So what do you want to achieve here, because such a platform is just useful if you find either people that are willing to answer specific questions - such as in mathoverflow - or if you want to read something up (and then you probably go to wikipedia or grap another introduction to a topic). Anyway, it is nicely done, but I wonder if there was another intention than "because we can". I have read the "How Function Space is different?" section, but it is not that convincing.
I wanted to create a complete learning environment for these three subjects. So apart from discussions and articles, there are various other things like Video lectures, book reviews, problem solving techniques, subject groups and visualisations(which will soon evolve to virtual labs). Rather than quickly-learn,quickly-forget model, I wanted to implement a model that is based on solid understanding of concepts.
I actually think that for a lot of maths/CS/Physics issues, wikipedia is a horrible introduction to people unfamiliar with the topic. A site which curates explanations in normalspeak with some form of interaction (i.e. "Can you explain why...") would actually be a very useful resource for a lot of people, myself included.
Yeah, that's true, but you can also use free ebooks, slides from lectures, etc. and you often find really good stuff. Furthermore one should not have to register for such a service ... consider wikipedia would require you to login to find out how, e.g. merge sort works.
Wikipedia is supposed to be static, without questions from readers on any engagement besides reading and maybe correcting or expanding something.
Also, no serious Wikipedia article about math or physics is thought of as an introduction. Sometimes its the other way around, its written for experts and goes into surface or line integrals, or sometimes even tensor notation, when an introduction would not.
I think this website is trying to reduce friction for user interaction and aggregating it, and also tries to curate material into different levels of difficulty. Both things merit asking for a login, for social its obvious why, and to curate for difficulty its helpful to use the feedback from users as a signal of an innadecuate label.
Khan academy is nice for the material it covers, but anybody going beyond high school will find it rapidly becomes obsolete (according to the content ca. the last time I checked). The treatments are simply too elementary and the topics too low level.
I would think a site where people can ask anything, ala stackoverflow, would yield more useful results for many physics/math/cs students.
That may have been true a couple years ago, but they are rapidly expanding. They now include calculus and diff eq with plans to go beyond. They're even researching med school related content for the future.
That being said, I wouldn't take that as a reason to not pursue this.
Looking at what's on there, I'm really not convinced. You could not get through an physics, engineering or math program on the material that is there, not even close. If I search for, say, complex analysis, all of the material I get is about complex arithmetic. No multivalued functions, branch cuts, p.v. integrals, harmonic functions, DEs, nothing. It's all what they expect you to know going INTO the course, or that they cover in the first two days.
Similarly, if I go into the physics topics, they are all <= intro courses, at best. Optics? Doesn't talk about fourier optics, lasers, etc. E&M? Doesn't seem to mention Maxwell's Equations anywhere... enough said. Quantum mech? Nothing. Statistical mech? Nothing.
Okay, how about math? Take a look at the differential equations stuff. No higher order, no series methods, no numerical methods, no coupled systems, no non-linear. Probability? No markov chains, MCMC methods, or anything except basic RVs and statistics (which is not the same thing as probability). Same for linear algebra: no fitting methods, no matrix decomposition, no graph theory.
I could go on. The point is that they cover the most basic elements of each subject, and they miss a hell of a lot of important subjects. That's okay, but don't claim that they're anywhere close to being able to educate you at a university level.
khan academy does so but with a definite focus on children, this feels a little more grown up.
Besides, just because khan does similar things does not reduce the value potential this has.
There is a lot more of a social SO type feel with Function Space whereby a user can ask questions and receive answers in an open forum. That is more hidden on khan.
For those of you complaining about the login. Give it a shot, there is a fairly well thought out site behind that login and the dev has expressed his intent to make things more open. With a site like this being able to ask and comment is kinda key to it working anyways.
Use your spam address on the site until you feel it's worthy of your "personal" one. But do check it out.
Free and open access to knowledge and knowledgeable people needs to be done in as many places and formats as possible. I hope this goes far.
Very cool work. I am glad there are people still working on Plan9 and its concepts. I think it is a very underappreciated OS but its time will come atleast its ideas. Kudos!
That's definitly the right direction. Our software stack is getting too complicated, and is carrying so much stuff that is almost never used (e.g. obscure entries in terminfo's db). But of course, real world does not give us much time to rethink/refactor our computing structures.
Maybe people will start to refactor the worst offenders. It takes more than a slight improvement to displace software that's widely used, but I'm sure there are things that we use that could be an order of magnitude better (according to some metric). Gmail was able to win converts because it was an order of magnitude better than the competition.
For me this was really disturbing. I was digging in an old thread, because I often use HN for research on specific topics, and suddenly it popped in my browser and I had no idea what was going on. It did not feel like _me_ controlling my laptop at that moment ...
