7 ms·

Wish I could fill up the world's knowledge in 1TB and put it in a low cost tablet and deploy it to a billion underprivileged people in their language to spark t

by LAMike 8y ago

Wish I could fill up the world's knowledge in 1TB and put it in a low cost tablet and deploy it to a billion underprivileged people in their language to spark the next Einstein, along with millions of other educated people who were able to improve their lives through data

rexpop 8y ago
Is that really what you think the next Einstein needs? No, she needs Colonialism to get off her neck. These millions are under-educated only because we have smashed their societies to burgle their commons.
- sctb 8y ago
  > Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - rexpop 8y ago
    The word "unrelated" is awfully subjective. I could, of course, improve at spelling things out, but one never knows how much elementary illustration is necessary. Of course, no one believes their own words to be flamebait. Makes the rule about as useful as "don't piss on the escalators"--no one who does it will be dissuaded by a sign.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
Sounds about as popular as reading encyclopedias for fun. I bet I'd be hard pressed to find one person who genuinely reads Wikipedia as a hobby outside of the lone HNer who will claim "but I do." I just don't think underprivileged people are so desperate for entertainment that they'll browse a 1TB SD card for morsels of wisdom. Unless you meant you're going to pack it full of movies, music, and games, which actually sounds interesting.
- bitzun 8y ago
  Anecdotally I know several people who "get lost" reading Wikipedia after looking up something on a whim, myself included. I find this comment a bit odd on a site people browse to stay informed on tech or tech-near subjects, which is not just movies and videogames and the like.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Compare HN to a 1TB SD card data dump. I don't see the parallels. HN is basically current events social media where people even admit they read the comments instead of TFA. And I think that getting lost on Wikipedia every few weeks is a far cry from browsing old shit on a 1TB SD card for fun in your ramshackle hovel with the family Android tablet. To me it kinda comes off as the hilarious "wow, those poor people must be so bored watching their paint dry. Maybe I can interest them in something nobody does" wrapped up in some feel good idea about sharing knowledge.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      Lot's of people still go to the library, and many of them still check out books a century or more old. A 1TB dump is not about expecting people to read all of it, it would be about getting a broad enough section of knowledge that the chances of a decent subset of it being of interest to a decent number of people. And if the purpose is to "spark the next Einstein" as the comment suggested, it doesn't matter if 99% of them ends up being used for games, or sold, or used for all kinds of other things, if a tiny portion triggers an interest in learning and provides a good starting point.
  - Ultramanoid 8y ago
    Agreed. I thought it was common knowledge ( from commenting with others around me ) that Wikipedia is a rabbit hole hard to escape sometimes.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    I call them "wikiwalks". And I call an excessively tangential session a "wikiwalkabout", after the Australian walkabout tradition introduced to Americans by "Crocodile Dundee", or, more recently--the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show have a letdown denoument. But I did like the colossus foot in the later episodes, because it reminded me of "Ozymandias", by P.B. Shelley. And did you know that he wrote that as his shot in a poetry duel with another poet--Horace Smith? (I guess he won, right?) Anyway, they picked that as a topic to honor a new museum exhibit of the Younger Memnon statue of Rameses II. Those British museum-goers were just mad for importing cultural artifacts from distant lands and never sending them back. Like the Elgin Marbles, from Greece. And when I think about Britain and Greece, I can't help thinking about their palace guards--Greece with their poofy-footed Evzones and Britain with their Beefeaters. And one of those Beefeaters is the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London--literally