skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobody watches Charlie Rose except everybody I know
CASE STUDY: Google+ vs Facebook engagement
My feeling after reading the article is that he's link-baiting to make a valid point about trends in education in general. He gets demerits for the misdirection, but his fundamental question is essential and needs to be engaged.

Is he correct that education is fundamentally a human, not technological, endeavor? Is something essential lost when teaching is made completely abstract by software and engineering?

I say this as a home-schooling father of five that uses a lot of technology -- DVDs, online -- to augment our curriculum, and couldn't be happier that I'll be able to have my kids go through MIT, Stanford, Khan, etc., online content, and I think our options in the next few years will be even more amazing.

I'm in agreement with the author that human interaction has to be fundamental to the educational process, but technology must play a role. Books themselves represent arguably the most important mass application of technology in modern history.

So the question for me is: does Khan (or Mathalicious for that matter) attempt to become a replacement for human interaction in education? I don't think so. That is still left to the freedom of any parent or teacher using the material. If more context needs to be applied to a given technology-driven lesson, then the parent or teacher is certainly not prevented from doing so.

The more I think about it, the more I think the author is simply advocating one abstract technological solution over another: his particular brand of context-driven content vs. Khan's more conventional content. Nowhere is the question of actual human interaction broached, just the question of whether qualified "experts" created the content to begin with. He may be correct that his content on the whole is better than Khan's, but his invocation of the "human vs. technological" seems to me yet another misdirection.

The real human element of education takes place in one-on-one situations, with a teacher or parent who can intuit where the child's understanding is at, respond in real-time to the student's own reactions, and change their approach in real-time accordingly. Nothing can replace the give-and-take of face-to-face teaching. Every student is different and real teachers know how to change their tactics slightly, drastically or somewhere in-between to help a student make that crucial conceptual breakthrough.

So to me, "Mathalicious vs. Khan" is merely pitting one abstract set of materials vs. another, and has nothing to do with "human vs. technology." I may use one of them or both or neither, but I won't give up my direct interaction with the student, and, having been raised by a teacher myself, I know that real teachers understand this as well.
There is something about the cultural dimension of social
problems that eludes us. When confronted with the rowdy
youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age,
to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the
influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit
becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him
with a positive and constructive example of how to drink.
The consequences of that failure are considerable,
because, in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in
dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the
law.
What's cynical is taking a comment about an article and using it as a way to make the thread be about a specific hacker news commenter. Gross.
Where Khan Academy has the distinct advantage to me is not in its content or teaching style (both of which seem good) but in the ability for the student who does not grasp the subject to be able to replay the lesson over and over without fear of holding up the class or causing the teacher inconvenience thereby allowing the students who do understand the ability to move on to the next subject without having to "read ahead". The overall content covered can be greater overall in a shorter amount of time.

Kids don't want to seem different from other kids. If a child has to ask the teacher to repeat the lesson or stay after for extra help he may be perceived by his peers (or feel as though he is being seen as) as slower or stupid. With KA on the other hand the student can learn at his own pace...something that just cannot be done in a class of 30+.

Khan Academy does not get upset if a student does a search and finds another method to solve the problem at hand (I don't know how many times I was told "I don't care if you are getting the right answer, we want you to do it our way" when I was in school).

To me it is not about KA at all...but more about self education. The best teacher is you, the lecturer may be giving you the information but how you perceive and use it is entirely based on you. It is a simple fact that teachers cannot at the same time be paid more and have smaller class sizes...the funding is not there. Students are going to fall behind unless they are taught early on to not rely entirely on the teacher to show them "everything". We have at our disposal the most powerful learning tool in the history of man...The internet. No longer are libraries bound to the confines of a building down the road that you may or may not have access to. This is the most amazing thing to me, decentralization of learning, and those who profit from learning in the old system obviously are going to be worried about their future income.
For many of us teachers, this is somewhat disconcerting. Gamification is fine when students are trying to save Zelda, but it’s more problematic when math becomes an obstacle, and eighth grade just another “level.”

The author is delusional. That's exactly what 8th, or any other grade, is. Get enough points, proceed to the next grade. Score high enough on the leader board, proceed to the college you want.
> I believe it to be the opposite, the chances of you just guessing 10 correct answers in a row is ridiculously low. It encourages you to make sure every answer is correct before submitting it, otherwise you would have to start over again.

