical events (Christopher Columbus discovered America. Indians and settlers got along and had Thanksgiving), while high school consisted mostly of un-learning all of the stuff that they got wrong in elementary school (Columbus was actually a failure! Oh, native Americans hated us).

I don't think you can expect somebody getting their feet wet in history to pay attention to or care about historical subtleties.
A few questions:

* What kind of limits and performance does this implementation have?
* Will data be fetched from the database for each query?
* Is it possible to have dimensions with millions of
values and expect reasonable query times?
* Looks like it supports advanced topologies and hierarchies.
How will dimensions with a high carnality affect performance?
I totally agree with you. I don't think history and many of the humanities can be distiller into 10 minute chunks. I don't think it would be fair to distil World War II into 15 minutes, much less the last 100 years. Trying to distil romanticism into 15 minutes seems just as impossible, since to understand romanticism, you need to understand the changing, industrializing world that birthed it.

My daughter's history class this year did not focus on dates at all. It didn't even really focus on facts. Instead, it focused on why events were taking place, what the impacts of those events were, and why that is important to understand today. This is the way to teach history, but it's a lot harder because it requires interpretation.
I'm not sure what you mean by semi-random, could you explain further? As a non-religious person myself I drop the 'semi-' and just go with utterly random.

I'm also not sure why you think we can't have it both ways. Take chess for example. There's a board, there's rules, and it plays. However ask any serious player about the game, and you'll discover very quickly that there is far more to the game then just the board and how the pieces move.

Why can't the same principle be applied to our universe, where the board is what we perceive and the rules physics?
Do you think any Android phone, or Windows mobile, will be able to use iCloud?

Apple support Windows because there would be an uproar if Windows users bought iPods and iPhones and couldn't use them. They do the bare minimum they have to however.
I have no idea (I just came across this link and thought I would share).

If you find out, I'd like to know too.
Perhaps not all knowledge is concrete.
"Group Warned Women on Twitter About Weiner" Oh NYT what an awesome title+lede
"One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future."

And yet we learn nothing from history even when we know what is considered factual.

The things we learn from history that are important become implicit part of our culture, our DNA not our curriculum.
I think this article points out a weakness that has a rather simple solution: Khan should bring experts in other fields with a knack of teaching well into the academy.

Also, sometime in the near to mid-future, the platform should open up to allow anyone to submit their own video lectures.
Odd how arbitrary fiats and dicta from 'above' tend to provoke reaction. Even more surprising in this case that the discussion was both meaningful and enough to get participation from at least one of the big three---hope this continues in the same vein...
I'm pretty sure any business offering to expand facilities, add thousands of jobs, and increase tax base by a lot while staying inside city limits would have the same kind of rapt attention.
There's no IPv4 shortage in Africa; there might be a shortage of computers per capita but that's a different issue. http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/
I understand your problem and there are indeed multiple options for you. You should definitly not see this as a problem but as an opportunity!
However, if you decide to keep living like now, and you do not wish to use that money for the moment, I suggest you put it in an investment (such as bonds) were you cannot easily withdraw the money. This is because otherwise you would be quickly tempted to use the money for your daily problems you would normally solve otherwise. So if you want to continue living like you did before, make sure the money is frozen or something but still invested so it doesn't use it's value over time (inflation).
To make your decision, you should look into the options. First, do a lot, I mean really a lot of research on founding a startup. How much work is it? What will your life look like when you have a startup? Which things will you miss that you have now? Write down some pro's and con's.

My perspective is that you do want to continue living like you live now. If you are happy with your job, stay there for now, because it is not easy to find a good job. Also you can get a lot of xp and grow. You can have oppurtunities like you say and you will make a carrier. Something to be proud of. When you outgrow that job, you can think of your own business.

Of course I want to suggest to you to help me carry the burden and give me some of that large amount. It would be a nice reward for this advice, but I do not want anything in return for this, I give it to you unconditionally. However I do find myself in need of €2,500 to pursue my own dream. I do have a dream, and it is now that I have the chance to make it real. That is because now I do have time and I'm young, if I wait to long, I will end up in this society witouth any prospects and live a normal live. So if you are open to investing in someone's dream, please feel free to do so. I know this is what I want deep in side and will make me happy. Donation can be done on this adress: 1Q5JMqpGcGo7cz7eqrhuivyLsSCzTY9CQ5
I thank you in advance and I hope you can use my advice. If you need anything else ask me here.
Oh no, a 15 minute summary of the history form WWII to Vietnam isn't thorough Well, I, never!

In all seriousness, I am not sure what the author's point is. Summaries lack detail? Short things are short?
Aha, for some reason I thought you were the author :-)
That comment got me, too, but I don't think it invalidates the other arguments. History teachers need to teach students why history is important, and it's not so you won't be embarrassed when the press asks you about Pal Revere. History teaches us lessons that help us make better decisions today.

(In case its not clear, I'm mostly agreeing with you. :)
Both of the janitors in my high school (small town) were two of the most prominent businessmen in town. One was worth half a million from an HVAC business, the other had owned three stores, a bar and a bowling alley before retiring to the janitorial position.

The speech at our graduation was given by our janitor!
He uses a Wacom tablet to write.