skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say it has failed completely, but yes, it has not delivered on the promise. Edtech and teaching is close to my heart and I have spent a lot of time analyzing this. My insights are mostly from what I have observed in India.

Edtech has failed in India because there is very little tech and even little education in the apps. Mostly edtech in India equates to exam preparation apps.

Other approaches like the duolingo gamification approaches have also failed to actually educate users though some of them have found success as startups.

This has lead to a disillusionment among parents about the edtech promise. Also, unfortunately the big successes of edtech(Byjus, Whitehat etc) turned out to be bad apples.

But lets take the positives. The main positive is that parents and kids are willing to try and there is a huge market. They just need the right product.

My takeaways are as follows:

1. Too many products try to reinvent the wheel with their own curriculum etc. This creates an extra burden for students who have to study these in addition to their course work. Given the paucity of time, guess what they drop?

2. Too much gamification and engagement farming. The emphasis on gamification instead of learning.

3. Most edtech is about putting videos online and adding quizzes. No emphasis on making the content actually interactive and engaging. In this day and age why shouldn't text books be interactive.

This is what I am focusing on and helping my wife do a startup in this space(I am unfortunately busy with running a SaaS startup, so I just help out of passion :))

So far, we have made the whole of CBSE(India's national curriculum) curriculum for math as an interactive textbook. But it's a long journey. There is no hurry. The revolution has just started :)
Side note: I tried the same questions with some local LLMs I’m running at home—unfortunately, they’re nowhere near as good or useful. I hope local models improve quickly, so we’re not left depending on the good graces of big LLM(tm).
Yes, for a Cessna or a 737. Not for a modern fighter.
I worked for a couple of years in edTech and the reality is that all you need is a good teacher, pen and paper, and a chalkboard.
IMO education is still built around Victorian structures and needs to be reworked from examinations downwards. Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject. Once you strip that away the you wind back all the structures that feed it. You can see this working at schools designed for the neuro diverse. Those students simply can't sit and listen to a teacher all day, so each student learns in their own way and are better of for it.

Arguing about the effectiveness of edtech is like complaining there wasn't a viola on the Titanic's band.
Looking to the skies: The importance of satellite cybersecurity
Ok that's very helpful, thank you.
> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.

That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)
.NET Conf 2024
There was talk of gerbils !!!
Everything you need to know to fine-tune LLMs in the privacy of your home
Honestly. Enjoy having a billionaire dictate your government staffing, WCGW
CUDA Programming Course – High-Performance Computing with GPUs [video]
AMD grabs a quarter of x86 market
Amazon ready to use its own AI chips, reduce its dependence on Nvidia
I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.
The problem is that it should be the present. Oh, I've been an engineer for a while and I know the system can't turn on a dime, it would take some time.

However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.

The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.
> But leads to kids guessing.

Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
Could it be that part of the failure is that EdTech companies are focused on replacing the pedagogical aspect of schools, but the main utility of schools for parents is not pedagogy - it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?
I don't think hating or lauding his music is really appropriate in this thread --it's kind of off topic. We can admit it's subjective and tastes will vary.
I’m sorry I made you feel defensive. (Though maybe take a moment to consider how the author feels in response to your comments...) I’m not at all saying you can’t comment on language. It is possible to break language rules, this just isn’t one of those cases. I’m saying if you’re going to criticize someone for their language on the basis of perceived language rules, you should either be certain you’re correct about your complaint, or be prepared to receive counter-criticism. In this case, your top comment is factually incorrect, the usage of the comma was not wrong above, according to the rules and usage of commas.

> why is a comma better than any of the alternative here? It isn’t.

Your complaint boils down to the writing has other alternative choices that you would prefer. That’s fine. It’s pure opinion, but you are entitled to your opinion. I’m not arguing the sentence in question is the best way to write it, I’m pushing back on your incorrect claim that it’s wrong. It wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t non-conforming, the usage of comma in the article matches what sources say about comma. Maybe before criticizing or arguing further, take a moment to review what a few sources say about the comma and it’s legitimate uses. [1] For the comma to be wrong, it must break all of the acceptable uses, not just any of them. IMO it’s also worth reading about why language prescriptivism itself is considered bad by many people. [2] Reasons include prescritivism being overly dogmatic, classist, racist, regional preference, and doesn’t adapt with changing language.

It’s fair for you to say it could be better written. It’s not fair to try to justify your opinion by claiming valid language use is breaking language rules.

