skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the question is, what problem is it that Khan Academy seems to be solving? It may very well be a band-aid on the symptoms of our sick math education system. It might also be improving scores of students on exams.

I happen to be in the camp that HOW we are teaching and HOW we are measuring the learning of mathematics is the problem. We are teaching procedures simply to try to get the right data. We avoid actually teaching mathematics because the only real way to figure out what someone understands is to ask for an explanation and discussion and those results depend on trusting teachers to evaluate the understanding and assign a measure to it.

It seems that the best job we do teaching mathematics occurs at the lowest and highest extremes. K-3 elementary students, and Ph.D. Students. It's because at those extremes it's more about conversation than scores. Notice that no one gives Ph.D. students multiple choice quizzes.

Now back to Khan Academy, so this is how we are going to use this powerful computational tool to teach Mathematics? Watch video and take multiple choice quizzes? Anyone who thinks that's revolutionary doesn't understand the history of educational technology. This has all been done before, just not free. Free is the only difference between Khan Academy and all of the other previous efforts of using automatic quizzing systems and pre-taped lectures to teach.

I be a jerk to criticize Khan without offering an alternative. There has been a project happening at the University of Illinois for the past 20 years that IS revolutionary and does use the full power of the computer to change the approach to teaching math, AND flips the classroom the way Khan speaks of. It uses content written in Mathematica to approach the subject from the model level rather than the procedure level. It's simply too difficult for most people to understand models by doing hand calculations. However, once the models have been well explored and understood the procedures become trivial.

I am part of a project called Making Math to bring the model of teaching using Mathematica to the web using modern Javascript techniques. We're adding all the communication and feedback mechanisms as well as authoring and editing interfaces. BUT our motto is "if a computer can grade it, it's not worth asking." We feel that way because we expect explanations, and because at the end of the day, students want feedback from mentor, both help, and a pat on the back for a job well done.

(the one thing I like about Khan Academy is the marginalization of the lecture format and the flipping of the classroom. I just happen to think we can flip the classroom by engaging students in better activities, and providing a mechanism to explore and explain mathematical models).
Is this a culture thing? In some Japanese offices, the boss is at the head of a line of desks where all his subordinates work in plain view all the time.
What is the time lag on this graph? How much of Apple profits are from amortized phone contracts that are now 2yrs old?
Well, you've got a goal, right? So match everything you read with your research and see if it can help. A lot of times, it will.

Reading digital copies has a major advantage in that you can search by keyword and only read the stuff that is pertinent to your research/goal. The rest is useless and you don't even have to skim through it...
1. Is anyone actually saying that traditional education is irrelevant? In particular, is Khan Academy (or Sal Khan personally) saying this? (I haven't heard it.)

2. Imagine that you're a possible user (or funder or ...) of KA, but you are not convinced that "traditional education is irrelevant" or that KA's variety of not-so-traditional education is going to be any good.

One thing you might look for, when evaluating KA, is whether the people who run it are any good by the standards you're used to. So even if the people operating KA thought that "traditional education is irrelevant" it might be eminently reasonable for them to parade their traditional-education qualifications, in order to help persuade those who aren't yet on board with the idea.
You wrote "...online approaches to learning, on average, do not work very well..."

Huh? Listen my good man, we aren't talking about the average online approach to learning, we're talking specifically about Khan Academy approach. And I know Khan Academy works for some kids because I've seen some kids using, and liking it -- both kids ahead of their peers and kids behind them.

Whether it works for all kids, on average, is totally irrelevant.
7. Small team of programmers, sharing an office with the boss and his secretary / saleswoman, several people smoking, and the office radio running music you do not really care for. And a wall mounted webcam pointed at the programmers "so the cleaning woman does not nick stuff".

But at least the billiard table was great.
Market share is very important in one business strategy: de-facto standard platform and monopoly rents (see: Microsoft).

If you (or one of your competitors) is planning on playing "monopoly" then marketshare becomes an important metric... either you are aiming for dominant marketshare, or proving that your competitors don't have it. This is why, despite profits being more important, market share is viewed as so important.
The headline manufactures drama from the contrast between "8.7% market share [in units sold]" and 75% of profits. This is the silly part of the coverage.

It's not Dediu's fault that Elmer-Dewitt at CNN Money chose to be ridiculous, so your defense of Dediu's integrity is beside the point.
Are the Khan tests really multiple choice? I don't think most of them are.
The HTML form tag; also expressed more directly as URL templates. The server provides the parameterized template, and the client fills in the params to access the resource.
Also lucky that he was only fighting for $131. For those hitting more than that each day, having the account dropped without an option for a reasonable appeal is ridiculous and Google should absolutely be doing more in this situation.

