hanibash's comments

Thanks for the feedback jmspring. I think you're right, deeper understanding takes a lot more time than 8 weeks, even at the pace that our students go.

However for people that want to get into coding for the first time, nothing is more gratifying than having a project in your pocket that you can point to and say "I did that". That is why our courses are project-oriented.

I hope that our courses pique student interest enough to pursue deeper theoretical knowledge, but as a first foray into coding, we've found projects are really the way to go.

Wow. I can't believe it's this bad.

Our startup, bloc (www.bloc.io), pivoted four times in 8 months, and we're way happy with where we are now.

The vision, or core motivation, never did change though. There's a common thread through all four pivots. In fact the current product looks most similar to the very first. But it's different in important ways that weren't known during pivot 1.

Here's the full story http://jmtame.posterous.com/this-is-how-you-actually-teach-p...

Zed I think your self-identity point is spot on. Time and time again we see that the greatest minds don't pigeon hole themselves into a single category. Paul Graham says it himself --

"What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things."

Anyone who is a maker should be interested in learning to code. I strongly believe that although programming is a specialized discipline now, in the coming years we will see that people who have skills in both coding and other fields will come out the furthest ahead.

Telling beginners not to learn how to code is like telling people they shouldn't learn how to paint or learn to play an instrument. Coding is a beautiful and fulfilling activity which no one should be barred from.

Teaching people directly and offering personal mentorship is the teaching model. The price is just set at a point that people are willing to pay us. It has the added benefit of keeping the bar for student motivation high. That's not the only way, as Hacker School has shown, where the tuition is free and they instead filter purely on applications.

Not many websites are offering the personal touch online, and I personally think more people should. I think http://railstutors.com/ are an example of two guys doing it right.

Judging by the success of DevBootcamp/Hacker School/Etc. have had, I think it can safely be said mentorship is a pretty effective teaching model. Our job is to make that model work online as well.

I can see how it could be confusing, but for us, finding our business model and learning how to teach were in tandem with one another.

I think the main thing we discovered about teaching was that we weren't going to get anywhere by relying on other people to do the teaching for us, or with a fancy web application. The thing I find most interesting about our story was that it took us four iterations to realize that the best way to teach people was also the simplest -- teach what we know and do it directly. As far our methodology, it's going to be pretty simple: try to teach people, online, as if they were all in the room with us. That means lots of Skype calls, chat room, etc.

Hi Doktrin, I'm also one of the guys tutoring at Bloc.

We don't make any assumptions about your skill level. We'll take any motivated person, and come up with a plan that will challenge them. Whether or not that includes Hartl tutorial is actually up to the individual mentor teaching the cohort.

We put a ton of time into each cohort. It is basically our full time job to make sure each and every person gets as much as possible out of the course. We typically have somewhere like 15+ of office hours a week. For most of the course, we basically coach you as you build real projects of your choosing.

We would love to hear all opinions. Message me or post here.

The author is completely missing the point. Implicit sharing allows for everything to go into the graph in a structured way. This is the most important aspect of implicit sharing and the new Open Graph.

This doesn't mean that you're going to get inundated with meaningless shares. That would be a horrible user experience. In fact, Facebook put a lot of time and effort into making sure that is exactly what didn't happen. It's the very reason why timeline was built. It's why ticker was built. They did this because they want a place for the increased sharing to go, without degrading user experience.

But here's the really exciting part. Once all this data is in the graph, timeline and ticker will pale in comparison to what developers can do with all of this new, structured data. That is the really important thing here.

Implicit sharing is not so that you can get a notification every time someone listens to a song. It's so that a talented young developer can come along and create a beautiful application that visualizes all of your song listens, how it makes you similar or different from your friends.

Don't worry Farhad. Explicit sharing and taste isn't going away. I will still pay more attention to the link you posted of that song you love than the song that blips by in my ticker. I wouldn't criticize the new graph until its matured and we've seen the next generation of amazing apps that are going to be enabled.

I was hoping I would see a beautiful visualization of what people across the world love. Instead it poured out a bunch of information. Why does this seem typically Google?

I loved the Grooveshark interview. These interviews feel really personal.

I'll try to explain from what I understood in quantum physics class years ago.

When you're dealing with things on the quantum level, observing a particle affects it. Remember Schrodinger's cat? The cat is both dead and alive, until someone opens the box. The opening of the box gives the cat its new state of deadness or aliveness.

Quantum teleportation works through entangled particles. Entangled particles are, in some sense, the same particle in two places. An action on one entangled particle will instantly affect the other particle, including observation of the particle.

Suppose Alice and Bob share an entangled particle. Alice observes the particle on her end, collapsing it into one of four states. Which state it collapses into is and always will be completely random.

Bob's particle was instantaneously affected in one of four ways corresponding to those states. Trouble is, he doesn't know which way, and he can't do anything with his particle until he does.

Alice has to communicate to Bob in any regular way, through light, telephone or internet, what she observed on her end, so that Bob knows what exactly happened to his particle, and what to do with it.

So in this way, it really was instantaneous over a distance, but at the same time nothing useful happened faster than the speed of light.

I like to participate in day long hackathons for this reason. Mentally, I know that I've blocked that time off for coding, and socially, all my friends know that I have too.

Doesn't this show determination? Paul Graham's number 1 trait in a founder?

I see this as potentially being very useful.

Imagine if you had the ability to Google search all of your friend's 'Likes' on Facebook. This is what Google is trying to create here, except for webpages instead of social snippets.

This suggests a parallel competing feature for Facebook: Make all of your friend's 'Likes' searchable through the search toolbar on Facebook.

Probably largely because the Kauffman Foundation is there.

On the Chicago bus here. Currently in Wichita, Kansas. Our service is basically ready and we're going to sell it like crazy at SXSW

Z is a very futuristic, advanced sounding letter. Ask a kid to draw a spaceship, and then ask him to name the spaceship. It'll probably start with Z.

Oh wow. If this lets me test the bookmarklet I'm developing without setting up a fake environment, you have made my life much easier. Will try it out real soon.

Someone please explain why "I love you" is cyclical???

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=i+love+you&ye...