And my actual point was the part about leaning into descriptivism and away from language policing other people. I have done both, and I’m just saying you’ll probably be happier — I am — if you realize that following prescribed language rules aren’t what makes writing good or bad, and that legitimate usage is broader than you imagine. It’s also helpful when discussing language clarity to take the viewpoint that some of the burden of successful communication is on the receiver, and that when the reader or listener has an open mind and assumes there are multiple interpretations, it becomes easier to choose a good faith interpretation that makes the most sense in context.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription#Critic...
The article feels very much like a union rep fighting automation. If AI is provably worse, we should see that come up in the AI making 'bad calls' vs the human team. You would even see affects on health outcomes.

One place I'd really like an all seeing eye AI overlord is in nursing home care. I have seen family members lie in filth with clear signs of an infection. I am confident, if we hadn't visited, seen this, and got her out of there she would have died there, years before her time.
Did you know you can buy an Oxford Nanopore sequencer for about $2000 euro? It sits on your desk and it will sequence DNA or RNA at about 450 bases per second

https://nanoporetech.com/platform/technology

It somehow grabs a free strand of DNA\RNA and pulls it through a specially constructed pore on a membrane. It reads the voltage change as it goes through because each type of base (ATGC) changes the voltage differently, and interprets the sequence and outputs the data in a file.

Doesn't even need PCR amplification because it reads a single strand.

I thought it must be fake because it sounds like something out of science fiction but Nature did an article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01108-x

Mind blowing
I agree with you. The only issue is training AI to be better and better. Much more efficient.
I am not Czech but I did see a quote about life under communist rule that you made me remember: He who does not steal, steals from his family.
At school they used to teach us that if you cook a potato, the solanine will break down, but according to the article it seems not true at all :(

> Most home processing methods like boiling, cooking, and frying potatoes have been shown to have minimal effects on solanine levels.
> The bass heavy tendency of western consumer grade headphones/speakers is tuned for western pop music and does not sound very good with much else.

As a basshead myself, this reminds me of these Drum & Bass artists that found the speakers in the venues they played at were not tuned for the music they were producing, so they built their own soundsystem to bring with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-kq6g0-QY
Inside Ridley Scott's Producing Empire: “Tell Me the Film in Two Sentences”
no it hasnt, edtech's purpose is, and always has been, selling to administrators. I have never met a single educator of any sort who ever believed that this technology would be valuable to students in any way.
Eh, it's a heuristic. When you put time and effort in, you can usually do better. Superforcasters can beat "nothing ever happens", and even regular people can in particular areas, but if you don't know about a subject it's a good starting point.

Similar to the "efficient market hypothesis". It's clearly false, but good luck walking into a randomly selected part of the market and reliably being able to beat it.
PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook series served me well

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/postgresql-16-administr...
Artists can and do remove your access to purchased albums on Bandcamp, see my rant below.
Other countries have had lower crime rates than the USA without mass incarceration.

Mass incarceration brings a lot of other problems, not the least of which is the moral repugnance of for-profit-prison companies.
If you like the company and they like you, wouldn't you be a better asset in a role that actually fits you? You're not going to help anyone if you just burn out and leave.

Your needs matter too, and while no job is perfect, it sucks to dread work every day! I hope you can talk to them and find a better balance.
Wow, this instantly gave better results to my first couple of queries than any other image generator I've tried

I'm not even talking about the high res feature, just the returned image was better looking, more on-prompt and without weird artefacts
If you like SF Mono and don't have a Mac, you could just download it from them and break Apple's licensing agreement.

https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
>area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh-smallest since recovery began in 1992

Yet later in the article:

>In previous years, NOAA and NASA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time period dating back to 1979 (...) . Using that longer record (...) this year's hole ranked 20th-smallest in area across 45 years of observations.

20th-smallest or 25th-biggest. So looks like perfectly average size to me.

If we look at year earlier:

>the hole ranked as the 12th largest single-day ozone hole since 1979.

from:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152023/modest-ozone...

Why do I have a feeling these numbers are being manipulated?
That's closer to real life physics than knowing formulas is!
Of course it's corruption. Most of the money goes to the boss of the center.

This happens on plenty of public offices (probably most). You need some permit to build something? You either pay or wait for years to get it, if ever.
I never associated alcohol with poor sleep (it makes me fall asleep!) until I got a garmin watch and could see whenever I went to bed after drinking, my rest was absolutely awful.
I still appreciate how self-learning is now easier and more convenient than ever. It's always been possible by reading books, but the addition of resources like Kahn, 3Bl1Br, MitX etc are lovely.

Given the adversarial of systematic education, and their focus on discriminating into social status castes, the self-learning will have a dual advantage: Growth, enjoyment of learning, and a large advantage in the competitive aspect. Someone who's smart may score well on an evaluation; so will someone who's seen the material, and worked through the problems before.
Are there uses for this drug other than weight loss?
I didn't find the GitHub project for bufstream... Any clue?
Yeah, I wish more emphasis was put on #3.

