They are the biggest scam in India capitalizing on FOMO of Indian parents. They charge heaftily (more than $2000) to teach app development (using Scratch, Firebase etc.). Their staff is poorly paid and just reads off scripts. Their staff doesn't know even the basics of CS (as evidenced in this video: https://youtu.be/1Y21eSn_zSM?t=64, when the student asks how files are stored in Cloud Storage, she says the files are stored in real clouds. There's another where the teacher can't tell the difference between Java and Javascript)
Their ads are highly misleading and straight up false with made up names of students who earned millions of dollars in salary while their fellow peers are playing Cricket. (https://in.news.yahoo.com/wolf-gupta-byju-whitehat-jr-090945...). You can imagine the effect this will have parents (especially in India where parents are known be super competitive).
This guy, Pradeep Poonia, has been actively campaigning against them. His youtube channels were taken down, Quora account was taken down, Twitter, even Reddit (if i'm not wrong). His current youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdv4_YNXrIQtGHSVXnY-1mg) has lot of videos on this.
He especially has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN1DOE7GoYw) where he accessed their internal slack (shady I know, but even Whitehat Jr is also not playing fair) and showed their organized effort into suppressing online dissent by fake twitter accounts, trolling etc.
WhiteHatJr was recently acquired by another firm Byju's (whose CEO is the plaintiff in this lawsuit) that also does the same thing, but for entire school curriculum.
In a world, where there is Khan Academy, they sell their subpar product at a very high price, exploiting Indian parents' ignorance and willingness to do anything for their kids education.
Some years ago, when I started getting into machine learning, I couldn't tell he is a fraud. Considering that just before he was broadly exposed as a fraudster, he was invited by the European Space Agency (ESA) to give a talk, I was in good company. I think the only reason he got exposed is because he started making stupidly bold claims, attributing high-profile original research to himself. If it weren't for this, he would probably still be accepted by the mainstream because the case a few experts could make against him wouldn't be strong enough.
My point is: it is hard to see what is fraud and what isn't. If the ESA can't tell the difference, how can average parents?
Not just the ESA, India's most prestigious college IIT-Bombay also fell for him. The roster usually includes folks like Stroustrup, Vint Cerf etc & then a couple years ago 'Siraj Raval' of all the people on earth.
Check the reviewer's twitter. He has shared slack threads where the marketing Execs ask the entire channel to brigade & report his tweets/linkedin posts/YouTube videos without any copyrighted content as well.
WhiteHat Jr. abuses the DMCA and copyright policies to take down accounts and content. There was this article [1] where they detailed it really well (its a long article and requires login)
> It seems that fairly early on, WhiteHat Jr figured out that it can create temporary nuisance for everyone by reporting their video as a copyright or trademark infringement. Which is why after say, 15-30 days, several of Poonia’s videos were reinstated, after having been taken down.
Doesn't seem so, it's just a PR/Legal team with a lot more money & head in the ground attitude towards people seeing through their lies & reporting it.
I have fond memories of a visit to a children’s hostel in Hyderabad, India in 2006, and a rote answer they were taught in their textbooks:
“Why is a computer called a number cruncher?”
“A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.”
Dad took the children to the office where there was a computer and showed them that it had no teeth.
I’m glad to say that the children don’t go to that school any more, and that I haven’t found such egregious errors in textbooks for any subject more recently (I’m over there again at present), and there is less rote in their education than there was, though still more than is ideal as it’s hard when the teachers and students are all used to that method.
There are well designed, carefully planned and high quality textbooks by NCERT, which is part of the school board.
But many students and parents don't prefer them. There is a proliferation of 'cut-to-the-chase' guidebooks (similar to Cliffnotes but much much worse) that they use to cram before the exam. What you describe is very likely one of these.
a major problem is that teachers are using these "crambooks" too when setting exam questions so basically you get a leg up when you study from them vs the official coursebooks.
you'll literally see the same questions there so obv it's easier to study from that than from the coursebooks
source: experienced this in my math classes in the CBSE board of education from india
a friend of my parents in Bombay changed his kid's school because not only did the teacher set homework and tests from the guidebooks, but would not accept any other answer than what the book supplied. original work was marked wrong.
