This is fair. One example is the discrete math course (called Math for CS). The MIT course is widely agreed (in the Discord server anyway) to be harder to follow than even just a good discrete math textbook, but there are no high quality discrete math textbooks that are free and open source (as least that I know of).
I’m doing OSSU, and I went for “Discrete Mathematics with Applications” by Susanna Epps. Cost $50 for a used textbook. Technically I’m deviating from the curriculum but I’d say I’m still “doing OSSU”
I looked into this when I was trying to figure out how to round out my CS education. The lack of community is the primary reason I went with OSSU instead.
Genuine question: why do you believe Teach Yourself CS is superior to OSSU especially in light of the community aspect?
Full disclosure: I’m a “social organizer” for one of the cohorts in OSSU and blog OSSU sometimes
I think https://csprimer.com/courses/ is a good fit if you also want community. I think Oz Nova who is behind csprimer was one of the authors of teach yourselfcs
I was immature right out of high school and fumbled a really good opportunity to finish a degree in computer science. After getting married and having kids I later went back and quickly finished a degree in IT, but CS was always my first love.
A couple years ago I found myself in a place where I would really benefit from finishing my CS education. I put a lot of thought into getting a true second BS degree, a post-bacc, bootcamps, etc but eventually settled on OSSU.
It’s taken me longer to get through it than I wanted (life happens) but I have nothing but positive things to say about the curriculum so far and about how it’s affected my career and honestly my own happiness.
I blog about it occasionally. This is the first one and explains why I chose OSSU over the other options available to me: https://dustinbriles.com/ossu-blog-1/
Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school).
I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.
Isolation is not a requirement in home schooling. It can happen? Yes, it's a risk.
Can the opposite happen? Yes, I've seen it personally. My home schooled nephews know and are known by everyone in their village and surroundings. Sometimes I feel at 6 and 8 years old they have more diverse professional connections and acquaintances than I have right now.
Yeah, the whole "maladjusted home school kid" is a thing we were cognizant of when making this decision.
To your second point: I think the best predictor of success in any education setting is intentionality and involvement from the parents. That said, with home school you get nights and weekends AND days to spend in whatever way is most optimal for your kids.
I have a page in Notion called "Quick Notes". I have this page favorited and have a widget on the home screen of my phone where it shows up prominently. This makes it easy to get things out of my brain very quickly.
Every evening I journal about / document my day and set up basic todos for the next day (takes about 15 minutes). During this time I also review my Quick Notes page and file things away as necessary (e.g. Todos, notes about something I researched, calendar events, summary of an interesting conversation I had with a stranger, etc get put where they need to go).
As far as note-taking when I'm learning something, I do something like the Cornell method where I write notes as questions and then write the answers underneath or to the side. When I review the notes, I try to answer the question first and check my answer against my notes. This format also makes it really easy to throw things in Anki.
Besides convenience, one of the benefits of autofill is that it offers some implicit feedback about potential phishing sites. For example, your O365 credentials shouldn't autofill on off1ce.com. If I was on a site and noticed that my credentials didn't autofill (or offer autofill) when they normally would, this would immediately raise some red flags for me.
The article does looks at how password managers autofill on different levels of subdomains, which is relevant to my point above - a hijacked subdomain would be a problem for many of the password managers he tested.
Your first point doesn't really seem valid when comparing manual to automatic autofill. When I manually autofill, my password manager will show a suggested list of matching passwords. off1ce.com would not suggest my Office password, so I would still be alerted to a phishing site.
I'm not sure I follow - automatic autofill and manual autofill would both raise red flags by not automatically filling in credentials (automatic autofill) or not suggesting credentials (manual autofill).
edit: I think I understand. My first point doesn't show that automatic autofill is better than manual, because both methods will raise red flags. I.e. this isn't a reason to choose automatic over manual autofill. I think this is a fair point.
I do think that both autofill methods have an advantage over simple copy/paste, especially given the XSS discussion in other threads here.
