Probably referring to my post:

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.

https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools/blob/main/pl...

Khanmigo specifies the Socratic method as well.

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

https://github.com/bevibing/socrates-skill

I recently used this to prep for interviews - I got the job :)

I've made an entire platform based on Socratic AI Agents that co-work with a person as method acting assistants in an office suite. https://midombot.com/b1/home

I've never found this to work properly, because AI doesn't have the empathy to understand where you really struggling.

Would you care to share them?

While the model itself is great at hiding the answer, the AI summary keeps giving it away, it's so annoying and AFAIK it cannot be disabled.

That's super interesting - will have to take a look into this!

Haven’t found a model yet that really orchestrates in a way that reflects how learning works. Or at least, how I learn.

I can get them into different teaching/learning “modes” and configure those modes appropriately, but they don’t know how to switch between them in context and automatically, and they ALWAYS go tangential and ADHD mode after depressingly few exchanges before they need to reset. I’m talking like, 5? Just not good enough to really satisfy.

Huge improvements over time of course, but they seem to have plateaud for this particular issue.

I started learn linear algebra and some mid-level math stuff couple of years back. While I really wanted to learn I still struggled to find a good learning path and use a product similar to Duolingo for math.

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.

People want to learn at the last moment, when it is needed to know, and then they want to discard that knowledge until it is needed again. We need to implement both in our modern software: it needs to solve complex problems, and it needs to guide a human (or AI) operator in the subtle nuances of that complexity so their solution of the moment is good to last for the time being.

AI isn't that general purpose. If There is a chef course curated / tested with Jamie Oliver I'll buy that over a Claude chat. And by "I" I mean regular folk who are most of the market every SaaS and AI wants to capture.

This is exactly right. I started teaching undergrad CS about 18 months ago after 20 years wandering through other careers, and I quickly realized that students do not need better teaching. They need frequent, direct feedback and an environment that more or less requires them to commit to studying until mastery or to quit early and do something else.

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.

I think learning from another human being live who can understand your confusingly articulated questions and who can adjust their answers for you, another human being, that's great.

What do you mean by “learning systems?”

They are solving the bloom sigma problem from where I see it.

It’s far from solved.

Qwen 3.6 27B will do that for you, or any other model with a few billion parameters. I don't see any value there other than nice UI on top of an LLM.

Yeah, I think people who really want to learn will very quickly grow out of this.

This is for people who don't want to learn but actually have to for some reasons.

Totally agree that the missing ingredient is making people want to learn. Which seems like something that gets harder every day.

I mean "People who want to learn will gravitate to learning systems." means that this is the obvious target market for a learning system. Since there are lots of those out there you win on execution.

>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.

Massive thank you for the introduction to Math Academy. After a quick look I signed up and it is fantastic - exactly what I wanted.

I'll take a look at AlgoTutor in the future :)

Math Academy is doing it right. Their neat synthesis of spaced repetition and the knowledge DAG is slick, but honestly the extremely fine-grained skill decomposition is what’s missing in virtually all of higher education. I’m trying to follow MA’s example as I put together curricula for my undergraduate CS courses.

I'd never heard of Math Academy. It seems interesting, but quite expensive ($49/month for software which is in beta). Would you say it's significantly superior to something like Khan Academy (which is free) to justify paying that much?

Yes, Andrew Ng is a great educator, well positioned with Coursera to deliver this, and personalized education (with exercises and feedback) is an excellent potential use of AI.

I guess the real challenge would be initial and continual assessment of each student in order to select the next instruction that they are ready for, but with "LLM as judge" that doesn't seem such a problem, and student feedback can be used to continuously improve these recommendations/selections.

Presumably you would still want to have a human designed curriculum, with the AI being used as the teacher - assessing how each individual student is doing and what they need to be taught next.

I remember reading that Education is a trillion dollar market, so i'm not sure about the financial outcome being poor, only the state of how that money is spent and obligated can differ greatly.

No no, the opposite is replenish. As in increase people supplies. As in the Matrix.

