DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
76% Positive
Analyzed from 4780 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#learning#learn#don#education#https#more#something#com#math#human
Discussion (131 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938375 (100 up votes)
Direct link to the doc page:
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
This was in the context of how I use ChatGPT Live to brainstorm/discuss/learn while on a walk, but of course useful in other contexts too.
I recently used this to prep for interviews - I got the job :)
These look like system and agent prompts and agent instructions: "Academic Assistant Pro.md", "Code Tutor" https://github.com/linexjlin/GPTs/blob/main/prompts/
Gemini Notebook does flashcards, study guides: https://edu.google.com/ai-gemini-notebook/
Spaced Repetition flashcards or flashquestions to progress through a game might be good; configure Anki decks to surface cards from when for example the user jumps to crush a bonus block.
"Ask HN: How can I learn to read mathematical notation?" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511718
"[Feature Request]: flashcards to advance in the game and learning mode" Issue #3054 ; SuperTux/supertux https://github.com/SuperTux/supertux/issues/3054
So I Ctrl-F'd for "Linear algebra" resources in my research log and found:
"Interactive Linear Algebra (2019)" (2021) re: Manim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28173565
Latest Manim developments; interactive WebGL in browser: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093210
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had
And the rest can continue enjoying everyday human life experience.
> 02 Adapts to how you learn
> 03 Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills
1 and 2 any of the big AI companies will do that for you. I have Claude doing this for me for a few learning areas.
3 to me feels like the Duolingo bird.
IMHO, they are trying to solve the wrong thing. People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems.
If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
Eventually I learned some, then stopped using it and then forgotten all of it.
But my point is despite if me really want to learn I found it quite challenging to find learning path that I trusted to be good start for me.
I also need to make the point; I didn’t have 5 hours a day, so this 30-90 minutes in a good day endeavor.
There are still tons of things to solve in this area, how to cross to chasm, a learning path that’s right for you and how can you be sure of that. Learning something in one good 60m instead of 5 different videos and 5 hours. Etc. I think these problems are far from solved.
I also want to get fit but that doesn’t mean I’ll show up in my gym to workout everyday. So even when you really really want to learn you still need to stay motivated.
For that 3Blue1Brown is very good for this.
https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown
Better Explained as well, but focuses more on how to understand the concept so you can start to learn.
https://betterexplained.com/articles/linear-algebra-guide/
They are good if you already know a subject well, and want a new perspective on the material though.
What if it's simply impossible to learn linear algebra and mid-level math stuff by spending only 30 minutes a day? What if you can't get fit if you don't go to the gym?
They aren't trying to get fit by not going to the gym they are looking for a progressive overload program for math.
Effective learning techniques have been known for decades, but universities have -zero- incentive to improve teaching quality. There is no standardized assessment infrastructure to compare graduates across schools, or to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching interventions at scale. So any effort put into teaching quality is invisible and thus worthless to a university.
Every attempt to make high-quality instruction available for free has been largely irrelevant to the unwashed masses, because universities have a monopoly on credentialing. The self-starters can learn anything for free, but they were never the problem. It’s the middle 50% that we have utterly failed.
SCORM for example.
It was never meant for assessment, nor is it secure. The creator of scorm said to not use it learning had to be secured.
It’s not a system or a framework in any meaningful or standardized sense, and more of a format for compiling content that can be copied between different places.
This is for people who don't want to learn but actually have to for some reasons.
But I will say Gemini / Claude have both been surprisingly good at understanding my half-assed attempts to put a complicated question into a coherent sentence.
Now its viable with AI to do it cheaply.
It’s far from solved.
>If you can find a way to pull in people who don't want to learn, that has value.
Most companies try to address a known market and not create one.
At any rate you have two types of people who don't want to learn:
1. people who don't want to learn and have to anyway, for some reason (generally work related)
2. people who don't want to learn and have nothing forcing them.
Number 1 is a potential market, number 2 seems hopeless.