in charge of the welfare of the tower ravens. One of whom is apparently named Merlina, and is allowed additional latitude in how far she may fly, because she always comes back. And speaking of ravens and 19th-century poets, boy was Edgar Allen Poe a gothy li'l guy. He had a lot of inspirational company, though. Including Mary Shelley, wife of the aforementioned P.B., who won a 3-way ghost story duel between herself, her husband, and Lord Byron, who only managed to invent the vampire romance genre. So between the two of them and ol' Rameses II, we're almost all primed to scare the crap out of Laurel and Hardy with Universal Pictures monster movie staples: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. But we still need the Wolfman.... And hopefully you see how it works now. Before wikis existed, there was "Connections", by James Burke.
ebg13 8y ago
This happened already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader It didn't work. Probably because gadgets aren't the solution to unequal distribution of privilege.
- mmastrac 8y ago
  I don't think WikiReader was every "widely distributed". As far as I remember from watching Techmoan's video on the topic, it was a consumer product with no market. An alternative data point would be https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata-mitra https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata... - the hole in the wall computer that showed giving access to the internet to poor children did have a dramatic effect.
- LMYahooTFY 8y ago
  Your derision doesn't include the fact that there is no "the solution" for unequal distribution of privilege. It's not clear that it "didn't work" either. Does that mean no one benefited from it anywhere ever?
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  I had one, until I accidentally killed it - it was a great gadget. The $99 price point is what killed it, though.
- mrybczyn 8y ago
  Google assistant or similar limited-AIs are a much more likely future. My kids already have (silly) conversations with google-assistant all the time. An obvious extension would be google-ai-tutor. Inspired by _Diamond Age_.
- rexpop 8y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. Most Hacker News comments are so wrapped up in their ideology--as evidenced by the response which reads your assertion as derisive.
jammmety 8y ago
There is evidence that education technology can be effective, but perhaps the global community should be focussing on the hundreds of millions of children in school but not learning: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/hundreds-of-millions-of-children-in-school-but-not-learning-world-bank https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/h... Software for getting children reading - in their own language first - is a great first step. See the work being done by the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning
brocket 8y ago
This is kind of what non-profit Worldreader does, takes Kindles loaded up with books and ships them to schools in Africa. See https://www.worldreader.org/our-solution/products/blue-box/ https://www.worldreader.org/our-solution/products/blue-box/
maxxxxx 8y ago
You can't just provide information. People also need help to do something with it. Most of us won't become math experts by reading a pile of math books. You also need teachers who help processing the material.
- vidanay 8y ago
  We should rename teachers to catalysts.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    True.
zaarn 8y ago
If you don't include images, the world's knowledge should be able to fit into a 1TB µSD card; most fandom wikia's + random wikis from the web + wikipedia + wikiquote + wiktionary + wikibooks. Text compressed well, especially if you have a lot of it and image files usually make up the bulk of any archival effort.
justfor1comment 8y ago
Fun fact: You can download the entire set of articles on Wikipedia. The English set is roughly 25GB in size. At 1TB you could probably store 40 different languages in your tablet. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...
- int_19h 8y ago
  This is without images, which makes many articles that much less useful. A full point-in-time snapshot of English Wikipedia, with images, without videos, and with xz compression applied to all data, is on the order of 80 Gb.
int_19h 8y ago
https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/

