http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/

They stopped talking about it but they had some success (with lots of funding from the British taxpayer) in the games industry.

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomerics

Keep the episodes rolling!
-Abe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32923390

Been a 4x fan for a long time and I’m looking to see the game as it progresses!

The discussion about MP vs XP is interesting and I tend to agree. It’s better to have multiple goals at any given time, so you can get progress towards one even if not all. The interest in absolute skill vs estimated effort probably varies quite a bit between users, also.

He walked me all over Pasadena and despite my urgent need for coffee, it was a great time. I hope to give him a similar tour of my old stomping grounds someday!

@Jason:
Re: I don’t have to do anything
For my wife’s 30th birthday we did what she wanted to do that day, and one of those things was going to the local mall. It was really nice out and the booths outside of the shops were out, one of vendors running a booth got my wife’s attention (some personal cleaning products company) and the vendor was scrubbing my wife’s hand with some sea salt solution, and the vendor said “You gotta try this!”. I said “I don’t gotta do nothing”. My wife was a little mad at me at the time, but now, everyone I spend significant time with knows that I’ll pull out “I don’t gotta do nothing” at the drop of a hat.

Justin, it’s a bummer you’re on your way out of the country so fast now that I’m finally back and in the LA area, even.

@Jed I had a lot of fun writing the summarization code! I give Justin free reign to productize it if he wants, I currently have my hands full with a new job and the house rebuilding process.

Great show guys!

Anyway, good to hear you guys are still recording shows, even with the long intermissions.

With regards to the “tech-tree” talk, perhaps have a dig into the game Factorio’s tech-tree, here’s a brief pic:

https://thecuriousdev.com/images/Factorio-tech-tree.png

This propagates down and is probably upside down to how Math Academy works but it might provide some form of inspiration.

But Jason … DO. NOT. PLAY. THIS. GAME. It’s otherwise known as cracktorio 🙂

Cheers
Scott

Can’t recall if it was about JavaScript still or not but Justin’s pronouncement of “Layer” had me laughing:

me: “Layah” (Australian)
Jason: “Layerrrr”
Justin: “Lair” … an evil Lair for JavaScript developers?

Appreciate the time you take for these, a great way to pass the time for a 12km run!

Re: the comment about “you guys are like an old comfortable pair of shoes”. That indeed was a complement and as for the “old” part, I think we are the same age (I was born in 1971) and I am nowhere near old 🙂

@Jason: I’m also someone who went from Superman level vision to having to deal with presbyopia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyopia) in the last few years. My wife and I keep a bunch of pairs of 1.25x glasses from the dollar store scattered around the house. They break or get lost all the time but for $1 who cares?

Finally I got excited when you guys started talking about Elixir. I’m a big proponent and I have a small side website doing event ticketing I wrote in Elixir/Phoenix that has been humming along with zero problems for the last four years. I get a lot of very bursty traffic when events go live and it never breaks a sweat. That said at this point it makes zero sense to think about re-writing your node app in Elixir.

@Justin: Health > Wealth

@Jason: That’s great to hear about the new hire. If I had one wish, it would just be faster page loads—both between questions and after completing a lesson. Sacrificing a bit in terms of optimal next lesson ordering would be worth it to be able to go on more quickly.

I’d say math learners are a poor to mediocre fit for newsletters and programmers are better but not great. The three groups I’d look at are health & fitness, politics (which seems to be the most read category) and financial topics.

Millions of people pay for investment newsletters and the average price is a lot more than a typical Substack or Patreon subscription.

I’ll be “The Daily Phil” could also be a very popular edition based on what he brought to the show 50-55 episodes ago!

For many years, every time it’s come up on r/languagelearning or similar places, the threads on it have been hugely negative. Like many of its competitors, it’s hard to find a single person who has actually learned a language to even a B1 level. Unlike its competitors, there are countless stories of people wasting over 10 hours a week for *years* to not learn a language. I’ve met a number of those people in person over the years and sometimes it’s jaw-dropping to hear from them that they put many of thousands of hours into a language when their skills are behind where a lot of students are after a single intense summer course.

