Your best bet at this point would be https://mathacademy.com/. Their CS course will be launched between okt and dec. In the meantime I would recommend levelling up your math using the same website.
I noticed this line at the end of the article about the things you would like to build:
“Education apps that leverage learning theories, community learning and game design to make learning more inspiring and accessible for students”
Nice, there is a guy here live coding a tesseract on a string in javascript using geometric algebra. The code is general enough that you just have to adjust the dimension n=2,3 or 4. The rest of the code is identical.
I am not quite sure what you mean, can you elaborate? In my mental model, money in the pockets of shareholders is much more effective than money in the pockets of big corporates.
In my mind, big corporates tend to be large corporations of wealth controlled by few people. And shareholders on average are the same. And therefore neither ought to be considered likely to be particularly effective.
Best would be if the company increased salaries, then their employees could invest themselves in stuff that actually benefit them, boosting the real economy.
Only because there is under-supply of housing at the moment. If we built more houses then landlords wouldn't be able to charge higher rent just because people had more money.
To be clear, I think that we need to address both of these issues: general wealth distribution and lack of affordable housing.
A majority of the population's landlord is the bank that holds their mortgage, and they don't just raise your mortgage payment because your income increases.
Define "effective." A company spends its money on people and other inputs to productivity. To my mind that's a lot more "effective" than giving it to the investor class that "spends" it on other investments (by buying it from other people in the investment class).
Most of the money returned to shareholders isn't going to be pumped back into the economy as money spent on goods and services. It just goes into the casino we call stock and bond markets where it provides some liquidity for some investment into companies, but most of it is just spinning around creating no value.
I’ve been a paying customer since October last year. I discovered it after someone recommended it in a hackernews comment.
I’m guessing you’re mentally comparing this to all the possible books you could buy instead for that price. But how many of those books would you actually read, let alone finish?
A better comparison is, having an MIT educated math tutor on call for $50 a month.
I have a bachelors in physics but it still feels great to learn new things that my education skipped. For example, we skipped singular value decomposition at my university in the interest of time. Mathacademy says, screw it, we’re teaching everything!
Also as someone with a physics degree, it's difficult for me to think of taking courses beyond sophomore year that didn't involve SVD to some extent or were using proximal solution strategies (solid but not crazy tough public state school, late aughts). It's not something skipped for time, it's a basic tool used in multiple branches of physics/math. I'll need to look further to validate some of the content/capabilities but as with most things, buyer beware.
What can I say. It simply wasn’t taught at our university. Instead the advanced linear algebra course focused more on abstract function spaces to prepare us for quantum mechanics. This was before the machine learning revolution.
I suppose this is sarcasm, but it was talked about. Not in detailed depth, but the picture I got, many times over, was a far-right fascist wannabe that badly mismanaged the country, stole a lot, was disastrous for the environment, actually killed a lot of people through negligence, glorified military dictatorships, etc. was facing against a left-wing person that was literally in prison for corruption, and whose party has had a few other corruption scandals since that time.
Nobody was saying Lula is the good guy - he was the drastically less bad option than Bolsonaro.
Many journalists writing english language articles about Brazil are themselves brazilians. It's highly likely they're leftists too, so it's not surprising they presented that picture to you. I remember one instance of an american journalist reporting on brazilian affairs on live television: when Biden's CIA officials told our president not to question the voting machines. He was surprised that CIA people think they can openly tell the president of a sovereign country not to question his own elections. To me this was reason to suspect the CIA had compromised our voting machines.
I'd like to offer my own point of view as a counterpoint to the image painted by those journalists.
Bolsonaro is a loudmouth who needlessly offended a huge number of people by making light of COVID-19 deaths. He could have just shut up and allowed other people handle the matter but he just had to put his foot in his mouth. He's got this "myth" thing going on where he says needlessly outrageous things in public and everyone is awed by the sheer balls it takes to say such things in today's politically correct world. When he mocked COVID victims though it caused massive damage to his reputation. It was extremely disrespectful and accomplished nothing. In terms of actual death toll I don't think Brazil is any worse off than other countries but people still say he "genocided" the brazilian population. For that "crime" they wanted to try him like a nazi in Nuremberg. It's ridiculous.
I don't think he mismanaged the country. Considering the world wide economic meltdown caused by the war and the pandemic, he did alright. By the end of his mandate I had high hopes for the future. Now the current government is essentially undoing everything good he did out of spite and increasing taxes for good measure. I criticized his government and his ignorant handling of the pandemic but those problems seem so small now that we have literal communists in power.
By disastrous for the environment you must mean the amazon. It's not something I personally care about. I'd burn that entire jungle down if it brought us prosperity and development. Still I'd like to note the amazon was in much better shape under him than it is right now. Deforestation is a lot higher now, dunno why. Maybe Lula doesn't actually care either. His "solution" apparently consists of begging the king of england for money during his coronation while spending ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money on luxuries.
I am a customer of mathacademy.com, an intelligent tutoring system with a focus on math. Right now they are putting the finishing touches on their courses like abstract algebra and discrete mathematics. They already have linear algebra and calculus.
It absolutely works as advertised and I highly recommend it.
I took a look at the site you mentioned, but I don't see how it's useful for learning. It uses AI to determine what the learner's current level of knowledge is, but the way the learner learns seems completely typical. Then I may as well read classic textbooks. It doesn't seem to me to be that meaningful to determine the learner's current level of knowledge.
The benefit from 1-on-1 tutoring comes not just from finding what the student knows. There are any number of standardized tests that can determine that. Khan Academy does this for free and also adds lessons for mastery based learning.
The benefit comes from understanding how the student misunderstood a concept being taught to them and then fixing that misconception.
