Daniel Bruce

"submitted by reddit to blog." - Daniel Bruce

"That's actually a really clever solution that catches most of the cases and still allows for wholly automated grading. Just set up the answer boxes to depend on each other, with the expected answers formulated as expressions instead of static numbers (a la Excel :P)." - Daniel Bruce

"Not unfeasible, but more challenging and not as quick to throw out there, as startups tend to do. :) I am sure that there are solutions, but of course finding a solution means being aware there is a problem, thus my post." - Daniel Bruce

"Also interested" - Daniel Bruce

"I was able to figure out the homework assignments on independence based on the examples given, and found them more than accurate, so I'm not sure what you're referring to here." - Daniel Bruce

"Although you shouldn't expect them to, as this *is* unofficial." - Daniel Bruce

"If they were to make the deadline on midnight based on your timezone, then one could "cheat" by twiddling with the timezone or the computer's clock, and they would have to release the videos in a "staggered" fashion, so that everyone gets a fair amount of time. This of course presents a problem since the videos will be available on youtube from the very first timezone gets access to them, which means that us in the later timezones would, unfairly, have access to them for X amounts of hours more. There are a few things to consider when it comes to this proposition, and the simplest solution is just to set a static deadline and let the students work out how and when they will work. In "real" school I didn't complain when I had homework due at noon, even though I'd be worked 8-4 that day, I just worked harder before that time and handed it in the day before." - Daniel Bruce

"Also, there is no need to shout." - Daniel Bruce

"I'm pretty sure the problems wouldn't be with bandwidth. Pushing out a video is a comparatively simpler job which is almost trivial to optimize for with the right amount of hardware or by back-ending to the cloud. I'm fairly certain the issues came from CPU load from fetching and storing answers and computing things related to personal progress and other such things." - Daniel Bruce

"One must realize that this is all run for FREE (not accounting for any sponsors/investors, of course) and without any ads, and as such these people probably simply don't have the resources to field the massive amount of servers required to sustain ~100K users hammering the servers every few seconds trying to figure out why they can't turn in their homework. This is a beta test, in many ways, and while it might seem intuitively simple to have the software scale, since many other sites can handle it just fine, one must consider that these sites have had many months, even years, to fine-tune their architectures, and even then they have issues (twitter seems to failwhale with regularity still, for example.) If they have these issues sorted out by homework #3, I commend them on their speedy resolution of the issues." - Daniel Bruce

"What he's positing as Bayes' Theorem is actually just conditional probability shuffled around [P(A|B) = P(A,B)/P(B) -> P(A|B)*P(B) = P(A,B)], from which Bayes' Theorem can be derived, but I'm not sure why that was put there. The B' in his example I'm guessing is supposed to be an easier way to write ¬B. Other than that, it was a very good summary." - Daniel Bruce

"I do most of the answers I do in my head as fractions, and many of the ones I do on paper. Once they go into the calculator, though, they get input as decimals. :)" - Daniel Bruce