jayro

This is a valid sentiment / concern that was also raised in the comments section of the Google+ post. Here's a mildly edited version of my response.

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When you don't formalize the challenges, the kids just kind of meander, don't get much accomplished and things start to devolve into chaos. I know there's been a bunch in the press lately about how if you just poke a hole in a wall and stick a computer in it the kids will teach themselves differential equations or something and then of course teach it to a bunch of the other kids (believe me, I'd love it if it were that easy), but that's not been our experience at all. Not remotely. We've tried that a number of times in a number of different ways (because you know - it's easy) and when you're feeling burned out from work or didn't have time to write up a bunch of challenges, it's something you can rationalize trying, but we've NEVER seen that work. Occasionally, one of the kids will look something up on the web or figure something out on their own and tell the other kids about it, but that rarely gets them very far.

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Just to add to this a bit in the form of a slightly different technology. I bought a few Mindstorm kits last year for the class, wrote up a bunch of easy to read documentation and examples and basically told them to go at it, but even with that and the occasional soft intervention, not a whole lot happened in terms of learning. And we tried this a number of times throughout the year. Sure, they learned a few basic concepts, but the efficiency was extremely low, and nothing much was learned that was transferable. This is also pretty much the same story I heard from every well-meaning, thoughtful and supportive parent who bought their "gifted" kid a Mindstorm kit. They basically played with it a few times, mostly with the legos and then gave up and left it in the corner.

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In regards to the concern about teaching to the test, I make up new challenges every week based on how the kids are progressing, what they're struggling with, what they're excited about, what the next logical learning step might be, etc., so it's not like there's something static that they can optimize against or cynically "game" without actually learning how to code.

Also, while we're very focused on whether they're having fun, exploring and being creative, at this stage the primary goal is to give them enough fundamental skills to be able to do ANYTHING interesting. I mean it takes a lot of work to get them even to that point, and we're not there yet. And the thing is that we're competing against very attractive distractions like Mindcraft and YouTube, as well as all the homework they have to do and the other activities they're involved in, so it's not like being relentless task masters would even fly with them. They'd simply quit.

To sum it up, what we're attempting to do is extremely hard. We're not idiots. And we're really trying. I've probably read just about every related article that's popped up on HN over the past two years, plus 100 others on learning theory and creativity, but a lot of these articles are just people spouting off who've never really tried it in the real world for any length of time or with kids this young, and I can tell you that a lot of it just doesn't work, or not to the degree that you may have been lead to believe. Look, I can't speak for what works for a every group of kids in every context, but what we're doing seems to be working, the kids are having a blast, and if we keep up this pace I think the kids might actually be able to do some real stuff within the next few months, which, in my opinion, would really be something.

Cool! Thanks. ;)

Previous to Carl Lange’s post, this was described in "How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area" - http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...

Apparently, Carl was unaware of it as well despite the post and subsequent discussion receiving a fair amount of attention on HN at different times.

Disclaimer: I wrote it.

Hacker Newsletter is simply a weekly coalition of curated links. HN Digest would aim to provide a short summary for every article that makes the home page. So, if say fifteen of the articles on the home page look interesting to you, but you don't have time to read them all (because actually you do have work to do ;)), then you can just read the summaries for all but the two or three most interesting. Anyway, that's how I'd use it.

I would love to see this fly. I can't count the number of 1000+ word articles I've read that could have been reasonably summarized in a paragraph or two. Sure, there are long articles that are so engrossing or relevant that you wouldn't want to skip a sentence, but in my experience they turn out to be the rare exception.

Brooks is the ultimate apologist for this kind of corrupt military, industrial, surveillance state crap. What a tool.

This article about Brooks (written by Greenwald and dating back to 2009) is pretty illuminating.

* David Brooks: our nation’s premier expert warrior http://www.salon.com/2009/09/25/brooks_6/

Here are two relatively inexpensive options for tick-by-tick market data:

   * IQFeed
   http://www.iqfeed.net/dev/

   * Nanex
   http://www.nanex.net/historical.html

The Nanex data is more expensive and harder to work with, so you might want to start with the IQFeed data.

In other news ...

House Approves Sweeping, Warrantless Electronic Spy Powers: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/house-approves-spy-...

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.

"The filmmaker: Laura Poitras is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose recent films include “My Country, My Country,” about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and “The Oath,” which was filmed in Yemen. Since 2006, Poitras has been detained and questioned at airports at least 40 times. She has had her computer and reporter’s notebooks confiscated and presumably copied, without a warrant. The most recent time, April 5, she took notes during her detention. The agents told her to stop, as they considered her pen a weapon."

...

"He [Jacob Appelbaum - a computer security researcher for the nonprofit organization the Tor Project (torproject.org)] has been detained at least a dozen times at airports: “I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. ... Another one held my wrists. ... They implied that if I didn’t make a deal with them, that I’d be sexually assaulted in prison. ... They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq War, the Afghan War, what I thought politically.”

