nhoven

Of course! Gamification (and other extrinsic motivators) are best used sparingly and short-term in order to get over an initial hump before something fun or easy. Think of climbing a hill to get to a playground.

Basically, our goal is to make the kid's progress tangible and visual for them so that they can start enjoying it, and then use our gamification mechanics to reinforce the child's growing intrinsic motivation so that they enjoy and appreciate the feeling of making progress

Hi - Mentava founder here (we make gamified early literacy software). Obviously I believe in the value of gamification, though I think it's difficult to do correctly.

There's certainly a market for "calm" learning, though you've already identified the main challenge: there's a smaller larger market for people who want to be educated than entertained, and the market for "calm education" is going to be an even smaller subset of that education market.

Essentially you're looking for the people who are saying "I want to be educated, but I'm not looking for the most efficient way to do it. I would prefer to move at a slower pace being driven purely by intrinsic motivation, rather than using extrinsic motivators in order to encourage me to move more quickly"

That market certainly exists, but it's a small enough niche that you'll likely have to be compete at a high price point to be viable. As point of comparison, Mentava costs $500/month, so if I were building a calm learning app (for an even smaller market), I would try to figure out a way justify an even higher price point than Mentava's.

Hi, Mentava founder here. Almost all of our investors are in AngelList RUVs so there's zero overhead

Some of our most helpful investors only put in $1000 and the RUV made it easy to accept their money

Great post! At this moment, I'm passionate about childhood education. There are plenty of challenges in education to be tackled, but the one that I feel needs more attention and isn't getting it is seeing high-achieving students bored to death thanks to education policies that hold them back from their potential.

Rather than policies that prioritize equal outcomes, I think we should be encouraging every child to explore their full potential. I've begun working on a startup so I can be part of the solution. It's too early to say if our plan will work, but I'm excited to be trying!

Mentava | Founding engineer | REMOTE-FIRST north american timezones

Mentava is building software to support independent, accelerated K12 learning.

We’re backed by Quiet, Floodgate, and more than 50 amazing angels like Garry Tan, Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, Balaji Srinivasan plus founders of Figma, Flexport, Replit, Intercom, Thumbtack, Lambda School, Outschool, and a lot more.

We: 1) Teach kids to teach themselves 2) Provide software that lets them learn at their own, accelerated pace

We've already begun teaching 2-year-olds to read, and fully expect our students to complete college-level math and programming before high school.

Founding Engineer - https://www.mentava.com/jobs?ashby_jid=9b64a18a-bf83-4e26-a1...

Mentava | Founding Engineer, Founding Art Director | Remote | $100k-$200k base | 1%-5% equity

Mentava is building software to support accelerated K12 learning. With gifted programs getting cut nationwide, it’s the perfect time.

Customers are already paying $500/month for our no-code MVP, and we have 2-year-olds in our pilot reading at a 2nd grade level. I expect our students will complete college level math and computer science in elementary school.

Like Tesla, we’ll move downmarket over time. Education creates pathways to success for kids of every socioeconomic class. Ultimately, to accelerate education is to accelerate human achievement.

How many lives would be lost if the MRNA vaccine came a year later? How many lives will be saved if humanity can cure cancer 1 year sooner? It’s no exaggeration to say that millions of lives are at stake.

We are backed by Quiet and Floodgate, plus over 50 amazing angels like Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, Garry Tan, Ryan Petersen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Perell, Sheel Mohnot, Des Traynor, Austen Allred, Amjad Masad, Dylan Field, Mikhael Seregine, Jonathan Swanson, Julian Weisser, Joe Liemandt, David Petersen, Evan Van Ness, Eric Boduch, Harlan Crystal, Packy McCormick, Jiaona Zhang, Justin Mares, Nat Eliason, Keith Schacht, Turner Novak, and many more. I’m an alum of Cloudflare, ClassDojo, Pocket Gems, Playdom, and Tableau.

