The way I come to look on such offers (monthly unlimited subscriptions) is not the net price itself, and not future supposed returns to it (who knows what they be, and they for sure will depend on many other things), but how many hours a week I am willing to spend on that service.
If you can and willing dedicate on average 2 hours a day (a big commitment but I think I was able to hold it for several month with them) the cost of mastering, say, Linear Algebra will be ~4 less then if you subscribe and will be spending ~30 minutes a day.
I have no use for a weak willed news product. Endorse Trump, Kamala, or a third party, but if your tagline is “democracy dies in darkness” and you’re embracing that slogan in the opposite direction, I’m just going to cancel.
Still, someone has to say no to the pressure. If that's up to the subscribers then so be it. Let their money go to media that isn't beholden to Trump's threats.
For sure Bezos handled this badly. But the problem in my opinion is not his management skills or even his civic valor, but apparent fear of business and public people of retributions for supporting a wrong candidate.
Yes, engaging in flashcard-based spaced repetition would qualify as valid retrieval practice. But if you're in a skill hierarchy like math, then you would need to make sure you're not only recalling isolated bits of information (facts, formulas, theorems, etc) but actually practicing pulling together this information to solve problems. Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
I am happy Math Academy customer. Agree with most what you wrote above.
Except for the pricing estimate for the private tutor and related 26x cheaper comparison.
People generally don't hire private tutors to have lessons every workday of the week. No I think it would make sense for do so even leaving out financial cost.
It is more like once a week session with take away homework (maybe twice a week for a quite intense level). This brings cost comparison down to the 5x time (10x for twice a week). Still quite impressive.
Oh cool, always happy to run into MA customers! I see your point -- however, in my comparison, what I'm trying to get at is this: imagine that when a student goes to school each weekday, instead of spending an hour in a traditional class that is not personalized to their needs, they spend an hour with a 1-on-1 tutor who engages the student in personalized training exercises. This is essentially what Math Academy is.
I realize that tutoring is typically done at a lower frequency, but I don't agree that the lower frequency is ideal. At least in my mind, when I imagine the Platonic ideal of an education, there is no real difference between "lesson" and "homework" -- minimum effective doses of instruction are interspersed with minimum effective doses of active problem-solving, where every single problem is carefully selected in response to the learner's performance on the previous problem(s).
If this characterization of the Platonic ideal accurate, then achieving it would require a tutor continually sitting next to the student, analyzing their performance on every single problem that they do, and deciding the exact moment to move the student on to a new topic or problem type. Of course, that is infeasible with human tutors, so we settle for one or two days per week where the tutor tries to get the student prepared enough to tackle the homework without being completely overwhelmed.
I would argue that, while 1-2 tutoring sessions per week can really make a difference in a student's education, a lot of learning efficiency is still left unrealized (compared to 5 tutoring sessions per week).
As others have already mentioned this is used in a lot (most?) of databases.
It is called "slotted-page". Searching for it gives good discussions/explanations of it.
I am very happy to see more content like this (attempting to teach how to create a real system) becoming available.
Few month ago there was a launch announcement of YC backed startup that sell you walk-through labs guiding you to build Redis, Docker, Git and others. (Can't find link to it now.)
What is still missing, in my opinion, and is badly needed, is content or even an idea on how to teach taking such projects from toy prototype version to the production quality one.
You're probably thinking of https://codecrafters.io/. I've been meaning to check them out with my education stipend from work, just haven't had the time to devote to it.
$83/mo or around $994 annually is crazy way too much for me. I hope them the best because I love that kind of content and want it to be more popular, but I will wait until a better priced option comes.
There's* a free plan allowing a stage daily. With current content (all languages, all stages) someone can do everything in <9mo. But challenges are same across languages. If only want to do challenges ("build X clone") once in one language can do it in <1.5mo.
*Saw in sibling comment this is recent addition. Without it, yeah, it may be a bit expensive for one person.
Please consider similar pricing structure as JetBrains. If you pay for it, the price is X, but if your company pays for it, or you're somehow reimbursed for it, the price is 5X.
Correct. For many of our users, doing one stage per day is just the right amount of exercise (especially on the later stages — as it gets more challenging)
Not to by hyper critical but that is just not enough to support learning for more ambitious people. There are too many great learning communities that are way cheaper. I really hope you guys revise the pricing structure. At a $20mo price point, I know a ton of people that would buy it. At the current price point, well, it’s just people with a learning stipend at big corp that don’t like to buy books.
I think this is a bit much. I wouldn't buy it, but I think this is deep technical content that you might not stick on forever, and they need to pick a price for it. If it's too high or low they'll find out soon. No need for any other inputs than that.
The idea is very good - the tests approach is effective and stimulating; they also provide a range of products to study/experiment with. However, I think that the approach to the learning material is "love it or hate it".
By design, the service doesn't provide any documentation; it provides references to existing technical documentation (of any kind, including blog posts).
Those who expect a focused introduction to each topic will find it very tedious or hard to proceed (for example, the SQLite exercise has important details buried in a very large and confusing webpage), and likely hate it; those who like the challenge of understanding loads of raw documentation will love it.
It's more complex than that. People may need stimulation in order to follow through a certain learning process.
Providing a structured path and (automated) test means can be stimulating, and can make the difference between (deciding to) learning something or not.
Some people are certainly entirely autonomous, but at the very least, there is a spectrum of need for stimulation when approaching a topic of study.
AFAIK there are no other services that provide multiple languages, automated testing and team features, but if you know of any, it's certainly useful to report them in this thread.
Exercism is the closer service I can think of, but it's based on simple exercises, not real-world projects.
There are a few books that have a similar target (build X), but much narrower in scope (either a single language or pseudocode, and certainly no automated testing/team features).
I have finished their build your own Redis exercise. It is very well organized and there are hints/discord groups in which you get sufficient help if you make the effort.
This model is great for someone who loses patience with all the groundwork setup.
However, I do agree that the next leg is taking this MVP/Prototype level to production and ideally sell it as a real alternative to the commercial version of Redis.
Excellent advice and explanation. It is rightly on top.
The only thing I would take issue with is the first paragraph where you try to calm down the OP:
> Okay, first things first - take a breath. This is not that big a deal. If you're at a company that's big enough to have a PIP process, then there are two possibilities: (1) it's well-established enough to know that junior engineers aren't productive for about a year after hiring, or (2) it's completely incompetent. If it's (1), even if you actually are way below average, you still have some runway left. If it's (2), they almost certainly have enough of a reputation that you can "fail" at your current job without it really harming your long-term career path.
This way things are at least in US, is next to impossible to harm your long-term career path by failing at one job. One needs to be at least prosecuted to harm their long-term career.
OP, if tomorrow you'll get fired on the spot, in a year time frame your most-likely will find yourself better of than you are now (and, frankly, likely to be better off if you stay at your present company).
If you can and willing dedicate on average 2 hours a day (a big commitment but I think I was able to hold it for several month with them) the cost of mastering, say, Linear Algebra will be ~4 less then if you subscribe and will be spending ~30 minutes a day.