I keep getting hurt via various forms of exercise. My last injury was a herniated disc which has cost me so much time and money for surgery and PT and missed work time and such.

So a big #1 and #3 for me...

Maybe they were because of #2, but I tried to learn as best as I could.

I couldn't care less about #5.

A lot of time, money, and effort and I still have pretty much nothing to show for it. I am still quite thin and weak. I wont give up, but it's definitely not as simple as some people make it seem.
I don't have exactly what you're looking for, but I built a personal RSS-feed generator for twitter accounts that runs Selenium, and scans the DOM for data - using vxtwitter to fetch things in an easier way.

You could do something similar; as someone else suggested, just walk the feed via DOM elements.
And they also stole tons of land and businesses from the Jews who they helped expel into concentration camps they helped staff.

Many of the famous cafes in Vienna itself, which show up in almost every writing about the city, were stolen from expelled Jews
IMO that is about the third best method.

The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.

Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
Free offerings from different corps are not equal in their concerns. With Google, my concern is they simply kill or abandon their project. With Oracle, I have to worry about lawyers knocking down my door for a license audit
Experiment reveals how Earth's magnetic field influences flow in planet's core
> Normalize your data unless you have a good reason not to

Ouch. You don't want to just say that and move on.

The author even linked to a page citing 10 different kinds of normalization (11 with the "non-normalized"). Most people don't even know what those are, and have no use for 7 of those. Do not send people on wild-goose chases after those higher normal forms.
I left Portugal and have been around other European countries since the early 2000's, also do similar trips back home, already lost many dear relatives including one of my parents, yes it hits hard, and makes one wonder how to sort out this kind of issues.

It is also one of the reasons why I no longer take jobs without remote option across Europe, not only the country where the company is located (naturally as long as I can afford to be picky).

All the best.
Youtube is pretty much a monopoly at this point. It has no significant competition. So they can afford to have plenty of bugs and indeed their fight against general purpose computation and preventing people from watching youtube outside of their prescribed web applications and smartphone apps has lead to the introduction of many bugs even in the browser.

I used to use youtube in a browser because it just worked. It had lots of nice features compared to youtube-dl/yt-dlp. But since they've worked so hard to prevent the use of such tools even my browser based youtube is regularly freezing the video for ~5-10 second periods many times during a play now (on multiple computers/firefox, via multiple IPs).

Youtube tightening their grip has made the youtube.com website so bad that yt-dlp is now actually a better experience. Rather than just an awkward way to preserve things.
A bit tangential but related.

I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].

I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.

It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.

It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.

[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.

EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.
You should visit Eastern Europe lol
What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency? If an exam is well designed, the student will need to figure out what is being asked and use their mastery to provide an answer.
There are a lot of things, particularly in math and science, that really benefit from modern media when it comes to illustrating things.
> The simple state machines and decision trees that make enemies move and attack in video games, we also call AI.

Yes but no game companies have ever marketed their game asserting that the things your shooting are, in fact, self-aware conscious intelligences.
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
> Overlord overshadows other operations because it was unique in its nature, scale and difficulties

Without diminishing Overlord (a landing of this magnitude was unparalleled), I think Bagration is just as impressive, devastatingly effective at annihilating the German army (most of Army Group Center gone, poof), and must have been a logistical and secrecy nightmare to employ maskirovka at such a large scale. It was larger scale than Overlord, too.

Not many in pop culture know about the Siege of Leningrad.

Stalingrad is better known in pop culture, but regrettably most of it at the level of terribly bad and misleading movies such as "Enemy at the Gates".

> Eastern Front also had its iconic moments [...]

That's a bit of an understatement... The Eastern Front is where most of the fighting in WWII happened. It's where the European theater of war was truly won or lost.
It's incredibly frustrating as a parent when you've taken care to make your network and devices work a certain way for your kids, then the schools send them home with devices that have unlimited access to Youtube and trash-tier Web games and whatever else, and no ability for parents to manage any of that (of course). WTF. Thanks, now I have some damn object I have to keep away from them, but also have to get back in their backpacks each morning. Wonderful.
Political pros no better than public in predicting which messages persuade
As others commented, the article doesn't really talk about edtech, but about introducing smartphones/tables/computers in curriculum in a way that makes it harder to limit their use both at school and at home. From my kids' experience, I agree with the article.

But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.

EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.

I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.

I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.

[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
Hissing is _usually_ something to do with the noise cancellation. In my case it was that the microphones were dirty.