The concern, though, is that how to achieve those 3 thesis. Do they train/fine-turn their own model? according to my own experience, the current models are not well trained in personal education context, and it is either too textbook-like or too task-driven.
So people will replace AI?
Hmmm. Maybe they should rethink their motto.
Speciation. Not extinction.
Here's I think how.
AI learns skills that people have, and replaces them.
vs.
AI helps people learn better and develop new skills faster.
Now, with AI, we can really build tools that were not possible before. I built for myself AlgoTutor[1], a CLI tool that teaches Go developers algorithmic skills and concurrency.
The recent Understanding floating point[2] from Oz Nova is also a type of tutorial I want to see more often.
[1] https://github.com/zuzuleinen/algotutor
[2] https://proto.csprimer.com/fp/
I'll take a look at AlgoTutor in the future :)
I have a rule of doing 20 XP per day, and I kept that rule for more than half a year. Maybe the price is also a factor, but I never managed to keep that pace for Khan Academy when I tried it. You can check their current courses here: https://www.mathacademy.com/courses
I think the topics and curriculum are more serious, and I would definitely recommend it if you have kids or are in highschool/uni. I'm 37 now and only do it to keep my brain sharp and build my mathematical intuition and I think is great for that due to its focus on practice and spaced reviews.
I think they have a 1-month trial, and you get your money back if you cancel within 30 days if you want to try it.
That said, on higher levels there's some cruft that trains mechanical skills, and that's on subjects that are needed only in the scope of the US system. For Europeans these should be optional, alas they are not and this adds a lot of tedium and hassle to an otherwise rather frictionless process.
Trig 1 -> This is a triangle and trig is about triangles.
Quiz 1: blah
But really what a wonderful mission. Imagine if they succeed and end up teaching millions and allowing people elevate their home towns/countries. Crazy impact.
Given how much people spend on education, there’s no reason AI education software wont be a huge market.
And there’s few people better suited than Andrew Ng to execute this
My wife has been a high school math teacher for 25 years and has seen waves of tech luminaries give their visions of how tech will radically improve education and learning. She can’t point to any startup that has had a major impact in improving outcomes. I wish I could point her to something that really will have an impact in, or even out, of the classroom for her students.
At that point they had ~24 employees. He said his interest was crowdsourcing and thought most of the engineering effort would go toward the crowdsourced translation, but at that time, it was being handled by just two employees.
They brought on two prominent consultant researchers, leaders in the field of language learning and linguistics. The first question they asked the consultants was which part of speech should they present to the learner first. The consultants didn't have an answer. They decided to dedicate engineers to collecting data in order to answer that question.
A big problem with edTech is that we don't know.
We know that mild stress can narrow focus and help learning. "Neural connections do form when you struggle." [0] A little stress is not only good but necessary for learning while a lot of stress causes a breakdown. The trick is being able to judge the stress level of the student and every person is different.
The idea of using some type of bio metric data from EEG or blood pressure sensors will help determine a little struggle from a lot of struggle in formative assessment.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0OS4MrN3E
It doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about “ed tech” - popularity of apps seems disconnected to popularity
The best teachers seem to combine deep thinking about how to teach with intuition and charisma. The ingredients are hard to replicate.
I do think that this is a nut that we will eventually crack, but it is proving to be a very tough nut.
Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, but if AI could give me, let's say, 90% of an average lecturer's capability, at 10% of the price or even less, that is probably extremely valuable. (For one, I would certainly be interested in learning new things that otherwise wouldn't make sense financially)
But I did not learn everything I wanted to know. And I can’t afford to take a time-out to go to grad school again for a second PhD. On the other hand, an LLM, in some sense, has access to the world’s knowledge. With some patience and persistence, you can mine almost-expert-level instruction from one.
When ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I excitedly tried this for a topic that I WAS an expert in. The results were discouraging. The model’s answers seemed to reflect the general misunderstandings that people had about the topic. More recently though, I had to review a paper in the same area, and I used a late-model ChatGPT to help check my work. It was an eye-opening experience because it was no longer confused. And it found longstanding misunderstandings I had, buttressing its answers against my skepticism with citations to original work. I came away very impressed. This kind of AI “rubber duck programming” is my preferred style of use now. I used it just today to help me learn an area of statistics I have always been fuzzy about. This approach definitely requires some careful prompting, but I am optimistic that AI tutors will one day be a real thing. My only worry is that people lose the ability to understand what makes an answer a good one and why we should care about good answers.
Did you check those citations to make sure they actually contained the information they were being cited for? Because I've asked difficult questions too and have had mixed results. I would never trust an LLM as a teacher. They make stuff up all the time, and when you're learning you're in the very worst position to be checking the information you're given.
This is of course about the PhD level and beyond. For regular university-level education, where the goal is to pass the usual exams, ChatGPT and Claude are more than enough. But for real-world "doing", not (yet).
Note I said "meaningfully" - something with LLMs that deeply concerns me is that they provide edutainment, and people actually think they're learning something. One of the comments on this thread mentioned giving a "dense linear algebra pdf" and having an LLM use the Socratic method. I guarantee they would have learned more if they read the PDF. I strongly doubt they learned anything at all with a bunch of silly "Socratic" questions about linear algebra. But it felt like they learned something!
Sadly we do not, so something like this will have to serve as a more accessible backup.
The AI sloppification is palpable.
Anywho, curious to see what comes out of this! EdTech & AI is a really promising space.
I wish they hadn't raised so much money. I'm not sure "large funding round" sets up the right dynamic for what he's trying to do.
I'm curious: what looks awesome? The website was created with Claude. There's no detail about what the actual product/service is and how it will work. Everything is a big idea/promise with no specificity.
Yeah, prominent thing run by famous guy … but why so much funding so early?
What does $100M enable in the next 5-10 years that $25M doesn’t?
I need to get some model pricing evals in place to see if I can use open weight models to get it cheap enough, since it's just me and not VC money. The real product potential seems to be getting reusable materials like cert prep, continuing education for careers that require it, and the like. But then you're fighting incumbents that fiercely control their moats.
https://studyengine.app/
By then frontier models may be able to do this by prompting. Even now it is very easy to get one of the chat interfaces to keep quizzing you and adapt to your level, answer your questions, and in general behave how I imagine a tutor behaves. It lacks integrated stats/progress/gamification/long term memory but those can be added by a simple vibecoded app or are usually unnecessary for actual learning.
The exception to this is if the focus of the learning is the writing in itself. Right now I'm learning kanji, so I need to draw them to focus on and memorize the shapes. That said, it doesn't have to be on paper. Dragging my finger on a tablet or moving a mouse are just as effective as using pen and paper.
The other half: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/15/3/345 and a plethora of others.
I don't really get how this is new or even "AI". Can't you already ask Claude to teach you something ?
"Patiently stays with you until you've mastered new skills", that's so nice. Maybe in the future it will be the other way around, your computer will complain about how slow the user is :)
Personally, I believe the last 40 years or so of academia has failed at creating the proper reactive curriculum for students, so I'm nearly positive anyone that enters the AI education space has a very good chance of proving to their end users that they can out-teach ... I don't know, the entire NY Board of Education, for example.
It is not bold at at all to say K-12 will be eradicated. Higher Ed not so much because many were always buying the status of higher education anyway, so the status in itself still has value as a product.
It’s funny because I believe the opposite for both of these. Living with a teacher, I’ve learned that the most important objectives of k-12 education are teaching kids how to act like adults in society and behave around others. This is something I don’t think AI will ever be good at teaching.
A few other things, like learning to read and write, basic math, critical thinking are secondary, but important, but, I imagine not the best use case for AI either.
Beyond that however, you’re an adult equipped to take learning into your own hands with all the understanding and agency to make it happen. With the help of AI I don’t think there’s much you couldn’t learn, at least that doesn’t require human interaction (e.g. teaching).
This guy never stops.