That's not the point. You can learn to solve ten math problems in a row by simply memorizing algorithms to solve the problems, rather than learning the underlying concepts. The author criticizes Khan Academy because its methods emphasize the algorithms, rather than the concepts.

There's a good bit of research suggesting that the ability to solve quantitative problems isn't necessarily related to underlying qualitative understanding. Students could benefit from teaching methods designed to promote understanding.
Try this one:
https://gist.github.com/1747707

It basically uses the toDataURL() method to get the image data of the canvas.
Hey! Thanks for using my explanation from your last article. It's very flattering. And, kudos for calling it what it is.
I'm shocked by how often this needs to be pointed out.
According to Steve Blank, a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

A company is an organization that has found one.
The problem I see with NetBeans is that it consumes a lot of resources. There are better & lighter options.
Can OEMs charge whatever they want?
typo in the title: it's a perceptRon. can an editor fix this or is there some way I can?
Thanks for your comment.

I've tested it on Chrome latest for Mac & Canary Build and it works fine for me.

Do you have more details on this issue?

thx
Thats why I think we were built by aliens. They put an expiration date in our DNA. :)

We just need to figure out how to diffuse the bomb!
Thanks Gee.
We are currently on Linode.
But now Im experimenting with PHPFog. Looks good so far.
This is _exactly_ what I've been missing in ST2. Thanks.
Interesting assessment of what I've always considered to be a successful learning supplement. Not an alternative, and certainly not a revolution, but something people of all ages and backgrounds can refer to when needed. It's a wonderful resource, and this article attempts to diagnose some sort of nonexistent problem with it. It even seems to back off at the end, as if the author realizes he's done little to identify a problem and less to propose an alternative (or even market his product).

Now, if he was going to complain about the "intuitive" approach of KA, he might've had something. Alternatives to KA like PatrickJMT have been successful (to an extent) because some feel that Khan is perhaps a bit too gentle with his teaching method. Baptism by fire certainly appeals to some.

I hate to say it, because comments like these always feel a bit hollow to me, but "Sour grapes" is all that comes to mind with this article.
One can have a lot of respect for teachers and still like education reform.

That said, I've also worked with big companies. This does not obligate me to believe that big companies are universally properly managed collections of competent, self-effacing employees who would never dream of advancing their own interests at the stake of the job. It also does not obligate me to believe that big companies cannot be improved, even radically improved, by measures which would discomfit at least some people who work for big companies.

Indeed, if I hypothetically believed either of those two things prior to working for a big company, working for them would have cured me of those delusions, rapidly.
I posit that their awesomeness is independent of any touch pad.
I personally did not care for the article (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3552363) because it was not technology related, at all. The only link it had to anything technology related was where the author worked.

If you don't like to drink, don't. If you like to drink, do so responsibly and be considerate to others.

Nobody has the right to make value judgements about other people's lifestyles, on this site.
The Erlang Design Pattern
>what exactly service did you talk about in the top comment?

Skype.
One thing I thought of: I think one way to really make education stronger, and cheaper, by utilizing technology, is to have your "point system" based on teaching people just under you. By teaching material, you also learn it more strongly yourself. And of course you have more "one-on-one" time with students while actually reducing the demand for professional teachers.

So maybe you could start with something like Khan Academy (it doesn't hurt to have the lines, dots, and steps documented somewhere). But then have some sort of social network (and I'm saying this as somebody who thinks that too many things have social networks) based on the ability to learn and teach skills.
The more invested and successful you are in some arbitrary game, the more you seek to justify the (nonexistent) purpose of the game. It's pretty scary.
I get a http 500 status code back and I'm gonna investigate that issue tomorrow.
Maybe its because the user agent.
I got a copy because of the reviews, but found the prose style pretty painful, and at least the early material to be basic, so I never got far into it. If you open e.g. AIMA to a random passage, you'll find it's just got more vigor than this book, without losing its textbookiness.

I'd like to see more books like this that use programming in teaching another subject, like Sussman and Wisdom's SICM.
Khan Academy blew my mind when I heard the TED talk on it, no doubt this and software like it has a massive part in the future of education.

More recently I started learning a different language (the human kind) and it drove home even further how much more useful software can be to pickup problems with my understanding.

Let's assume you have an A+ class teacher the best of the best. They still have limited time with an entire class of students. It's simply not possible to diagnose and fix the little or big parts individuals are missing.

