"Dear Sebastian, we quit, piss off. Best, Sam, Lee, and Jon."

Seriously, this is just ridiculous.

Is there anyone here that would actually put up with this ridiculous public shaming at all, let alone from a CEO that's off in Asia staying up "20 hours" to print flyers for one of his other companies, while he bitches that you're not reneging on your teaching commitments (which I would presume he knew about when he took you on...) so that you can meet his arbitrary (and from the sounds of it, utterly unrealistic) timeline?

Fuck guys like this. I know them, and I'm even friends with a couple, and sometimes they're decent people to hang out with and (on occasion, in the right contexts) even learn from. But I'd never dream of working for them, or even usually with them, because they tend to be neither very good businessmen nor good employers.

Bitching about your people being "jokers" is not the way to speed up a product's release: cutting features is, and that sometimes requires a CEO's involvement. Learn that lesson fast, or you'll be sorely disappointed in all your future projects, especially when you're just the guy-in-charge-of-negotiating-rates-for-business-cards...uh, I mean CEO.

For anyone with the Galaxy Nexus here, I'd like to point you in the direction of the pressureNET (https://market.android.com/details?id=ca.cumulonimbus.barome...) as you are in a new group of Android users that have barometers! I'm the author of this app, and we're building a crowd-sourced network of live-updating Android barometers in hopes that we can improve short-term weather prediction. The app is open source and free, of course! You can get the code at cumulonimbus.ca

</shamelessplug>

Edit: Most of our users are on the Xoom (and some other tablets). I have not been able to test on the Galaxy Nexus yet. If you have bug reports, please send them to software@cumulonimbus.ca

At first I thought this was posted by one of the email's recipients as a form of revenge on its douchebag author. Then, I realized it was posted by the author on his own blog... how embarrassing.

The whole letter/blog simultaneously reeks of desperation, egotism, conceit and condescension. He clearly craves validation and doesn't hesitate to dole it out to himself. "I picked you guys because you're the best! Now quit sucking and start being awesome like me! Money money money!"

Sad.

I get easily excited about education-related topics so I may be over-reacting, but I think these classes will jump-start an educational revolution, and that people will start to fully appreciate just how inefficient traditional teaching methods are.

Some people like to say that this is nothing new because video lectures were posted on the internet for several years now (for example MIT Open Courseware etc.), but I think this misses the point entirely. There is a huge difference between low-quality video/audio recording of a prof mumbling for an hour and post-processed, perfected snippets of videos presented in a coherent fashion, and most importantly with supplementary materials that encourage people to actually apply their knowledge and get feedback. In addition, the fact that many people take the class at the same time also enhances the experience for everyone, and we've seen study groups form everywhere around internet.

Full disclosure, by the way, I'm a CS PhD student at Stanford and I am a (voluntary) co-creator of the programming assignments for the current ML class. It is a lot of work, but the way I see it, we only have to put great assignments together a single time, and thousands of people can enjoy them and benefit from them for years and years to come. That is what I call time well spent.

I hope all these classes go well, and I'm looking forward to telling my kids about what education used to be like in the old days. I have a feeling that they'll find it hard to believe me.

Stop being a joker! Don't make excuses! Everyone has reasons! Fuck reasons!

Also, I can't do it, because I'm otherwise engaged.

Can someone provide me some concise explanation as to what Sebastian Marshall has actually done - outside of lots of blog posts, Hacker news posts, and travel?