Duolingo fractally bad. The content often has errors in it. The methods used—such as spending a lot of time translating L1 into L2 rather than actually getting input in the the target language—are atrocious. The in-app goals are arbitrary things that have no external value. Then to top it off, it’s highly addictive so people invest their time into it.

Even on their own forums you can see that, after years of use and completing the entire Japanese “tree” in Duolingo, students have almost no hope of even passing the N4 level of the JLPT. That level is titled, “The ability to understand basic Japanese.”

It’s a similar story for people using Duolingo to pass other tests that correspond to useful skill levels and open doors, like CEFR, TOEFL, or the HSK. The story is even worse for people trying to learn the language for spoken use, since the app is so focused on sentence level and smaller chunks of content.

For anyone building an educational app, I’d recommend looking at Duolingo as a target to navigate away from.

@Shawn – Yep! The paid version is still a thing too. Our first goal is to get 5k free subscribers and that will give us a user base to run some tests with.

But thanks so much for the positive feedback. It’s much appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScEsbdp8SJ78e6naAB6kA1L_kzVtSAEbV9cjWfQMfBM9DFENg/viewform

We’re bringing on both students (starting at the level of Prealgebra) as well as adults looking to push forward in advanced mathematics (or recapture lost mathematical knowledge if that’s the case). The beta price is $39/mo.

Jason, congratulations on releasing Math Academy into the wild! I’m sure the stress level has been rising steadily over the past few years as you navigated towards this moment. It’s really great to hear about the journey as it’s happening.

Justin, it will be interesting to see how Morning Brief evolves. Surprised by you talking about paid advertising. Looking forward to more updates.

To kick things off, we allow the student (or student’s parent, depending on the situation) to select an optional (but recommended) “course readiness” test to identify any potential holes in critical prerequisite knowledge. In addition, there’s an optional placement exam where the student can select which modules they think they know and want to try to place out of. This could also be really useful if you’re either just brushing up on a course, or if you were picking it up halfway through the year, after say deciding that your high-school or college Calculus teacher isn’t doing the job for you.

If we were to use Calculus as the example course, the readiness test might find that you’re solid on basic algebra and functions, but weak on trig and parametric equations. Likewise, the placement test might find that you remember basic derivative and integral rules, but the other stuff has kind of gone to pot.

So, in short, the answer is “yes”. 😉

Re. MathAcademy – I wanted my son to join it for a long time already – he just has a few years to get to the right level. But I love the idea – we’ll get there!

Re. Morning brief – have you considered tweaking the setup to guide people to more specific things rather than a grand change. For example “The topic X you chose is very broad and you may not produce interesting results. Would you like to try more specific topics: (10 tags which are commonly tagged with X, but are happen less frequently)?” Could be a quick improvement while you work on bigger changes.

How do you think your adaptive learning curriculum would handle this kind of ‘swiss cheese’ pre-existing knowledge? Is it possible to slow down for some sections, and ‘test out of’ other sections?

RE: gamification, my first thought when you said you enabled the leaderboard without optin or allowing changing names is that someone will have issues with Personally Identifiable Information (PII) being shared.

I also wonder what the impact will be for those who are in the same cohort that is running away with the lead, whether it is someone that is simply miles better than you are they are doing none of their other work, or down the road someone having figured out a way to game the gamification. If there’s no chance that you’ll ever make the top, or even break into the top group, the leaderboard will then become a disincentive.

I think that with Duolingo one way they handle it is by having leagues, kick butt in your league and you’re promoted to the next league up (or you slack and you’re pushed down a league), so you’re always with a group that you can compete. I know from my wife’s experience the notification that she’ll be demoted triggers here to through enough lessons to not be demoted.

about 50 minutes in so far, will listen to the rest tomorrow

Congrats on shipping, Jason! 🚢

With those services you get automatic error collation (only one entry for a specific type), extra context (url, parameters, user, …), threshold notification (send me an email only after 10th failure of that type) and many more nice features.

