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Khan Academy requests for donations as their servers are at 250% normal load
- alex_duf 7y agoTime to use webtorrents to lower the bandwidth cost?
- dangoor 7y agoOur videos are largely served by YouTube.
- op03 7y agoWould moving to torrents reduce the load? Kiwix seems to able to distribute offline wikipedia stackoverflow etc that way - https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
- jsilence 7y agoPeertube is distributing the video streams P2P. Would be interesting to see whether KA could adapt that technology into their platform.
- rany_ 7y agoKhan Academy uses YouTube for videos, they have no problems with YouTube.
- satyanash 7y ago> Would moving to torrents reduce the load? Only if they could figure out a way to host their learning platform, content and scoring on it.
- op03 7y agoInstead of link to vid replace it (or place side by side) with link to torrent (probably with a note about torrent clients the same way Kiwix does). The rest of the platform can still be used as is. Most people will just click and download will be pretty quick (most vids are quite small).
- sim_card_map 7y agoThey can also move from Python.
- cellularmitosis 7y agothey recently posted about how they are doing exactly that.
- hd4 7y agoAgreed. I wish more companies/nonprofits/whatever would make better decisions early on about their infrastructure, or at least gradually graft in better tooling over time.
- akerro 7y agoThis gonna cost a lot to rewrite
- RenierZA 7y agoHere is the article explaining their plans to move to Go. https://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm https://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
- throwaway13337 7y agoI quite enjoyed khan academy when it was just Khan doing lectures. They were terrific. I can't imagine, though, that servers should account for any sizable amount of overall expense. Is this really an issue for them? The linked page didn't seem to talk about it.
- warent 7y agoIt's a nonprofit organization. I'm not that educated on the topic but I think that means it's possible to find a breakdown of their expenses somewhere.
- bjterry 7y agoYou can find their 2018 IRS filing here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/261544963/201912279349301826/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/261... I've never read one before, but it looks like their IT spend was $5m of $49m total expenses on page 10. I think it's very plausible that a sudden unanticipated increase in IT costs could cause a cash crunch.
- jka 7y agoThanks for linking to this. A unique string to find this line item in the linked filing is "Information technology" This was their second-largest functional expense area for 2018, behind "Other salaries and wages". Although I'm not an accountant it also seemed noteworthy to me that their "Revenue less expenses" was negative for 2018 (not overwhelmingly in relation to their assets, but still by a sizable amount). I'm not really qualified to comment on what that means, but naively it does seem to imply to me that they can continue to benefit from donations and external funding.
- innocenat 7y agoIt was actually linked on the donation page: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/
- 7y ago
- gigatexal 7y agoI donated what I could. They’re doing amazing work
- dangoor 7y agoThank you!
- karimf 7y agoHere's the video of Sal Khan talking about the donations [0]. Not much additional information, aside that he said they were already running on deficit before this crisis. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjGERWYvzqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjGERWYvzqk
- thoraway329 7y agoThe CEO make $824,000 in salary in 2018.. non-profit my ass.
- Crosseye_Jack 7y agoThe IT staff also get paid... How very dare them. Go to work and earn a living... It’s disgusting I say. They should do it completely for the love of it. Same goes for those pesky YouTubers. Long story short. If you don’t offer a decent incentive package, you won’t incentivise people to come and take a CEO roll. If you look around you will find that CEO at other charity’s also get paid well.
- thoraway329 7y agoYes I know and it does disgust me. I wasn't talking about IT staff and regular employees. The CEO founded the "company", does he really need to incentivise himself with a near million dollars a year? I thought NPOs were created by people who want to change the world, but with this salary it seriously skews my perception of his true intentions.
- the_pwner224 7y agoThis 1m/yr is nothing compared to the impact KA has. It's no longer just a site with videos; it is a huge e-learning platform that is widely used and integrated in schools across the world. Being the CEO of KA must be a lot of work and I think most people would agree is worthy of that level of compensation. Or to put it another way: the government is also a nonprofit organization, but it needs good workers to fulfill its goals and those workers should be fairly compensated. We wouldn't get anywhere if the government paid everyone minimum wage.
- ipsum2 7y agoNo one gets in the government gets paid $800k, the highest paid salary is the president, at $400k.