by LAMike 8y ago

rexpop 8y ago

Is that really what you think the next Einstein needs? No, she needs Colonialism to get off her neck. These millions are under-educated only because we have smashed their societies to burgle their commons.

sctb 8y ago
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rexpop 8y ago
  The word "unrelated" is awfully subjective. I could, of course, improve at spelling things out, but one never knows how much elementary illustration is necessary. Of course, no one believes their own words to be flamebait. Makes the rule about as useful as "don't piss on the escalators"--no one who does it will be dissuaded by a sign.

hombre_fatal 8y ago

Sounds about as popular as reading encyclopedias for fun. I bet I'd be hard pressed to find one person who genuinely reads Wikipedia as a hobby outside of the lone HNer who will claim "but I do." I just don't think underprivileged people are so desperate for entertainment that they'll browse a 1TB SD card for morsels of wisdom. Unless you meant you're going to pack it full of movies, music, and games, which actually sounds interesting.

bitzun 8y ago
Anecdotally I know several people who "get lost" reading Wikipedia after looking up something on a whim, myself included. I find this comment a bit odd on a site people browse to stay informed on tech or tech-near subjects, which is not just movies and videogames and the like.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Compare HN to a 1TB SD card data dump. I don't see the parallels. HN is basically current events social media where people even admit they read the comments instead of TFA. And I think that getting lost on Wikipedia every few weeks is a far cry from browsing old shit on a 1TB SD card for fun in your ramshackle hovel with the family Android tablet. To me it kinda comes off as the hilarious "wow, those poor people must be so bored watching their paint dry. Maybe I can interest them in something nobody does" wrapped up in some feel good idea about sharing knowledge.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    Lot's of people still go to the library, and many of them still check out books a century or more old. A 1TB dump is not about expecting people to read all of it, it would be about getting a broad enough section of knowledge that the chances of a decent subset of it being of interest to a decent number of people. And if the purpose is to "spark the next Einstein" as the comment suggested, it doesn't matter if 99% of them ends up being used for games, or sold, or used for all kinds of other things, if a tiny portion triggers an interest in learning and provides a good starting point.
- Ultramanoid 8y ago
  Agreed. I thought it was common knowledge ( from commenting with others around me ) that Wikipedia is a rabbit hole hard to escape sometimes.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I call them "wikiwalks". And I call an excessively tangential session a "wikiwalkabout", after the Australian walkabout tradition introduced to Americans by "Crocodile Dundee", or, more recently--the Locke character from "Lost". And boy, did that show have a letdown denoument. But I did like the colossus foot in the later episodes, because it reminded me of "Ozymandias", by P.B. Shelley. And did you know that he wrote that as his shot in a poetry duel with another poet--Horace Smith? (I guess he won, right?) Anyway, they picked that as a topic to honor a new museum exhibit of the Younger Memnon statue of Rameses II. Those British museum-goers were just mad for importing cultural artifacts from distant lands and never sending them back. Like the Elgin Marbles, from Greece. And when I think about Britain and Greece, I can't help thinking about their palace guards--Greece with their poofy-footed Evzones and Britain with their Beefeaters. And one of those Beefeaters is the Ravenmaster of the Tower of London--literally in charge of the welfare of the tower ravens. One of whom is apparently named Merlina, and is allowed additional latitude in how far she may fly, because she always comes back. And speaking of ravens and 19th-century poets, boy was Edgar Allen Poe a gothy li'l guy. He had a lot of inspirational company, though. Including Mary Shelley, wife of the aforementioned P.B., who won a 3-way ghost story duel between herself, her husband, and Lord Byron, who only managed to invent the vampire romance genre. So between the two of them and ol' Rameses II, we're almost all primed to scare the crap out of Laurel and Hardy with Universal Pictures monster movie staples: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and the Mummy. But we still need the Wolfman.... And hopefully you see how it works now. Before wikis existed, there was "Connections", by James Burke.

ebg13 8y ago

This happened already. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader It didn't work. Probably because gadgets aren't the solution to unequal distribution of privilege.

mmastrac 8y ago
I don't think WikiReader was every "widely distributed". As far as I remember from watching Techmoan's video on the topic, it was a consumer product with no market. An alternative data point would be https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata-mitra https://www.edutopia.org/blog/self-organized-learning-sugata... - the hole in the wall computer that showed giving access to the internet to poor children did have a dramatic effect.
LMYahooTFY 8y ago
Your derision doesn't include the fact that there is no "the solution" for unequal distribution of privilege. It's not clear that it "didn't work" either. Does that mean no one benefited from it anywhere ever?
owenversteeg 8y ago
I had one, until I accidentally killed it - it was a great gadget. The $99 price point is what killed it, though.
mrybczyn 8y ago
Google assistant or similar limited-AIs are a much more likely future. My kids already have (silly) conversations with google-assistant all the time. An obvious extension would be google-ai-tutor. Inspired by _Diamond Age_.
rexpop 8y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. Most Hacker News comments are so wrapped up in their ideology--as evidenced by the response which reads your assertion as derisive.

jammmety 8y ago

There is evidence that education technology can be effective, but perhaps the global community should be focussing on the hundreds of millions of children in school but not learning: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/hundreds-of-millions-of-children-in-school-but-not-learning-world-bank https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/02/h... Software for getting children reading - in their own language first - is a great first step. See the work being done by the Global Learning XPRIZE: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning

brocket 8y ago

This is kind of what non-profit Worldreader does, takes Kindles loaded up with books and ships them to schools in Africa. See https://www.worldreader.org/our-solution/products/blue-box/ https://www.worldreader.org/our-solution/products/blue-box/

maxxxxx 8y ago

You can't just provide information. People also need help to do something with it. Most of us won't become math experts by reading a pile of math books. You also need teachers who help processing the material.

vidanay 8y ago
We should rename teachers to catalysts.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  True.

zaarn 8y ago

If you don't include images, the world's knowledge should be able to fit into a 1TB µSD card; most fandom wikia's + random wikis from the web + wikipedia + wikiquote + wiktionary + wikibooks. Text compressed well, especially if you have a lot of it and image files usually make up the bulk of any archival effort.

justfor1comment 8y ago

Fun fact: You can download the entire set of articles on Wikipedia. The English set is roughly 25GB in size. At 1TB you could probably store 40 different languages in your tablet. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

int_19h 8y ago
This is without images, which makes many articles that much less useful. A full point-in-time snapshot of English Wikipedia, with images, without videos, and with xz compression applied to all data, is on the order of 80 Gb.

int_19h 8y ago

https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/