Rolling out your own error notification these days is likely a waste of time.

@Jason: have there been any updates on the documentary about Math Academy that’s been following its progress over the years?

After all these years Justin is still able to make me laugh so hard it’s dangerous while driving to work 🙂

Great to hear about math results of Riley, test scores by Colby etc… So good to see all that hard work paying of.

Keep on rockin’ guys !
Vladimir

Keep in mind, I don’t look at all of them. I scan the headlines, and I have about 20 topics I am interested in. I actually only read about 2-3 from the total. Where I am getting the value is that its scanning everything for me which cuts down on me surfing around to find it.

I used to use google alerts for it, but that was too noisy to the point I may as well have just been throwing terms into the search and reading everything.

@William Wow, arxiv.org, I feel like we could make a whole Morning Brief product edition just from that one source. Thanks!

Jason, I liked the architecture discussion. I have found job queues like Celery (within python)/Rabbitmq useful for when I have long running jobs that I need to offload. I think your other students will find it easier to get internships if they want them as local institutions find out their level.

Btw. Black Widow was the first movie that I saw in the theater since the pandemic. I thought it was fun.

Jason: eager to learn more about the progress on gamification, and how the students actually react to it and how well it works.

Justin: I’ve had the tab open for more than a week, but I will be signing up for a lifetime Morning Brief account soonish!

One other benefit that we’ve found from queues is that you can turn on and off processing at the various points within the queues when issues occur, and you have the ability to increase and decrease the workers doing the processing based on the number of unprocessed items in a queue.

Either way, I’ll sign up to a new podcast host and put all the files on there tomorrow. The good news is that all the files are sent via a single redirect script so I shouldn’t have to change anything other than that and do the file uploading to the new host.

In other news (for anyone interested) the Morning Brief free trail s now live! (no cc required) – https://morningbrief.ai – check it out!

ps. Podcast app reports “html file found instead of actual episode file…”
pps. Maybe you really need a new website 🙂

Thanks !

Here’s the dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ynswkgfqmztnlc/techzing-341.mp3?dl=0

A company (“Automatic”) basically did the same thing that we were trying to do a couple years after us and ended up raising $30+ million, but I see now that they just shut down: https://www.engadget.com/automatic-obd-diagnostic-dongle-shuts-down-192653493.html

Ok, imma try to answer your concerns.

– We’ are only selling lifetime access right now to early adopters. You’re right that we need a link to the subscription page on the login page, that will help guide people. Right now you can get to the sales page directly (“Get Lifetime Access”) or by completing the demo (clicking the ‘next’ button). I’ll add a message on the login page!

– Asking for the number of links you want up-front is a demo of the actual product, that’s why it’s there.

– You might be right about the name, but I’m undecided. I’m tracking conversions and seeing where people get hung-up. I’ll circle back to a decision about that. There’s also something really nice about the paid journey where if you already entered your name all that info is there and you start receiving briefs as soon as you pay.

– The tech demo IS the brief. You don’t get anything different if you pay. That’s what goes in your inbox every day. So, if someone doesn’t like what they see they will probably not be interested in the product.

– Re crawling tech and content analysis, we discuss that in the show.

@William – Ok ok, I know you are going to try to do at least 2 full comment blocks here moving forward. 😉 I hear you on the abstract we’re thinking about that.

@Mark – Damn right, laravel and php all the way baby! Did you hear that php is thinking about introducing immutable read only properties… talk about forward thinking 😉

Oh BTW, we already have it – https://www.swoole.co.uk – I’ve heard it can be used fo ML.