- elric 7y agoIf anyone from Khan Academy is reading this: I tried to donate and my transaction was flagged as "suspicious", now my card is blocked. Probably because their PSP doesn't seem to implement 3DSecure. What's grating is that after I tried to donate I had to solve a bunch of reCaptchas before it showed me the failure status.
- avian 7y agoVery likely Khan Academy can't help. Also your bank probably doesn't know why and neither does their fraud prevention service provider that runs some machine learning/AI system somewhere that decided to flag your transaction. At least that has been my experience in dealing with these things.
- bob33212 7y agoIt is an unusual transaction, but we are living in unusual times. And the fraud detection process has not accounted for that yet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dangoor 7y agoSorry to hear that. AFAIK, we just use Stripe, which is pretty standard.
- vasusen 7y agoI had a similar experience now. Never had to do reCaptcha on a payment form with my phone before. And then the payment was rejected. I am a normal US credit card payer. I ended up using PayPal.
- discordance 7y agoWorthy internet causes: Khan Academy, Wikipedia and Electronic Frontier Foundation Any other suggestions?
- insertnickname 7y agoInternet Archive
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Aachen 7y agoNote that Wikimedia has a huge income already. They're important and valuable, but if we're talking about who doesn't get enough publicity and donations, it's not Wikipedia/Wikimedia.
- tehlike 7y agoACLU maybe?
- tehlike 7y agoWhy the downvotes? What am I missing about ACLU?
- Vinnl 7y agoOpenStreetMaps.
- keiferski 7y ago"The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions." https://publicdomainreview.org https://publicdomainreview.org
- majkinetor 7y agoMusicBrainz and friends
- maest 7y agoNot that familiar with Khan Academy, but shouldn't their income also be at 250% normal load?
- kiba 7y agoThey don't charge anything for the content.
- maest 7y agoThey do have an income source, though.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoTheir income source is donations. They do not monetize their users, so an increase in users is pure cost.
- maest 7y agoI'm talking about the "Earned Income" section they show here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (you have to scroll down to the second piechart) It's separate from donations and gifts.
- ftl64 7y agothey are non-profit
- sumedh 7y agoNon profit does not mean zero income.
- netfl0 7y agoIt’s primarily a free website.
- 7y ago
- dmayle 7y ago(Replying to a trollish comment, but don't want to push it to the top). There was a comment about the salary that CEO Sal Khan takes, with is over $800,0000 per year. I think Khan Academy is fantastic, and was going to donate until I saw this figure (verified). I think that it's entirely inappropriate to extract that much from the donations.
- noja 7y agobecause....?
- amachefe 7y agoAre you not the one trolling? So will the figure be less of it's he is doing the same work for a company?
- wanda 7y agoWhy run KA as a non-profit at all then? If you run something for the common good, you extract whatever you need to live and to run the thing — not $800k. At least, that's what I would do if I ran a non-profit, I would take only the money I need to live/perform my duties in the upkeep of the service. Which would not be anywhere near $800k.
- agustif 7y agoWell, sadly NGO are just financial investment types for people like that, they see they can get away with no IRS and donations and go for it...
- dmayle 7y agoJimmy Wales takes $0. I know they're not in the same situation, but even half that salary provides an extravagant lifestyle. I don't think he should be poor, I just think that if he's asking people to give up their money to pay him to do what he's doing, than he should be more frugal with the money he's asking for
- 7y ago
- robinhouston 7y agoI’m a bit surprised it’s so little. Our servers are at something like 1000% of normal load. We’re a data visualisation company: naively I would have expected online education to be affected more than us, rather than less.
- Aachen 7y agoWhere your money goes is detailed here: https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ https://khanacademyannualreport.org/financial-information/ (see PDF downloads). The most recent data is from 2018, when they had an income of about 43M of which about 3.4M goes to the top 10 paid employees and the top two get 0.7M and 0.8M. The total salary budget is 35M, 25M of which are for "program services" (I guess creating content, developing the platform, etc.). This looks more reasonable compared to an organisation like Mozilla. Other things that jump out are half a million in legal fees and 1.8M for fundraising. In total, 43M out of 49M expenses in 2018 went to "program services", and they were running at a slight deficit. Looks pretty OK to me. Assuming "information technology" means hosting, that's about 5M. Doing that times 2.5 would indeed create quite a problem, and that's assuming they don't need more people working on it to keep up with the new crowd.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- malux85 7y agoI wonder what the technology breakdown costs are? Is there anyone from KA engineering here who can satisfy our curiosity? Most of it would be outgoing bandwidth I’d think... maybe storage as well?
