jasonrr

The data presented in this article is extremely suspect. The methodology for both the collection of shipment information and the extrapolation to revenue are secret (or at least not reported here -- see the update at the bottom of the story). As a community that is concerned with accuracy and precision, I think we should be bothered by this. Instead it's a launchpad for arguments based on conjecture and personal anecdote.

Mountain View, CA - full-time designers and mobile devs

Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Over 1 billion math problems have been done on our site and 2 million more are done each day. Here's some stuff we've been working on lately:

  *  creating adaptive assessments to accurately measure student knowledge
  *  running new A/B tests every week to learn how best to teach students and grow our userbase
  *  building infrastructure to allow us to scale up our content creation efforts
  *  internationalizing our entire website to enable pilot implementations in Mexico and Brazil

If this sounds interesting to you, we'd love to hear from you. Right now, we're focusing on hiring product designers and mobile developers. Come build with us:

  https://www.khanacademy.org/careers

I am saying that you can follow OOCSS coding practices and still wind up with a ton of really great abstracted styles that you don't reuse. That is because most people look at OOCSS and only see the "this is how you write proper CSS" and don't realize that most of the work is around planning and communicating. How many of the folks using OOCSS have a style guide of some kind that they are sharing to let people know what exactly is available to be reused?

This article focused on the first part and even compares different approaches, but misses the point that OOCSS is advocating a process overhaul, not just a change to the way that you write CSS.

When I say help people not write custom CSS, I am referring to reuse. Writing the code the right way is of course a pre-requisite, but from experience, not nearly enough.

This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, and while all of these approaches solve some problems I think the requirement for maintainable CSS is a fundamentally different approach to the purpose of CSS. Once you make the mental switch from "CSS is the stuff that I do to make the things that I build look right" to "CSS is a component of everything I build" it becomes easier to see what I mean. It's not about "I need to be able to reuse this font size" as much as it is "I want to reuse this widget when I am display text in this way on any page".

In other words, if you want to build something maintainable, start thinking about all the ways you can help people not write custom CSS at all.

Also, LESS and SASS at their core do little to help with this problem, and can even hurt you with unintentional specificity (due to nesting) that hurts reusability. Mixins help you think "reusability" but they can really easily be misused in ways similar to how people are misusing CSS right now. This is by no means an attack on LESS/SASS, which I love. It is just a reaction to working on a large project that is making the switch and seeing the fallout.

Simply stating it is not a ponzi scheme doesn't advance the conversation in a meaningful way in my opinion.

It's really just semantics at this point. There is a lot of evidence here that suggests systematic misleading (if not out-right defrauding) of investors. So you while you are technically correct, I think what Groupon has done is in the spirit of Ponzi even if it is executed differently. What's happened here is more than just a bad business plan executed honestly producing poor results. Just because we don't have the exact word for it doesn't make it any more ethical.

This is an ongoing falsehood. Several Khan Academy employees were real honest-to-goodness teachers, and we work with teachers directly in-person every single day to make the product and the content better. In addition, we are looking for more folks to make videos. Our standards are extremely high, and that will take time, but I disagree that this is our biggest challenge in scaling.

Furthermore, your opinion of the Biology content may be spot-on, but there are thousands of students who say it's making their lives measurably better. Maybe it would be 100,000 if the content was better; it's hard to know for sure. I'm just not sure that it is directly affecting scale at this point, or that there's not a greater effect on scale trying to get more people to use our existing content.

Disclaimer: I'm the lead designer for KA.

What about accounting for the massive selection bias of people who would actually visit the Genius Bar in the first place and combining that with the total number of people who visit the Genius Bar with their iPhones at all. I am guessing the number represents a tiny fraction of total iPhone users.