1. I found the signup process confusing – I tried login but there is no register, not unless I use a social login. Then I did “Play with tech demo” – it asks my name, not sure why as it doesn’t add to the experience except saying “hello matthew”, and doesn’t ask for email address, so how do I register or get on the beta?
2. It shouldn’t ask how many links you want. Make a default and let the user change it later.
3. During the “play with tech demo” process you get asked 3 things – name, # of links, and the tags you want to follow. All that matters of those 3 (for the demo) are the tags. Don’t ask the 2 questions that don’t matter; it just gives users that much more opportunity to disappear.
4. It seems I can pay $100 for lifetime access but why would I pay without even experiencing it? How can I try it?

Curious,

– what crawling tech are you using?
– what service/library are you using for your content analysis?

-Matt

Justin WILL do some ML dev… just as soon as there’s a Laravel service to wrap it up nicely and abstract away a few details 😎

For Justin, for me I would love to see summaries of articles rather than just links. One other thought is that a number of us may sign up because you have provided good value over the years–but may not be your best/most representative audience.

Jason–the math academy diagnostic sounds awesome!!!!! I bet there are extremely few people in the education space who are looking at knowledge graphs. Eclectic interests rule!

Nice episode, enjoyable as always, keep recording !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4-D_v6sWWo Patrick “PJ” Hughes (aviation technician onboard the USS Nimitz in 2004)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwZU6RiTEAw Alex Dietrich (the second pilot present at the Nimitz “Tic-Tac” encounter)

I have to say personally I am not even a little bit convinced by the UFO evidence, and the latest evidence doesn’t even really seem any better than stuff from 20 years ago.

https://dashbit.co/blog/announcing-livebook

Along a similar line, Jeremy Howard talked about the ecosystem size / speed tradeoffs on Lex Friedman’s podcast. They’re actually writing some fast.ai libraries in Swift now: https://youtu.be/XHyASP49ses

My guess is that Python won’t go anywhere for a while but more and more new things will be done with Julia, Elixir, Swift, Rust and other younger languages over the next decade.

If there were a smart contract with the necessary oracles to make the bet, I would.

Thanks for the idea that’s interesting, also, love that Sivers post!

This section of the podcast also reminded me of an article I read a while ago titled No Speed Limits by Derek Sivers: https://sive.rs/kimo Others have mentioned it in the comments, most recently on episode #336, and even further back on the comments for episodes 251, and 25.

When Jason was talking about conscientious kids, I’ve wondered how automated alerts and notifications will tamp down that ability for some folks the more they are exposed to it. I see it similar to how I basically can’t remember phone numbers anymore as it’s always a lookup in my contacts by name. About the only two numbers I remember are my own cell number and my house phone number because it’s used for so many store rewards programs that I have to say the number. Besides those, I’d be very hard pressed to pull a phone number out of my brain.

Another example is my wife’s usage of Duolingo for learning Spanish. When she first started she was burning through the lessons, but now, she only does a couple of lessons after getting a notification saying that the app will stop giving her notifications because it doesn’t look like she’s using the app. So she does a couple of lessons to keep the app thinking that she’s not given up just yet, but basically has until she gets that notification again.

@justin: you mentioned the ability to retroactively add a tag to content that you’ve scanned before. That is an interesting exercise. I don’t have any close recommendations, but a service that we use for web app analytics, Pendo, from what I understand, has the ability for us to tag certain elements in the app to track and after it has done some processing, it can tell us the activity related to that tagged item. Since they use CSS selectors (at least in part) to help determine which element to track, I assume that they store all of the click events on the page and also store the CSS selector to identify the clicked element, and when you add the element for tracking later they just search through all of the tracked events to see which match the newly added tracked element. I’m sure that it doesn’t work for every possible element being clicked, but it works well enough. So that got me thinking about when you’re doing the processing of text that your service consumes that you also add to the tracking other words/sentiments that the text contains in addition to what you may be specifically looking for. Anyway, just a thought.

FYI: this episode isn’t categorized as “podcast” so it’s not listed on the Podcasts page.

I’m a developer, but studied a chunk of biology at university and I can just about follow the science behind their normal talk in other episodes (which I’ve been following for about a year), as they’re good at boiling it down to a low-ish level. In general, I’d trust their opinion more than a lot of other people who turn up on TV talking about this sort of stuff, and I’m in the UK where there seems to be a lot less of this than the States.