We have an audacious goal, passionate supporters, a cultural tailwind, and a clear path forward. Join us: https://www.mentava.com/jobs

The author (as she admits herself) is in a pretty good situation - she has a very meaningful amount of stock options, a respectable salary, and she enjoys her job. Consider how much worse the situation gets when that last one isn't true. What if you're ready to leave, have an offer from another company that wants to double your salary, but have no way to keep your stock options? Or what if you're not ready to leave, but the company has decided that it's time for you to go? This happens frequently at rocketships, where an essential contributor when the company has 50 people may have a different skillset than that required when the company is 5000 people. Should employees lose their options if they need to leave a company before the IPO?

I just happened to find this 2017 article about fungi growing on the exterior of the space station. I wouldn't be surprised if extremophile fungi turn out to be widespread in space after all http://cosmology.com/SpaceFungi.html

U2F is under active development. My team is actually working on it as we speak

Ah, nostalgia!

Yes, chronological blog feeds were hot back then, but now that FB/Instagram have taken over the role of lifestreaming platform, we're starting to see some blogs move away from the constraints of "chronostreaming", and more towards a collection of essays.

Search traffic also tends to have a power law distribution, so the majority of your incoming traffic will be focused on a few popular pages, meaning that in the long term there's really no need for an sequential stream of posts. One of the main benefits of a blog is its ability to earn search traffic for years, so why limit yourself by dating your own content?

How does he safely maintain altitude? The helium balloons will expand as he rises (due to the lower pressure at higher altitudes), eventually popping. It's how weather balloons descend. Is he counting on a slow descent after some initial fraction of the balloons pop? That's quite a bet.

I don't understand why every company is trying to reinvent the wheel with their ICO. Initial offerings should be about price discovery, not minimizing FOMO. A dutch auction is obviously the correct strategy and would be trivial to implement in an Ethereum contract.

Because self-experimentation is an excellent source of data. Obviously we'd prefer a series of double-blind, controlled experiments whose results have been rigorously replicated, but that doesn't mean that less rigorous experiments have no value.

Good point, the one I saw a week or so ago was definitely flagged. These may just be related to the algorithm change you mentioned, and I just noticed them because the previous one made an impression.

http://imgur.com/ comes to mind, though its scope has obviously seen a vast increase from when it first appeared

I remember my mom teaching me the phrase "like dragging a cow up a tree" when I was little, and I was never sure whether she was serious. I was very excited to see it captured here! Mom, I'm sorry for not trusting you.

I've seen several articles on intelligence/IQ/g hit the front page recently (often followed by being flagged and removed). There have been two this morning, plus others in past weeks. At the time of this comment, this post only has 6 points, how are they consistently climbing the charts so quickly?

There is a good discussion of the relative merits of both articles(the linked blog post, and the post it criticizes) on the LessWrong forums: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/h6p/g_a_statistical_myt...

I'm pretty certain this is illegal and a violation of the Fair Labor Standard act. http://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/

"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Thanks for this! People hardly ever share hard numbers, so it's great to have a specific data point for a lean startup. I hope you continue to share with the same transparency as you grow, but even if you can't, it would be interesting to see a blog post on why that changes.

Side question - I've found that market validation can be an equally significant cost, whether running surveys, or Adwords, or generating content to test SEO. Did you do any sort of market/customer exploration before kicking off development?

To clarify, other estimates put misattributed paternity in the range of 1-4%, but that's still a whole lot of marriages (especially considering that most marriages have multiple kids).

The rate of non-paternity is commonly quoted to be around 10%. If genetic testing becomes more common, we're likely to see even more of these divorces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattributed_paternity

It's a good time to be a wearable whose core functionality is complemented rather than cannibalized by the Apple Watch. Fitbit, Pebble, Jawbone, etc are in trouble though.

Pretty self-centered. For a world with only a couple great game designers, there's an awful lot of excellent games out there.

Also an oldie but goodie, a basic styptic pencil: http://www.amazon.com/Clubman-Styptic-Pencil-0-33-oz/dp/B001...

I was excited to read about how an "org-less" org could work. Then: "We've grown from three to thirteen employees in about a year, to shrink back to four in about two years." And: "About a year ago, we've filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code."

It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.

While I agree that learning about design is great for most developers, this is a pretty naive presentation. I could turn it around and say, "Designers, learn to code. It's not rocket science, it's a set of rules, just like design. Code doesn't have to be perfect, good enough is OK."