One of my employees has a very honest and decent content site (not MFA-style). He ran AdSense on there for a time before they shut down his account and ignored the appeal. He suspected a friend of his clicked a few ads to help him out, without instruction or without letting him know. Completely out of his hands. It would be trivial for people to do this to their competitors.

I suspect that sites generating more income for Google can get away with a lot. The smallfry just aren't worth the hassle to investigate.
Is that the Amazon Arrow? It'd be cool (By my standards) if it was similar, but it looks like a straight rip. :(
Typical Gladwell article. In fact, the truth is simple: The farther from the cradle of civilization [1] you get, the worse the alcoholism. Thus, Arabs and Jews are rarely alcoholics, whereas Irish and Russians commonly are. When you get to Indigenous Americans and Australians, alcoholism is a serious problem. It's simple adaptation, no different than adaptation to smallpox.

[1] Where ethanol was first manufactured.
There was heaps of great discussion in the ai class forums, I'd expect that to continue and grow to more of those on the class getting involved.
I've never heard of this difference in perspective between Europa and the US. Do you have anything to support that?

But anyway, this was written in 1988. As someone who was already a programmer at the time, I can assure computers weren't viewed as "prohibitively expensive" in Europe.

Maybe this difference existed ten years earlier, but not in '88.
Please link to the referenced original article, not to BoingBoing.
This is such a fundamental problem that I am surprised that there is not a definitive answer.
I understand your points and they're all fair in the context of programming as a job. Code is code and can be evaluated in an atomic fashion, its objectively either good(correct, efficient etc) or not.

How exactly do you accurately assess teaching? Test scores? I've worked at very tough schools. High unemployment, high crime area. Good teaching in this context meant the teacher showed up, made it through the year without having a mental breakdown and student attendance was > 50%.

On the flipside I've worked at top tier private schools where success was gauged by how many of our students were in the top n% for the state.

Teachers fear outside assessment from bureaucrats. Here in Australia we even have league tables for schools, and there has been talk of tying teacher pay to student performance. Obviously a worry if you are a classroom teacher who understands the human component of teaching (ie it's more than test results in a spreadsheet).

In my opinion to truly assess a teacher you'd need to observe their teaching for weeks to see how they deal with the myriad of situations that arise in the classroom. What we end up with though is standardised testing which ends up telling us what we already know.
The article is missing the point. The purpose of peer review is not to assure that a given publication is of good quality - it's to maintain the status quo. A system in which any undergraduate/PhD can publish his or her research without passing from a committee, or his own professor, is exactly the opposite of what people in academia are looking for.
You can also click the left hand side or right hand side (on mouse over, you'll see a button fade in) to turn the page.
Xenon 2 and DRM, almost irreparable damages?
I have used https://github.com/joseph/monocle/ for my android app https://market.android.com/details?id=in.microangels
iPad 1 was useful most of the time, when you knew of the weak performance. But iPad1 with iOS 5 is a useless piece of metal and glass. It literally takes 2 second to unlock.
"I respect people who are resourceful and get stuff done."

Does getting a college degree not count as getting stuff done? Would you rather someone list every single problem set, proof, project, etc that they have done? I can vouch that a degree from some schools requires much more work/time/resourcefulness than making a couple of cool projects on github.

Also, as a technologist, my ultimate goal is to push things forward. Think SpaceX, Google, Intel, or even something smaller like Lytro or projects like Google's autonomous vehicles. These technology beneath these things (cheap manufacturing, PageRank, integrated circuits, etc) isn't invented by the people who make CRUD webapps; its made by those who master a field and have some insight to vastly improve their domain. That's what changes things.

Note, mentioning Apple or Facebook might seem like a counterpoint to my statement. I would argue Apple has pushed design forward in the same way Intel has pushed the semiconductor business forward. However, Facebook seemed to have no extraordinary technology at its core, but just capitalized on a hole in the market so much that it actually has changed how society functions.

Also, I'm not at all discounting the hustlers who get stuff done, by I think to really change things, one must be a hustler (or know one) and also have extraordinary technology.
Who Was That (Anonymous) Masked Man?
I agree with you gomphus, as an outsider reading this article it did make me feel kind of crappy.

The main feeling I got was:

"Look at the King! Look at the the King! Look at the King, the King, the King!
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
He's altogether as naked as the day that he was born
The King is in the altogether, but altogether, the altogether
It's altogether the very least the King has ever worn"

I am sure there are drawbacks and improvements KA need to make, no doubt at all. But an all out attack from someone at a similar space, to me, seems counter-productive.
A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops
If that's true, do you think alcohol should be regulated differently for members of different racial/ethnic groups? That's a pretty controversial thing to suggest, but it seems to follow if we assume that the government should regulate alcohol at all, and that the regulation should be based on its potential to do harm.
I guess there's good advice here, but I'm browsing on a mobile and ironically the "view this document" link is disabled (and therefore unclickable).
I'm not a programmer, but I do like to automate and my favorite way at the moment is using macros, bash scripts and WinAutomation - I can't believe how much can be automated this way. Email replies, online searches, software updates, website testing, testing content for uniqueness, proof reading and renaming files, taking screenshots, adding tasks to the calendar - everything can be automated using existing software and something to connect it all together (in my case, it's WinAutomation).