Even more speculatively, on the UFO thread… I find it interesting to wonder what next on that. If there are UFOs, what does that mean?

If they’re aliens, does that mean they have faster than light travel? In that case, we know that’s possible and our understanding of physics could be way wrong. If not, are they very long lived or robots? Why spend the resources to come all the way here and study us in some way we can’t comprehend?

How did they know to come to this planet? OK, we’ve been broadcasting radio out for quite a while now, but that’s going to be very tenuous and difficult to pick up even from nearby stars. Does that mean they’ve sent probes or crews out to lots of exoplanets (from their point of view?) Or did they know we were here and how did they know that?

Much as it’s interesting to see something come out about UFOs, the amount of questions that are then unanswered is very frustrating.

It’s nothing new, though. Remember even the NYT, the US “paper of record”, pushed false stories about weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq war. Longer ago, they played a key part in Fidel Castro’s rise to power and before that, they even wrote that it was Poland that had invaded Germany! The Times bureau chief in Berlin, Guido Enderis, had been parroting Nazi propaganda right up through the start of the war.

This isn’t to say that the NYT is uniquely bad. Aside from possibly the
Atlantic, most its competition has fared even worse over the years. Every media outlet suffers from a lack of accuracy at times. It’s just that the most prestigious papers often pair that with a lack of epistemic humility and the power to essentially write the headlines around the world and even in Wikipedia.

I recently picked up a surprisingly engaging book about this history—The Gray Lady Winked.

That said, having spent most my adult life in Taiwan as well as years in mainland China, I don’t think your view of the schooling there is that accurate. A math academy started by an outsider within the public school system would have been utterly crushed. As much as it may dismay you, I think the non-uniformity of the US educational system is one of its greatest strengths.

Even in my own case, the loophole I used to self study and enter university at 13 in Colorado was limited only by my effort and ability and pay tuition. In China, it would have been utterly impossible.

I think this is a reasonable debate to have (I don’t know what the right answer is–I remember that when I was growing up, it seemed like we changed our math system every year. One year I might be learning set theory for kids, then it would be traditional story problems the next year)–for the traditional model of education. As you have said, anyone who has worked with kids realizes that there are huge difference in ability/grit. Age is a very course marker for these. For some students, they might be ready for a concept at 5 and others, maybe not until 10. I think grouping them by age is more a question of limited resources, rather than an optimal way of education.

Just to clarify my own background, I work a lot with magnet school kids who often finish calculus by 10th grade, and by 11th or 12th grade have usually done multivariate calc, a year or two of programming (and perhaps some ML), stats, etc. These students are internationally competitive. Different students progress at different rates and part of what I find exciting about math academy is that it could allow for students to actually progress at the rate that is optimal for them. If you have a student that needs more instruction, then they can take it, whereas another student might whiz through things, then find themselves challenged later. I think if a student can move quickly, it gives them options later–they will be able to catch a glimpse of what real work might be like. They also have a chance to figure out sooner what they like. Also, with a certain foundation, they can productively intern and get a better feeling for what they do and don’t want to do. For myself, I tried a lot of different internships in high school/college (nonlinear optics, inorganic chemistry, space physics, cosmology, astronomy). I sat my first graduate course at 16 in urban planning (fun, but not for me)–I’m a public school brat, but I was lucky to go to a school with good options. Another thing that I like about Math academy is the possibility of seeing it available to students in lower income schools with less options–I hate the idea of seeing talent wasted.

In short–I think the question of accelerate or not is the wrong debate to be having. The question should be can we move more towards personalized education? It’s really hard to see how to do this with a normal classroom environment where the teachers would have to be skilled both at teaching and at math through the calculus level–not to mention managing students of wildly different ability levels, so it seems only possible (except for the rich) with the aid of technology. There are a lot of crappy attempts at online education, but it seems like it should be possible to do it better.

