gomphus

Yeah - to put it another way, ordered, general criteria like these will rarely be fit for the purpose of selecting the best coder for a given job. They place a huge premium on showing the widest possible diversity of knowledge, whereas what makes many programmers world-class is that they offer highly specialized skills for dealing with highly specialized applications, with which they have huge experience.

Let me try to crack that nutshell...

1. ...and several other factors, like requiring all students in a class to move at the same pace.

2. We all, including Khan, recognize there is a problem.

3. You gravely mischaracterize Khan's approach. Yes, the video you selected (out of thousands) does promote rote methods, as do many of the exercises. But Khan is also at pains to demonstrate mathematical reasoning from first principles, and to emphasize why we use the methods we do, why they work, and what relevance they have to the real world - in real world terms that make at least as much sense to me as those used by mathalicious. These 'reason' and 'proof' videos are judiciously interspersed with the 'rote' videos and taken together form exactly the kind of compelling mathematical narrative you complain is lacking from typical math curricula.

4. This is great. Students can view and review Khan's videos as their core learning material, help each other, and make use of the teacher's limited time according to metrics which continually and repeatedly assess their personal level of comprehension (which, as they absorb substantial portions of a playlist, will expand far beyond the memorization of rote methods).

5. Hard data will soon show if you are right, but it is my impression that thousands have already benefited.

6. The Khan model, taken in its entirety, only encourages this.

7. If you listen to what Khan actually says in his various talks, he is proposing that his site has a novel and exciting role to play as part of a general restructuring of math education along the lines your propose.

You could have taken the view that the Khan Academy is a useful tool and resource, yet to capitalize on it we must redouble our efforts to improve education funding, classroom teaching methods and better curricula. That sounds reasonable. Instead you wrote an article attacking the Khan Academy as being a direct impediment to this kind of progress. Few respondents here on HN have found your arguments persuasive, and instead of replying to the kind of points I make above, you tellingly characterize us as follows:

It seems like the anti-post comments fall in three categories: 1. Khan is great 2. Mathalicious is just jealous 3. The author of the post is part of the establishment and should be ignored

The discussion here has been far more nuanced and sophisticated than you allow for - kind of like the way you discredit Khan's videos.

R as a language is highly multi-paradigmatic, while remaining essentially a specialized tool for statistical analysis whose users, often scientists, are not first and foremost programmers. Also, the usefulness of R depends on a huge range of contributed packages, leading to duplication of effort and disparate approaches to the same problems.

Because the language is friendly and intuitive enough on the level of manipulating datasets, and template code is available for all of the popular tests and plot types, you can go very far in R without actually learning to program deeply. Considering all this, it is not surprising that a lot of user code is inelegant, inefficient, etc. Perhaps we should be more tolerant of this, compared to other languages, in light of R's status as a rough 'n ready tool for quick analysis, simulation and prototyping.

Of course, reference and contributed R code should show exemplary style. And R code that is aware of the intricacies of the language - the consequences of lexical scoping with lazy argument evaluation, S3, S4 + Reference classes, environment implementation, the possibilities of 'computing on the language' - can be a thing of beauty. I think it's a wonderful language, and I would like to see many of its features implemented in more general purpose languages for application development.

Often it's just the little things. As a very basic example, I am someone who has always disliked that the assignment operator in so many languages is the mathematical symbol for equality. I'm not entirely happy with prefix syntax for assignments either. While R supports "=" and assign() for assignment, it pleases me no end to use "<-" or "->" (and the corresponding nonlocal "<<-", "->>"), with their implicit directionality and action of a target "getting" a value.

> Why not make the problems harder and let students use every possible tool or resource to solve them?

In science, we call this a thesis or research project. I don't see the need for all exams to take the same format (although some do so successfully), as closed-book exams test something quite different - the depth and breadth of your internal, longer-term comprehension.

> An “education,” whether for its own value or to help you get a job, is–at least to me–about developing the skills to find the information you need, assess its value, integrate it into the context at hand, and make a better decision than you otherwise could have.

An education -at least to me- is about building up an inner edifice of knowledge, so you can work fast, and formulate original and hopefully brilliant ideas and insights, with the skills the author mentions being accessory to this (and something that should really be in place by high school). The author writes as if knowledge is something to be retained as fleetingly as possible, to make room for whatever the next task is. But information you have committed to long-term memory can cross-pollinate, become a greater structure, open up new horizons. Information that you merely load and discard cannot - at least not in the same way.

> In the “real world,” having a copy of your notes is called being prepared.

In my world, being (professionally) prepared means that you have authoritative mastery of a subject. Of course you often refer to notes, and have the skill to quickly and perhaps temporarily assess and assimilate new concepts. It does not follow that holding the detail of our degree subjects at arm's length is a virtue, and that having to rely on our own memories in examinations is somehow "bad education". Yes, the open book exam format has its place, but so does the traditional one.

