Top all-time · #7425
Audrey Watters
Personal blog · 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.comaiculture
Audrey Watters writes Second Breakfast, a personal blog at 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com about ai and culture. Since 2024, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Audrey Watters' blog for writing on the history of education technology, personalized learning, and AI tutors. Commenters cite her posts and her book Teaching Machines as background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.
What Hacker News says?
Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning" , or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did. [0] https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5138/Teaching-MachinesThe-... [1] https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/
Comment linking /
on “Why Sal Khan't: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling”Submitted You Do Not, in Fact, Have to Hand It to Them as a story · 12 points
HN discussion> The computer. The Internet. Artificial intelligence. These are military technologies, first and foremost... [0] If you look at analytics or the internet or military-born technologies as applied to people in capitalism, you are but cattle to be utilized for your full value. In that way you can easily be mathematically whittled down to a statistic. More importantly so that these technologies are a way to control cat…
Comment linking /swords-into-plowshares/
on “A blog does not need “analytics””Submitted Of Course They Booed as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Working one-on-one with an expert personal tutor is generally regarded as the most efficient form of education [14] > [14] B. S. Bloom, "The 2 sigma problem: The search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring," Educational researcher 13, no. 6, 4-16 (1984). Now quoting https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-unleashed/ : > You know what was published 40 years ago (okay in 1986, not 1…
Comment linking /ai-unleashed/
on “Harvard says AI tutors are better than Harvard professors”Submitted The Plagiarism Machine as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Financial Nonsense as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Now Is the Time of Monsters as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Venture-Backed Conspiracies as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mark All as Read as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Broken Record as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agents versus Agency as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