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2012/4/26/the_nsa_is_watchi...

* Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports [Video w/ Transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/detained_in_the_us_fil...

* "We Don’t Live in a Free Country": Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance [Video w/ Transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/we_do_not_live_in_a

* Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails [Video w/ Transcript] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_...

This is precisely what AnyFu is: http://www.anyfu.com.

We haven't launched yet (just testing out the system), but we've processed five client/expert sessions in the past couple weeks and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

It would be really interesting to see a list of posts where he's been right as well as a list where he's been wrong. In fact, it would be great if there was a site that hand a right and wrong list for all the major economic and foreign policy pundits in order to see some accountability.

Fair enough. I'll try to do a little better next time. But in all fairness it was just an anecdotal G+ post.

We just did a podcast interview with a nuclear engineer (my brother actually) on the subject of Japan's nuclear situation that's worth checking out I think:

http://techzinglive.com/page/694/114-tz-breaking-news-jay-ro...

[Edit] For added context, after serving as a nuclear submarine officer, he worked at a commercial nuclear power plant for five years running computational simulations. Also, he spends half his time in Japan, where his wife and child are currently living.

It would be great if some enterprising designer created a poster out of this concept with some cool graphic depicting a sequence of sieves. Going further I think that you could create an entire collection of Hacker News posters that would find a ready audience.

Thanks for that. I'm trying to apply a lot of the lessons I learned from Preezo and I think it's going to make the difference. Also, I think have a good blog post brewing on the subject, so stay tuned. ;)

Yeah, I remember Numbler! It sounds like a very similar story except that you just got a little further down the road. If you'd be willing to tell it in more detail it would be fun to interview you on the podcast I co-host - TechZing (www.techzinglive.com). If you think you might be interested then please send me an email.

I agree. He seemed like a very friendly and intelligent guy when we spoke on the phone. The same goes for Jonathan Rochelle.

Thanks, I really do appreciate that. It was more difficult than I thought to actually write the story down once and for all. I'm still sitting here wondering what my mental block was at the time because it's not like I'm at all introverted or uncomfortable contacting people. Hell, listen to my podcast (TechZing) all I do is run my mouth. ;) Maybe the insight will come to me after some deep thinking or maybe even some regression hypnosis and I'll write a follow up. The post will have to be entitled something like - The Real Reason I Completely Choked. Ugh. ;)

I do agree with Josh's advice (not that I considered anything like that at the time), but just to clarify, Jonathan was in New York with the rest of the Google Spreadsheet team, was due to fly somewhere else (I think it may have been Europe) and felt it was important to meet at the Googleplex in Mountain View with the Writely team. I don't think I could have showed up in Mountain View without him being there since he was the champion of the acquisition, and the decision makers weren't in New York so it probably wouldn't have helped much for me to fly there. Obviously, none of this matters now, but I just wanted to explain that the logistics weren't quite so simple.

That said if you want to make something happen then you make it happen and I didn't. Fail.

Google only became aware of Zenter at their YC demo day, months after my initial contact with them, and snatched them up very shortly after that.

Yes, do that! I now send status check emails to all of my consulting clients and prospects with great regularity.

I just wish I could be inspiring in some other way. ;) But thank you for that.

That's why I'm building Appignite now. It's something I want for myself and I know it's something other people need. I'll definitely talk in-depth about that in my "Lessons Learned from Preezo" post. Stay tuned. ;)

Yeah, we were trying to coordinate that. Jonathan was anxious to get me up there and thought I'd be a big hit with the Writely guys who he seemed to hold in very high regard. But he had to fly back to New York (we were in SF at the time for the conference), then he had some other trip and then it just got complicated. That's why he just decided to pass me up the ladder, but in the end that clearly didn't work to my advantage.

I think (and this is just speculation) that they may have already developed a lot of similar technology in-house in addition to the Zenter acquisition. By the time I got around to contacting them again they probably just didn't need it anymore.

You're absolutely correct. I started to write about my lessons learned and "don't build to flip" was one of them, but the article started to get a bit long. I'll summarize the lessons learned from Preezo in another article as there are a lot ... unfortunately. ;)

No, Jonathan Rochelle was a really nice guy. I think he just knew that that demo was going to be a big deal for me and that it was probably something I had been hoping and waiting for. He was right.

Yes, in retrospect I was stupid not to at least have sent a short email or two. Honestly, I look back and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

The full story is told in my next post, which should be done tomorrow and will be entitled "How I Screwed Up My Google Acquisition".

Yeah, it was you! I couldn't remember your full name or Omnidrive for some reason, but I remember you were sleeping in one of the bedrooms at the time. Cool, I'll update the post.