An awesome teacher with infinite time could, but that is not a possibility, it just doesn't scale.

About the article, haters going to hate, sounds jealous to me.

Ok point about still teaching using abstract examples, but hell that's a simple fix, throw in some real life ones. How does he use "millions of students across the world have used it" in his opening paragraph and then go on to try and say it's doing it wrong lol.
The coming Series A crunch
Hosting your own on Heroku isn't cheap either. Not to mention even more time savings when you go the paid route (interfaces into accounting software and what not).
Those course titles do sound very typical for an undergrad CS program, if a bit heavy on the practical subjects.
This guy has completely missed the point.

Shareholders like high margins. Amazon made some moves last year that depressed their margins, specifically releasing the kindle fire, which they're selling at a loss, and price-beating brick and mortar stores with gift cards over the holidays to lure away customers. These moves have nothing to do with a loss of efficiency in their EGM business, but they do produce the smaller profits we see.

What the author mistakenly sees as a loss of efficiency is actually amazon future-proofing their business. Knowing that the market would punish them for taking all this profit and reinvesting it in growth, they went all in and took all the punishment at once.

Amazon has bright days ahead.
Look, Sal just hired Vi Hart to do more cool math stuff, the exact opposite of "wild goose chase" math.
It wouldn't really work the way you are thinking. If 10-25% of applicants to the college I went to decided to go to Udacity instead, my college would have had exactly the same number of freshman and wouldn't notice a dollar difference in its revenue. They already only admitted X% of the people who wanted to come in, where 0%<X<100%.

So these online college courses aren't going to kill regular universities. They might make the odds of getting in easier as some people forego normal college for online school.

Likely the schools that currently struggle to fill their classes (lower tier schools, for-profit schools) will go out of business, but these online classes simply aren't going to hurt the big colleges.
I got that a lot for different WAVs that work fine in my other software.
Interesting read. I hope you're wrong...

Our business wouldnt be possible without AWS, they are still innovating which is good (and often lack of innovation is another sign of a company in big trouble)

I have never found Amazon.com particularly useful, nor have i bought anything from it. My girlfriend buys books a fair bit, but also admits the library is cheaper.
next? is there one right now in eastern europe?
Dealing with JVM limitations in Apache Cassandra
Welcome to the desktop degree
oh yeah, thats because I didn't took CSS @include statements into account.
will be fixed asap. ;)
State of State Science Standards [pdf]
Explaining cap tables
You want to avoid injuries, so you suggest using the least ergonomic piece of equipment possible?

I do all my work on laptops, but 99% of it is with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse attached at a workstation calibrated to me. Hunching over a laptop is the last thing you should be doing.
Additionally, if you were doing this a couple years from now you could do it all in a shader in WebGL - which mimics what I believe to be Instagram's technology progression from pure CPU filters to pure GPU filters.
Why we chose to develop using Flash
Dijkstra was right though. We have credit card thefts, SCADA systems run amuck (Iran's nuclear centrifuges for example) and serious risk to life and limb as a result.

The thing is, we can't measure how much better off society would have been had we baked those rigorous methods into the base of our tools. Or the benefit in increased velocity if we didn't have to come back and fix stupid defects later.

Further, with TDD, BDD, unit tests, etc we're slowly moving towards the world Dijkstra argued for in the first place. Dijkstra could see the Forrest while industry was bedazzled by the trees.

In short, you claim we have it better. Prove it.
Capital Factory Adjusts Accelerator Schedule
Programmer Criticism
> I'm not saying that Khan Academy is entirely the right direction to take ...

Delivering a lecture is not what teachers should spend their time on most. Why should millions of teachers explain Pythagoras' theorem all over again, verbally, when we could hire the best one to make a video and then use that video?

Teachers should be education counsellors, couches if you want. They should spend their time guiding students, not regurgitating the same lecture for the 1000th time.

Khan Academy has no fault. The author is just a scared teacher. He should focus more on his students and leave the presentation of material to the most eloquent. There only needs to be one or a few of those.
"But in patio, lawn, and garden equipment, sports equipment, kitchen and bath fixtures, and numerous other areas, they're never going to have monopoly power."

I don't get it. The author doesn't provide enough rationale for this prediction at all, other than the vague notion that Amazon's trying to do too much. (Given they've successfully move into cloud hosting services, it's hardly a stretch to suggest they can move from selling books to selling garden equipment.)
Yeah, i agree with yurylifshits.