If you want a better education, try regarding your knowledge as something to be made more enduring, not more ephemeral.

van Gogh chose paints for their immediacy of color, sometimes without understanding the problems of hue shifting and degradation displayed by certain pigments. This causes a huge headache for curators and in many cases the changes are irreversible. For example his chrome yellows contain sulphides which have significantly darkened and browned through exposure to UV. He also used various red lakes that are prone to fading and discoloration.

van Gogh famously wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: "Paintings fade like flowers... All the colors that impressionism has brought into fashion are unstable, so there is all the more reason to simply use them too brightly - time will tone them down only too much".

Any theory of color vision deficiency that attempts to reconstruct the color balances that van Gogh actually saw should take into account the hue/value/chroma of his paints such as they possessed when originally applied, and also consider that van Gogh intentionally adjusted his aesthetic to render color schemes in expectation of future pigment degradation, and that these adjustments cannot have been an exact science.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, the documentary he talks about is mesmerizing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS7a-OJ7IVw

Two standout scenes for me. First, gazing out from the London Eye over a skyline filled with incredible feats of engineering, the chief is bemused - because our money houses are so much bigger than our spirit houses.

Second, entering the main spirit house itself (St. Paul's cathedral) - after establishing that their women won't be struck dead for entering such a holy place - the tribespeople encounter, seemingly for the first time, the glories of neoclassical Western sculpture, art, architecture. They caress the faces carved from marble and stone, dance with pure delight between the soaring Corinthian columns. They explain how such impossibly beautiful things could only have been created by God, and have obviously been part of the world from the very beginning.

Ever since watching this series, I've tried to look at my city with the same combination of cynicism and amazement.

There's also a bittersweet segment where the chief of the tribe is dumbfounded that he's not allowed to drop in on the "big chief" - Queen Elizabeth II.

You have broadened my thinking on this issue, but I'm not convinced that being "attached" to the result of an intervention is necessarily harmful (let alone something that makes me a dictator!). There are many ways to positively accommodate our natural emotional responses to things being other then we would passionately want them to be, into our continued efforts to make those things so. I agree with your comments on leadership (although I can think of some contrary examples), but leadership is just one area informed by expectation.

I think I am guilty of further polarizing what was presented as a false dichotomy in the first place. It is not the case that either we live a life full of expectations that poison us when they are not met; or that we must be devoid of expectation and experience all outcomes with equanimity. Shades of grey predominate.

That was really my beef with the article: its absolutism. Life requires a repertoire of attitudes and responses. It is futile and naive to say we must always adopt a principle of throwing all our expectations away. It is not so different from saying that the culture and technology we treasure could have been more painlessly attained in a world of wandering sadhus.

I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean.

Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain contexts (particularly personal relationships), can be fatal.

But this is a truism that any idiot could tell you - and in this case the post is generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

Suppose you encounter someone who is openly racist, dishonest or technically incompetent at their job, and no one is challenging him about it. Because it's bad to have expectations about public & professional behaviour, and even worse to actually impose them on others!

Here's the core message: when the world isn't how you think it should be, don't have the courage to try and change it, or to speak out about how you feel. Suppress your feelings, accept everything just the way it is, and - just as long as you yourself behave well - all the bad energy will go away!

Sounds to me like someone trying to justify being a total wimp. Like someone who's so afraid of experiencing any degree of anger or disappointment that they philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness. And I'm afraid that's my overall impression of people who embrace "zen" as a lifestyle paradigm, (rather than just a mindset for, say, a discrete programming project, for which it can work wonderfully). Zen has its place, but taken too far it becomes morally corrosive, and turns personalities to mud.

Many of the comments here debate materialism vs. minimalism, in terms of which provides a truer path to happiness. But the author of the post wasn't trying to be happy - his goal is to become "uncomfortable", in order to work more productively.

The main issue is not how much stuff the author has or doesn't have, but rather his spiritual and cultural impoverishment.

He insists that progress in life is driven by unhappiness, and that comfortableness begets complacency. This simplistic argument says a lot about his personal failings and very little about the human psyche in general. Yes, some great things are born of discontent. But this dude is a computer programmer, not Ghandi. It apparently has not occurred to him to nurture a sense of sustained excitement over the creative process, to channel the joy and endless amusement of a life spent problem-solving and pushing intellectual boundaries, or to get happily enthused about developing his own original ideas.

If drooling over video games and giggling at Reddit memes is your default 'comfortable' behaviour, then yes, by all means, take drastic measures to suppress your immaturity. (I'd personally keep very quiet about it.)