Yeah, that was my first reaction to that headline too. Given a second thought, he probably means the opposite of "replace", so in this context, "maintain people." maybe? I know marketing headlines shouldn't be interpreted literally, but it tripped me up at first.

I had the same thought. Then I thought, maybe "replace" is what will become opposite. Antonyms of "replace" are hold keep precede break damage deprive forfeit lose penalize remain take worsen

Hmmm. Maybe they should rethink their motto.

Yes, it's a bit of an odd h1, website also looks very Claude-generated, but regardless, probably most people understand the intent.

Roughtly, "AI will help people."

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.

Same here. What a confusing statement.

I'm just wondering if this is replacing, you know, teachers...

This is one of weaker Asimov's works, in my opinion, as it merely projects pre-mass education era teaching into the future. Conflating mass education and socialization is pretty myopic when writing about the future with unlimited intelligent robots. You don't have to be taught in one-size-fits-all way to have shared experiences, it just happens to be done that way due to the scale, out of necessity, and many education systems and experiments since the 90's are trying to combine individualized learning with socialization. Unfortunately many post-WWII sci-fi predictions turned out to be self-fulfilling, because a lot of people got conditioned on them and can't imagine breaking the lore which is now a part of their lives.

Care to enlighten the rest of us how this is at all related to the submission? Is it because it's AI it is "destroying human everyday life experience"? Seems this company is trying to find a healthier (and better) way of using AI, unless I misunderstand something?

Not sure I would consider public schools a fun experience though. At least not for the majority of pupils.

The classroom experience cannot be replaced, but obviously Independent learning is still valuable and needed.

If said experience is subpar, e.g. when it happens with 30+ student classes when 80% dgaf, there's no harm in offering an alternative to those who wants it.

And the rest can continue enjoying everyday human life experience.

It is. I just wish people would throw a plain text page with a paragraph instead of this because you bet I am just scrolling through it without reading as soon as Claudism appears

/frontend-design

The home page is entirely written by AI. Riddled with em hyphens. More should be placed on the home page at least..

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.

[dead]

I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and hope for the best.

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.

I got to see Luis von Ahn the inventor of CAPTCHA discuss his latest crowd sourced venture, Duolingo, which I'm sure everyone has an opinion about, back in 2013 or 2014 at The LAB Miami in Wynwood.

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.

There is not a huge market of people who actually want to learn something on their own motivation. Get some piece of paper, yes. So the huge market will only materialize if the degree granting institutions adopt something like this.

May I ask why? If by "not the same" you meant: AI is not at the level of a good human educator, it is a fair argument - but not many humans can afford to have a one-to-one human educator either.

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)

I also wish we had an infinite supply of expert teachers available to work 1 on 1 with students at any time day or night for a nominal fee.

Sadly we do not, so something like this will have to serve as a more accessible backup.

Well, hold that thought, what if one-to-one means AI to AI...

Coursera, the company providing the funding, also belongs to Andrew Ng

See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

It's funny that AI even gave us similar themes.

> This looks awesome.

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.

> 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).

I hope they’re planning to build hardware so the learning experience can be close to pen and paper. Keyboards and screens are a distraction and the brain learns better with a pencil than with a keyboard.

I have a feeling you've not been around a group of teenagers for a while.

Is he a grifter now?

Not really, have you tried to do anything innovative working remote with a team? In any meeting half the people are checked out watching youtube. The collaborative whiteboarding experience is terrible. Working remote is good for plug and chug type work, but the team dynamic is an empty husk compared to working alongside others in the real world. It can be done if you absolutely have to, but don't try even pretend the effectiveness is anywhere close to being in person.

That would cover school breakfast and lunches for NYC Public Schools for only 3 weeks. Personally, I'd rather see investment in technologies that can give more than just one large school district a temporary improvement.

Sophisticated personalized education for the masses is finally within reach. Andrew Ng is one of the most significant leaders in ed-tech. I'm grateful that he's pursuing this venture and hopeful for the impact it could have on my family and many others.