Side note: I get annoyed when a "company" continues to call themselves a startup because it sounds cool and trendy. If this is you, dont do it...
Reading the description, i agree this seemed to kind of suck. But I'm French and also wanted to say; it wasn't like that when I grow up in the 80/90s, and it also not at all like that now. Children are treated like children not miniature adults, but adults are simply not there to unconditionally serve caprices of their children and give them 100% attention all the time they are around, and be stupidly paranoid about what could go wrong if they aren't protected by a bodyguard 24/7 (I'm exaggerating, but you see the idea...)

Of course if you always spoil kids and never gives them limits and make them believe the world is 100% safe when somebody is watching over them and so unsafe otherwise that they have formal interdiction to explore on their own, they will get agitated and misbehave and drive you crazy. Not really news to most French people I think...

They are various other factors also, depending on the precise context. For example, in Paris and Petite Couronne most people lives in tiny flats (by American standard and even by French standard in other regions) and you can't afford to let your child make a mess for too long in the living room (or even in their own room) because that would occupy the whole area. So making them tidy up more often mechanically increase discipline. I think that that kind of thing can become cultural and applied even by people who have more space. The way an important proportion of people live in a country impact the way the whole typically behave (and even more true because there is less multiculturalism isolated from each other than in the USA)
Traditional research universities will be around for a long time. Good online schools may eat in to the commuter-campus types of schools that are mostly teaching centers. This would include a lot of the regional campuses of major state schools.
As a side note, I've been wanting to do some exploratory programming in Go to get to know the language for some time now. Can anyone comment on similar weekend-ish projects they've done in Go that they found to exercise the language's strengths and/or unique traits particularly well and would be worth implementing myself?
It's too early to conclude what are the limits of computer mediated human socialization.It's still a pretty young field.For example, just before something like 6 months , google came out with google+ hangouts, and now some people are cooking together using it, which seems pretty unexpected.
I disagreed with that entire article, but the fact that it wasn't tech-related doesn't mean it wasn't suitable for HN - neither, for that matter, does the fact that you or I disagreed with it.
You could get the image data from the canvas element using getImageData() and upload it to your server.
This might work for some people, but as someone relatively smart and good at math, this would just make me want to cry myself to sleep at night. A smart student can master algebra/algebra 2 curriculum in a couple of months. A problem with a lot of high achievers is that they already feel like they are wasting time in high school, this just aggravates that problem.

My suggestion:
Not everyone needs to learn that much math. Classes up to algebra 2 and also an intro to statistics are probably enough for most people. Note that this can be in high school or college.
However, for those who want to be mathematicians/scientists/engineers/technical people, math education should diverge probably around 7th grade. Rather than teaching pre-algebra or algebra or whatever they do now, they should start teaching the students how to do proofs. The best thing about Ma 1a at Caltech (http://www.math.caltech.edu/~2011-12/1term/ma001a1/) is that about 60% of the material could be taught to a smart motivated 7th grader. Making the students do proofs with help everyone figure out either that they love math and its beautiful or that they aren't really that interested in math. With a more rigorous understanding of basic math, learning applications like calculus is a lot easier.
what kind of implementation details are you interested in?
Who's to say the dead prostitute in my car didn't die of natural causes?
Yeah, I am aware of that. This was literally a weekend thing, so I'll try and improve it when I have some time. Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for this - will change the licence to MIT.
For an example of lousy peer review, I posted this yesterday on LessWrong:

A new science journal recently published a seriously crackpot paper, this has the abstract a link for the pdf. I first heard about it from Derek Lowe, who has also written two follow-up posts. The first has a couple of links discussing how news of the paper spread, while the second includes a link to the journal making excuses for why they published it.

<blockquote> Moreover, members of the Editorial Board have objected to these papers; some have resigned, and others have questioned the scientific validity of the contributions. In response I want to first state some basic facts regarding all publications in this journal. All papers are peer-reviewed, although it is often difficult to obtain expert reviewers for some of the interdisciplinary topics covered by this journal. I feel obliged to stress that although we will strive to guarantee the scientific standard of the papers published in this journal, all the responsibility for the ideas contained in the published articles rests entirely on their authors. </blockquote>

I included the links to all of Derek Lowe's posts because they have other interesting links, including in the comments.

The permalink is here http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p9/open_thread_february_114_2012/5t... , so you can check out the links I included.