- dangoor 7y agoOur videos are hosted on YouTube, which definitely reduces our outgoing bandwidth cost. Compute is actually a big part of our costs, because we do a lot of processing for things like tracking learner progress and connecting students with their classroom assignments. This kind of thing grows linearly with usage. We're working to move to Go, which will make a big difference in this part of our bill. http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm
- phonon 7y agoDid you try switching your interpreter to PyPy?
- arzel 7y agoAhh.. Khan Academy.. the usefulness this site provided throughout my middle and high school education. Quite frankly, it literally saved my ass. I've gone ahead and donated $1K.
- cerberusss 7y agoWow, that's very, very generous of you!
- inimino 7y agoKudos!
- malux85 7y agoCouldn't do 1k but I can do 200 right now, anything for these guys, they are doing amazing work, everyone give what you can!
- dangoor 7y agoThanks! That's a generous donation
- maps7 7y agoYou just gave Salman Khan gas money for the next few months.
- xnyan 7y agoJust so you know, I donated some money because they did it fist. Humans work like that, it’s how we think. So now they are responsible for $1000 plus a bit more of server time.
- maps7 7y agoAre you implying I'm not human in some twisted way? Either way enough people disagree with me so my comment is dead and likely any more conversation from me will be down voted so I won't continue this. Stay safe.
- kvz 7y agoWent ahead and offered them our encoding service at cost-price
- happy-go-lucky 7y agoI think the increase in load is due to school closures as a result of COVID-19.
- mustardo 7y agoyou sure?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dirtydroog 7y agoGoogle given them $10m per year. Are they on GCP? Are they pissing money away on MemoryStore instances? Turn off load balancer logs. Are their servers running javascript?
- notokay 7y agoKhan Academy don't care about users feedback for years, so, no donations from me. https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115001114611-Reset-Unit-Tests https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115...
- wccrawford 7y agoDonating or not is up to you, and absolutely your choice. But that link shows that they did listen, they understood, they debated, and they decided that they don't want that functionality. They think it's counter-productive for how they're trying to educate their students. Right or wrong, you can't say they don't care. Merely that they don't agree with you.
- inimino 7y agoSo answering the question and explaining their decision is not caring? I'll donate a little extra for you.
- rs23296008n1 7y agoTheir answer seemed legit. The purpose of a test is to improve. How else do you baseline? You actually need a score that represents a snapshot of your performance at a specific moment in time. Otherwise if you're constantly editing there's no snapshot - just a blur. In gaming we call this "git gud". You obviously need more practice because you haven't moved on from a specific failure. Learn from it then beat it next time. Owning failure is part of how you accelerate learning. This is an odd reason to not donate. Not that I'm donating either... but I've already donated to plenty other organisations this year.
- polskibus 7y agoShouldn't they address public cloud owners for resources directly?
- wendyshu 7y agoSalman Khan takes $800k/yr from Khan Academy donations for himself, maybe he should donate.
- dlss 7y agoHe spent a decade of nights-and-weekends effort on making kids better at math and science, taking what I understand to be startup level risks in the beginning. How much do you think he should make? Mr. Rogers was paid more than $800k/year if you adjust for inflation[1][2]. [1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/fred-rogers-net-worth/ https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors... [2] https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=139000&year=1968 https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
- wendyshu 7y agoIf he thinks other people should donate a whole bunch of money, shouldn't he donate a whole bunch of money if he has it? Maybe he already does this, I don't know. If he took a lower salary he would effectively be doing this -- in a publicly verifiable way. It's a matter of "skin in the game".
- caseymarquis 7y agoI'd be curious to know Sal's response to this. From what I remember, he left a lucrative position at a hedge fund for an uncertain position at his newly founded non-profit. He doesn't seem like the money driven type. With absolutely no evidence, I would guess that: 1. Someone probably had to convince him it was okay to take that salary. 2. The level of his salary is probably just above what it took to hire their top talent, as a technology focused non-profit.