Obviously, it's not scalable, but anything that saves you an hour of sorting 500 files by category is a win in my book...
"Russians commonly are"

Plenty of jews in this country that come from both Germany, Poland and Russia. They are not by any stretch of the imagination big drinkers and hardly drink at all.
In light of the super bowl (go giants), the greatest super bowl ad of all time
There's also the fact that in many jurisdictions, things like cube walls can be depreciated like office furniture, whereas building actual walls counts as an improvement on the building - making the cubes even cheaper/more tax-efficient.
Reminds me a little about when someone wants to break up with their partner and the partner tries to get them to stay. Usually by the time someone wants to leave things are just broken and to late to fix.
you mean when an organization is registered and has already a working business plan, they shouldn't call them a startup anymore?!
> The point you're missing is that a citizen here has paid taxes all his life, and his parents, and so forth.

Potentially; one could be a naturalized citizen, or a child of immigrants, or poor enough not to be a net positive contributor to federal revenue.

An H-1B making $100,000 a year, incidentally, pays more taxes over the original three-year term of their visa than most American citizens in their 20's have ever paid in their lives. Not just directly, but indirectly in terms of the profits generated by their productivity, which are subject to both corporate tax and, when and if paid out to shareholders, individual tax, as well as any appropriate sales or excise taxes for the sale of whatever products that immigrant has a hand in creating.

It's a rather poisonous social contract that a citizen gets prejudicial hiring preferences in exchange for his taxes, even if he doesn't pay them, while an immigrant can be effectively required to pay much more in tax for no comparable benefit.

> Those who are already here are responsible for what the country is today, and all its business-supporting policies. When someone is out of work for whatever reason, they have a reasonable expectation that they will benefit from this investment in their country with an opportunity to be placed at a job they are "qualified" for.

The fact that a given individual belongs to an arbitrarily defined class of people does not give that individual any credit for what that class of people has collectively done. You can take that same argument and use it to justify racial segregation. ("White men are responsible for what the country is today, and all its business-supporting policies, so when a white man is out of work, he has a reasonable expectation he will benefit from his race's investment in his country.")

> You're taking a very corporate-centric view here.

No, I'm taking an individual-centric view, which is the only sensible moral alternative to the pseudo-racist bullshit you're spouting. Once you're done explaining how your argument doesn't justify Jim Crow, you can get around to explaining how governments are magically better at corporations at hiring engineers.
The cultural inability to drink moderately is not inherently American. Seems you have a bit of a cultural bias, as you left out some notorious drinking cultures: Germany, Japan, Australia, and the UK among them.
Query parameters create hyperlink templates.

So

href="foo/bar/?baz=x"

is really a way for generating a set of hyperlinks that range over whatever domain x comes from and the client should feel free to plug in any valid value for x. You can even indicate the domain of x by returning a 405 in the case of an invalid value (although it would be nice to have a standard way of indicating the domain beforehand)

For instance, if there are 10 pages then x ranges over [1-10]. If the client request ?page = 11 then we'd return a 405 error indicating that the only valid values are [1-10].
> [Anthropomorphism] is paralyzing in the sense that, because persons exist and act in time, its adoption effectively prevents a departure from operational semantics and thus forces people to think about programs in terms of computational behaviours, based on an underlying computational model. This is bad, because operational reasoning is a tremendous waste of mental effort.

I see the effects of this every day at work. And the resulting programs are indeed much complicated by needless uses of procedural style.

It appears most programmers are completely oblivious to the fact that most computation is completely timeless. It's pure functions. It's static. Just like good old fashioned Math™. Nevertheless, they go on introducing time, change, and all the complexities and errors that goes with them, just because nobody taught them to think any better.

