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Comment by kafkaesque | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely off-topic, but have people taken a look at Po-Shen Loh's company expii.com? He's the coach for the US team.

It says:

Expii is a collection of free, interactive, explanations written by people from around the world

Interesting!

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Thanks for noticing! :) Indeed, I've been working with a certain segment of the population through my roles as the national coach of the USA IMO team and as a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

However, after being appointed to the national coach position, I realized that the USA would not be able to consistently deliver top results unless we lifted our mathematical level across a broad base. It seemed that technology could provide the solution to that problem, in the sense that it's possible to crowd-source the scripting of automatic virtual tutors, which can then be replayed (for free) on mobile devices throughout all regions, rich or poor. Thus, expii.com was born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11SdySDDrMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6WVbFIz43M

-- Po-Shen Loh

That's really interesting. Deserving of a top-level submission, too, I think.

May I ask what your plan is for defending lessons against cranks, crusading ideologues, and the less-than-knowledgeable once it gets more adoption? Other collaborative projects such as Wikipedia have suffered as a result of this, but I noticed in your talk that your aim is to maintain "higher" quality than Wikipedia or even Stack Exchange and Quora. I'm curious how this can be accomplished once the user base expands beyond its initial network.

Congrats on this year's IMO result!

Expii uses voting (like Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, etc) to identify the best content. After that, since we have the luxury of focusing only on the "heavy-hitter" topics which at least 100 million people need to know, there really aren't that many topics. When we do reach the size at which quality is an issue, we can simply moderate the topics in-house.

Wikipedia cannot do this because their objective is to cover 100 million topics (breadth), and so in-house moderation doesn't scale. Our objective is depth: we ultimately want to provide the absolute best free interactive lessons on every heavy-hitter topic in the world. :)

Thanks for your well-wishes!

I gasped when I saw my acquaintance's name on HN. By coincidence, I'm wearing an expii t-shirt right now.

He's really nice, and excited about improving math and science education. Expii could be called an "explorable explanations" Wikipedia[0]--one can write code (I think a subset of JS), embed videos etc in service of a better explanation.

I'm also fond of him because his office has an X server (or would that be X client?). How many startups actually use X??

[0] Just my two cents.

Maybe I'm just dense. Do you mean X11 server (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System) or something else?

Indeed X11. what I meant by my X11 server/client waffling is I think you /run/ an X11 client and servers connect to it--this is backwards to every other usage of client/server.

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