I think this claim is too strong. I’ve given and received more 1:1 instruction than most, plus my share of group instruction.
The correcting misunderstanding is a big deal. Don’t get me wrong. The big downside is it’s very dependent on teacher ability.
I’d say the bigger factor, and luckily one that scales well, is teaching the right thing to the student at that moment. You either have unmet dependencies of knowledge, needless repetition, or the right thing. You could also call this fast, slow, just right.
There’s a huge variance of what people already know, even if they’ve been through the same classes. This means if you put a group of people together, the way to teach the most to a group is to teach at a crawl. You’re not teaching to the bottom of the class, you’re teaching to the bottom of the class at any given moment.
1:1 you can just fly in comparison because you can scale up and down the time per topic easily 10x for new material. If you include there may be review, it’s totally reasonable to think one person may need 1 minute (check) or 100 minutes (learn).
The thing about this is that the math is really against you at any number greater than 1. Even 2 is a step change (also for social reasons). So trying to get a smaller class isn’t nearly as effective as springing for 1:1. I mean, you could even say it’s 2 SD better.
> I’d say the bigger factor, and luckily one that scales well, is teaching the right thing to the student at that moment.
I agree that this is a bigger factor for most in the current environment. I'd argue that this is already a solved problem though with Khan Academy for free. The benefit from 1-on-1 tutoring beyond that has little to do with understanding what the student knows and teaching what's next because that problem is already solved to a degree that is almost indistinguishable from what a skilled tutor can provide. The benefit comes mainly from the tutor being able to figure out why the student answered a question wrong and directly addressing it, speeding up deep understanding.
I disagree that teaching what’s next for the student is a solved problem. Usually the resolution is too coarse and the speed is barely variable at all.
Everyone here is asking the right questions. How fine grained are the assessments? What is the tempo? Etc. However, I don’t see any objections that haven’t already been addressed.
This graph traversal based learning is obviously an idea whose time has come and we will probably see many similar companies spring up in the coming years.
This sounds very similar to the system behind http://mathacademy.com . You follow a graph of skills and dependencies and because you always have the necessary prerequisites it is always doable.
Their team of mathematicians have created a curriculum from k-12 to a bachelors in mathematics.
What in tarnation. For 100 bucks/month you can get 1-1 mastery learning sessions from math PhDs/postdocs that need money (like me! I am the postdoc!).
If you want to learn some math and are willing to fork over $50 a month, my advice is to find a competent tutor online*, tell them what your goals are, and work with them to produce an evolving, customized mini-course.
Have them pick material suitable for your goals, work through it in-session together so they can spot gaps in your knowledge/technique and make progressive problem sets to cover those gaps, and so on.
*A local tutor would be better, but I presume they will be prohibitively expensive in the average HN user's location.
The problem is that finding a postdoc that is also a good _teacher_ is a monumental task of its own.
Compared to an online platform that's being used by a ton of people, has lots of reviews and recommendations and that is, presumably, actively optimized through a feedback loop, it's an easy choice between the two. Also, a platform removes the friction of cancelling the engagement if the need to do so arises for whatever reason.
I mean, if someone I know points at a postdoc and says "this guy is excellent", then their recommendation will prevail. But chances of that happening are next to zero.
I have no experience with those platforms, so I don't know how deep the instruction is. After taking, say, a Calculus course there, would you be comfortable doing Spivak's exercises? If yes, that seems great.
No, you can't do anything in 1h/week, 3 hours should be the minimum, 4 is ideal, depending on the level of the class (I would ask for more than 100 for 4 hours a week if I am to teach advanced harmonic analysis, for example).
Yeah, this is cool and similar to the end state I have in mind. The main difference is that I am not trying to create the curriculum/exercises. I am just creating flaschards that say "Solve exercise x.y.z in that textbook". Plus the whole free-software angle and being able to share the material as text files.
The math thing is just a side project at the moment to try to see how it works for other fields. I am primarily using this for music. I was hoping something like this existed already, but all the solutions are either very specialized like this one or do not support dependencies as a core feature, like Anki. Had Anki supported something like this, I wouldn't have needed to make my own thing.
It would be nice to simply include support for dependency tracking in existing flashcard software. Unfortunately, the most commonly used flashcard software, viz. Anki, has not been adding such features. I can only assume that the project is very lightly maintained and/or working on paying down technical debt - new innovative features don't seem to be a priority.
Agreed, I've also been waiting to see a system with spaced repetition (to help memorize and retain) + dependency graph (to choose what new topics to present). Not sure what the AI value add would be?
I have two children and I was glad that teachers are willing to use new tools (I never asked if they were forced to use them, but I assume not because each teacher seems to use different websites). I'm sure some kids still get bored, but they can let the ones who enjoy math practice at their own pace and provide special guidance to them while still spending the majority of their time helping those who need it.
I think ultimately it's a very different approach to their current one, so it might be too difficult to do in the existing codebase. Maybe not, I have not looked at the code. But the public docs and learning philosophy around anki all seemed to discourage it, so I decided to make my own thing.
And yeah, I don't think Anki gets a lot of support. I am an open-source maintainer myself, so I know that story.
This looks great. My son uses “beast academy” from Art of Problem Solving (https://beastacademy.com/), which is fantastic. But mathacademy looks like it might be a good competitor at the post year 6 level.
My observation is that the paper books are unnecessary because the online experience on beastacademy is so comprehensive - and your answers are auto checked. YMMV.
I noticed this line at the end of the article about the things you would like to build: “Education apps that leverage learning theories, community learning and game design to make learning more inspiring and accessible for students”
That’s a perfect description of mathacademy.