It is quite infuriating that I am sometimes forced to follow that trend, sometimes because otherwise my colleagues wouldn't understand my code, but more often because the APIs they wrote are based on mutation when there was no need, or their functions aren't total even though they could have been.
It's OT, but I've found that expense report submission requirements are often (either willfully, our just willfully not improved) difficult in order to reduce the rate at which they are submitted.
Get Ready for the Apple Treadmill?
DHH Was Right About Facebook, After All
Probably pushing the comparison a bit, but The Matrix is here. Only, we are not a source of direct energy but glazed eyeballs glued to television; to sticky content sites, checking news sources and aggregators to see if there's anything new in the last five minutes; succumbing to the urge to find the latest thing for Twitter or HN or Reddit to gain artificial scores; sitting through CoD intermission for the next round rather than quitting; getting worked up as the mainstream papers inflate another trivial issue to incite response.
I couldn't agree more. All the CSS3/HTML5 craze really worries me. With all the new tools we have available, it's more important than ever to remember that with great power comes great responsibility (to care about our users).
This kind of article is interesting to me because I've had no such experiences and it's really hard to imagine a landscape where overt stigmatization is the norm. I don't believe in a supernatural, and have no qualms about calling myself an atheist or an anti-theist (thank you Mr. Hitchens) openly in private or public. I can't think of a single negative repercussion of doing so. Just today, in the locker room, I overheard two guys, one a minister of some sort, talking loudly about their Xian superstitions. I would have happily asserted my atheism to either of them if asked, and would have expected nothing to come of it other than a bit of conversation. For what it's worth, I grew up in the northeast and now live in politically-conservative eastern Washington. There are loads of churches around. Related: my license plate reads INFIDL and I have a Darwin fish stuck to the back of the truck. I've never had anything but one or two positive reactions to either.
Because, again, as he said, he came during an enormous boom. Following relaxation of regulations, Wall Street was hiring every developer it could find, and there just were not that many around at the time. It's not reasonable to compare 80's Wall Street with modern, recession-hampered America.
Graph Degree Distributions using R over Hadoop
probably not, because apple's primary innovation isn't technical, it's fashion. as long as apple can maintain the iPhone's position as a desirable fashion item they'll be fine.
Maybe they'll go the Ubuntu hidden menus auto-complete route.
I haven't attended Penn State or MIT, but I have attended the University of North Texas and Yale, and I agree with you 100%.

While there were differences in curriculum, the biggest difference I found was in expectations for the work I produced. My Yale classes have simply expected be to do more with the material: take it farther, make more inferences, produce a more insightful answer/project than the ones I took at UNT did.

Regardless of branding, I could never say the experiences have been interchangeable.
I wonder how such cultural messages could be introduced, if they do not exist presently.

It doesn't seem like something that the government can do anything about, so it makes sense that the govt reaches for new laws and restrictions to address the problem (if unfortunate and ineffectual).

Very interesting read, thanks!
isn't it trivial? I use this all the time
How do they make money if the courses are free?
Virtual Basic and Applesoft Basic for apple II
Show HN: VPS benchmark one-liner with comparison table (updated)
Interesting article but I suspect what is happening here is what happens in most technology cycle: first the true believers and the hobbyists come up, finding ways to create something out of a new technology. Then the businesses come and make the technology a utility and a more commoditized thing, pushing the believers and hobbyists out of the way in the name of efficiency.

Cyberflaneurs probably still exist, they're just no longer the main group on the internet.
I spent most of the weekend working on this. Hope its useful for someone.
I've never actually seen any rowdy drunks in the many pubs I visited in the UK, despite the many people there drinking heavily. But then again, I never went to the rowdy pubs.
Thanks for the comments. Very helpful. Again, to reiterate, I actually like Khan Academy, and the post wasn't critiquing Khan as much as it was our turning Khan into something that it's not. The post wasn't about Khan. It was about us.
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Schools are experimenting with using it as a core instructional tool. That is not in question. Whether or not Khan himself is advocating this is besides the point (although they are involved in pilot programs). The point is that schools & districts are turning to a style of instruction that we know from research does not work, and that threatens to postpone the more important -- and necessary -- conversation about better teaching and better curriculum.
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That said, I have heard what Khan has said about how he envisions Khan Academy being used. (Awkward sentence; apologies). He wants teachers to be able to offload skills instruction in order to be freed up to pursue projects and other applications. In theory, this is terrific. As a former classroom teacher myself, I know how much time we spend on basic skills. However, my concern -- and let's be clear; I say this as a teacher -- is that if students aren't learning the skills correctly in the first place, then they won't be able to apply them.
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Finally, as someone who has spent considerable time -- and all of his savings -- trying to create a product that will help teachers teach better from the curriculum angle, I can tell you that Khan Academy has made it incredibly difficult to fund new projects in the ed space. Yes, there is more money than ever, but almost all of it is for platforms. Nobody wants to put money into effective content, because the media narrative has convinced them that the math problem has already been "solved." Having watched many, many Khan Academy videos, and having spoken to any number of teachers and school administrators, I have a difficult time believing this to be true.
Why do people put QR codes on websites (the credits pane)?
Except as I understand it going to New South Wales Fair Trading doesn't require hiring a lawyer.