However, let’s for the moment assume that I am correct. There could still be unintended consequences. Where maybe if you look at say a school in a low-income district and a school in a wealthy distract. Let’s imagine that you have two students with 4.0 averages from those schools. In the past, if the student from the low income district got a 1560 on the SAT, that might have gotten him into a good school (wow, he came from that school AND scored awesome!) whereas now, he might be locked out, because a college might assume that his school is not of the same caliber.

Anywho, my main point in all of this is that I’m not sure that this is a question of quality standards being lowered so much as it is a case of quality standards being questioned. Is the test predictive? Sometimes, I think we keep some things around simply because we went through them. For example, physics qualifying exams. Mine was 3 days of written exams on all of physics (7 hrs/ day) followed by 2 sets of oral exams–one on classical physics and the other on modern physics. I passed on my first try, but am not strongly tied to the practice. I can see changing the exam to be more focused to the particular area of research that someone is going into–but there are some that believe that it measures something important. Without data, I’m just not sure.

If you do dip your toes back into twitter, I would recommend less “sharing of articles” and more posting of unique content. As you mentioned, the best articles are showing up on HN, reddit, newsletters, etc — so your twitter feed is at best offering curation and at worst just reposting stuff people have already seen. Give people a reason to follow you and read your stuff, make unique content. No doubt a highly plugged in homeschooler parent in California has seen the articles about the advance math classes and SAT stuff — but where is the solution? Where is the alternative? That’s a gap you could be aiming for. Instead of sharing an article about how COVID remote learning has set students back 2 years in math progress, that’s the place for a thread about how to know if you kid is falling behind and what resources you could take.

Jason: Good luck getting your code back in line. I enjoyed the discussion about the diagnostic tool. Disappointed to hear about schools considering removing gifted programs.

Listened to the Fragmented episode that you were on, I’ve heard a few details in various TZ episodes over the years, but good to hear the Uber non-CTO story in more detail.

Really looking forward to following Jason as you start to market Math Academy. Would love to hear your response to some of the comments in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060677

Issue crenetials as NFT’s…? That’s an interesting, if not potentially brilliant idea – particularly from a marketing standpoint. HN would love that. Thanks so much for the suggestion!

I’m a fan of developer productivity and getting things done. That said, somebody’s gotta make the case for the advances in software over the past 15 years, so here goes:

C and PHP have been used to make a lot of useful things. However, the bar for security used to be much lower. PHP and C been at the center of so many serious incidents that it was a meme even two decades ago. Writing anything that’s concurrent and reasonably complex in either becomes an engaging but fraught mental exercise, at least for me. Rust is better than any legacy language for this class of problems and that’s why the largest 5 software companies have all started adopting it for pieces of their infrastructure.

I’d also say that there’s no way I could have done the last gig I did in the time I did without Elixir. It was a greenfield project, building the infrastructure for an algorithmic crypto trading system. It had to simultaneously connect to hundreds of feeds on multiple exchanges, some on private sockets others public, handle streaming updates for multiple users, recover from individual system or network failure, and any failures cost money. It took me three weeks to build the infra and hand it off to the trading strategy design devs. If I’d written it in JavaScript, which I have more experience with, it would have taken months and the result would not have been as reliable.

Blockchain is also very exciting and I believe will be a bigger shift than going from desktop to web was!

Here’s an example of an NFT (non-transferable token) that would be interesting: Students who complete an ordinary differential equations track on an educational site get a certificate as an NFT.

Even if they earn the certificate under a pseudonym, the credential is near instantaneously verifiable to anyone online, including other software like a gig platform that filters some jobs down to holders of certificates for specific skills. It’s got to be non-transferable because credentials that can be sold lose their ability to be credentials.

If you think of web platforms such as Twitter running on open protocols, then consider that blockchain-powered platforms also have open databases. Any crypto analogue of Twitter would enable a Cambrian explosion of other apps built on top of its public data that we’ll never see on a centralized platform.

tldr; Super 30 > Black Mirror