- wendyshu 7y agoYeah I don't know. I guess I'd just prefer to give to the worthy causes out there that don't spend as much of the donations on the leader's salary. Also, there's an abundance of free educational resources on the web, it's not clear that a marginal dollar is best spent on Khan Academy at this point.
- Farfromthehood 7y agoPornHub didn't ask for help. Just sayin'
- malux85 7y agoIs pornhub non-profit?
- skinnymuch 7y agoLook into the parent company of Pornhub, the exploitation they do, and the semi-duopoly they are a part of. I’d hope people don’t want people in porn to get screwed over figuratively too.
- 11235813213455 7y agoIn the other way, there might be plenty businesses using too much energy for their current usages/load
- drewg123 7y agoI was hoping to find more info on the "250% nominal load" mentioned in the title. However, I didn't see anything about load on the linked page, just a generic looking donation page. I'm a bit biased, because I focus on CPU efficiency for a major CDN, but I'd be super curious what exactly is at 250%? Network bandwidth? CPU? IOPS? Are there big hammers that they can use to get things back under control without adding servers, like reducing bitrate, or turning off "fancy" features?
- dangoor 7y agoVideo playing is mostly handled by YouTube. Features which use a lot of CPU are tracking learner progress, managing classrooms, and the like. These features are really important right now as teachers have moved classes online. We are in the process of moving this code to Go, which should still be very productive for us but also reduce how much CPU is required.
- jambutters 7y agoWhat language is it written in currently? Python? JavaScript?
- dangoor 7y agoCurrently running in Python 2.
- solotronics 7y agoPython3 has pretty good built in modules for asyncio, multiprocessing, and multithreading. Maybe port to py3 and utilize these features as an intermediate step while you are working on the jump to Go. I like to take a function for a single work unit "do a single thing" and then call it from a function utilizing asyncio and multithreading, this link shows a great examples. https://pymotw.com/3/asyncio/executors.html https://pymotw.com/3/asyncio/executors.html
- dangoor 7y ago
- stupidcar 7y agoSeems like governments should be funding Khan Academy during this period, since they are effectively replacing regular public education.
- malandrew 7y agoIf taxpayers could get vouchers for the money going to education, I'd send mine to KA instead of public schools. It would be money much better spent.
- boromi 7y agoDone.. wish them the best of luck
- dangoor 7y agoThank you!
- jason0597 7y agoI gave them about 4 pounds, the videos did help me and I feel like I have to give something back
- dangoor 7y agothanks!
- Joe_Ewing 7y agoAs an educator, this service is an invaluable supplemental resource for my kids. Especially now. Just donated without hesitation. I hope you all consider doing the same if you have the means.
- ibeckermayer 7y agoKhan Academy is a $40m/yr non-profit that provides better lessons than the multi billion $ government enforced Prussian-pedagogy propaganda centers (at infinite scale and for close to zero charge for the end user)
- dannysu 7y agoI've been a fan of Khan Academy since they were just some Youtube videos. You can find Khan Academy's past Form 990 online and I've been archiving them. Sal Khan made: 2008: ? ($0 revenue) 2009: ? 2010: $70,833 2011: $348,879 2012: $348,529 2013: $348,292 2014: $548,116 2015: $800,000 2016: $815,000 2017: $785,000 2018: $824,000 You can see that, just like a startup, the sacrifice in the beginning as a founder is real. Before 2010 his salary from KA was probably 0 or significantly less. $70K in 2010 was less than my new grad salary. The jump in 2011 to $350K is around how much a senior makes in HCOL areas now. There has been basically no adjustment in his earning for 4 years from 2015 to 2018. From the 990 forms, you can also get a sense of how much other people in the organization are being paid. I think all of them can command higher compensation elsewhere, but choose to work at KA because leveling the playing field for education is such a great mission. Sal Khan's compensation as a CEO is only ~3.x times of many senior positions in the organization. Not outrageous at all. In 2008's Form 990, Sal Khan wrote that KA is being used by 10,000 students daily. I don't know how many accounts, but growing from that to 71 million in 2018 is incredible. The impact to the world is undeniable.
- Mandatum 7y agoPlease register Khan Academy in other jurisdictions so I can claim tax breaks. Specifically: UK, Australia and Canada. Look to how Effective Altruism has setup its various entities around the world.