Anki (and spaced repetition) is awesome! Some things I've had used it for to great success:
1. Memorizing Japanese vocabulary, pitch-accent, and basic grammar rules. It would probably be useful, at least to some degree, for any language like this.
2. Any certification which required strict memorization. All the basic ComptTIA certs were like this, and the CCNA:R&S cert (unfortunately) required memorizing commands and their syntax.
3. Verses in the Bible (though this is pretty basic in comparison, just Address <-> Text).
In all honestly I think one of the best things you can do if you need to memorize something is make the flash cards yourself, whether with Anki, another app, or even just index cards. This forces you to think about what it is that you're trying to memorize and phrase the text of the cards in a way that you understand. After that, reviewing is just kind of "maintenance" in my opinion. There was definitely a marked difference in my retention when I was using pre-made Anki decks vs. creating them myself. It is also easier to create cards using the desktop app.
It's a side note, but I also don't agree with Anki's pricing model. The app is free on Android[1] but $25 on iOS[2]. I think I heard (I don't have a source) that the developer's justification was that they needed to make money from the all the time and effort they spent creating Anki, plus hosting costs, etc - so why not do a cheaper price on both Android/iOS, or do a free-to-download app with a subscription model? For what it's worth you can use the web version on iOS but the app is a better experience IMO.
> I also don't agree with Anki's pricing model. The app is free on Android[1] but $25 on iOS[2]. I think I heard (I don't have a source) that the developer's justification was that they needed to make money from the all the time and effort they spent creating Anki, plus hosting costs, etc - so why not do a cheaper price on both Android/iOS, or do a free-to-download app with a subscription model
People with money overwhelmingly buy iPhones. $25 is a pittance for anyone who can afford an iPhone. Anybody who uses Anki seriously gets far, far more value than $25 out of it. I used it for well over 200 hours before I stopped and I know I’ll go back to it again.
The Android version is not maintained by the developer of Anki. The iPhone app is. He chooses to charge for the iPhone app, which enables him to make a living making tens of thousands of people’s lives better.
If you don’t want to spend the price of two pizzas on an app that the modal user will use for over a hundred hours don’t.
> People with money overwhelmingly buy iPhones. $25 is a pittance for anyone who can afford an iPhone. Anybody who uses Anki seriously gets far, far more value than $25 out of it. I used it for well over 200 hours before I stopped and I know I’ll go back to it again.
I used Anki's web interface from my phone for about 6 months before I bought the iOS app. Then about 4 years after using the app almost every day, I sent them another $25 donation. I got way more than $50 worth of value out of it over the 10 years that I used it.
(I've now written my own study tool for Chinese which fixes some of the issues with using flashcards for language learning. Maybe at some point it will show up on "Show HackerNews"; but it's slow going when you've only got a few hours a week.)
I agree with you - I definitely got more than $25 of value from the iOS app and was happy to pay the price. I guess my thing is that I wonder if the developer would be better off trying to solicit more users at a lower price (or a small, monthly/annual subscription) than a one-time purchase.
Fwiw, two pizzas in US buy you up to 20 meals in a developing country. In a developing country, people often get cheaper iPhones (second hand or previous generation). The apps, however cost the same.
(co-author of the article) I wrote a longer list of categories [1] a while ago (some of which aren't mentioned in the article), here's the list:
* Basic information about countries e.g. population
* Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
* Important people and places
* History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
* Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
* Season for various vegetables and fruits
* Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
* Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
* Useful statistics
Seems people are taking issue with my gripe about the pricing. To be clear:
I bought the iOS app, was happy to do so, and got a lot more than $25 of value from it. In my opinion, the developer might be better off with a subscription model rather than a one-time purchase.
Developing for iOS is a lot more expensive than Android - you need to pay for Apple hardware and there are ongoing fees for "notarizing" your app. It's quite normal that an iOS app would ultimately cost more.
I’m doing OSSU, and I went for “Discrete Mathematics with Applications” by Susanna Epps. Cost $50 for a used textbook. Technically I’m deviating from the curriculum but I’d say I’m still “doing OSSU”