OT, so briefly: I'm interested in the possibility of applying much greater than usual domain expertise to create science education content which is more correct and insightful, focused on integrated transferable understanding. An unresolved challenge is how to make such available in a form and setting that actually gets it used. A quick check of the NCERT science textbooks turns up error and opportunity for improvement. So, is there some setting in which one might say "for NCERT class foo, book Science, chapter bar, here is a free correcting-and-extending supplement", and potentially see significant use? Tnx...
Sure, this will be great. Please do not assume that NCERT textbook writers are careless tyros - they include some of the best educators in India who have spent time in improving presentation of material - of course, there may be errors and gaps, and there is always scope for improvement. (For example, Fields Medallists like Manjul Bharghava are at least peripherally interested (1))
If you are earnest, you can contact people in the math and science community in India. This will mean substantially thorough vetting, because the corrections will themselves have to be checked across multiple sources for consistency. (The worst examples are in Chemistry. As you keep digging, you will start finding that B.Sc. material contradicts High School material, and M.Sc. material confirms the High School material. None of these are "incorrect", it is a matter of how deep one wants to go.)
A good place to start will be to look at the list of editors listed inside the textbook, look up their webpages and try them one after the other.
Thanks! Less briefly (the front page having moved on)...
> tyros [...] best educators
How to explain... The publisher of a cell biology tome of a textbook, praised their hundred-ish authors, and I half-seriously quipped, "Great! And how many for the second page?" Or... It seems every decade or so, some astronomy professor emeritus goes around suggesting it's embarrassing that in a field with an unusual focus on introductory textbooks, mostly authored by astronomy professors, the coverage of what color the Sun is, is so incoherent, that even most first-tier astronomy graduate students have it wrong. Despite being trivially explainable to a 5-year old. Hasn't changed yet. I chatted with a leading astronomy education researcher and educator, and my impression was they'd given up on near-term large-scale change. Or... Can one see an atomic nucleus with naked eye? To get the correct, rather than the 'almost always correct but not here' answer, and learn of a photo, you need someone with a research focus on nucleus dynamics. It's a small subfield, and if MIT has anyone, I didn't easily find them. So my quip is "MIT in isolation lacks the physics domain expertise to easily create an awesome childrens' picture book about atoms".
My suggestion is that transformatively better science education content is possible, but creating it would seemingly require collaboration on a scope more similar to that of the original science research, than of current informal artisanal handicraft authorship with a smattering of science education research.
And that's before hitting bottlenecks like a "yeah, that would be an insightful way to teach this topic... but my students are taking the medical school entrance exam soon, and it only tests for superficial understanding here, and our time together is limited, so I'd be doing my students a disservice if I didn't focus on the what they need for the test, lest they're years of dreams and effort go for naught".
> try them [editors] one after the other
A (US) OER astronomy text has a nice online ticket database for errata. The text did the usual getting the color of the Sun wrong. Folks pointed that out. It received a common remedy - just enough of a tweak that if you already know the correct answer, you can closely read the unclear text as not being wrong. But with no hope at all that students are getting it. Last I saw, the ticket was, despite criticism, tagged 'good enough, WONTFIX'.
So there are a lot of needles I can't move, or are not worth my pushing on.
Now maybe there's some part of the Indian education community with a greater emphasis than these, on non-rote non-test deep transferable understanding of the physical world? I'd love to hear of it.
But my current thought is to target early primary with supplemental material. Teaching things far earlier than they're usually taught (escaping teaching to tests), and better enough that the misconceptions avoided can pay for the effort cost.
In the US, parts of the homeschooling community might be receptive. One tactic might be to create a supplement for a text already in widespread use. The mention of NCERT texts, had me wondering if there was somewhere one might say fruitfully drop a pdf, "Oh, you're using NCERT's solar system intro? Yeah, it has the color of the Sun wrong. It will be easier for you to understand light and color if we fix that - here you go... Oh, and that bit about planetary heat coming from the Sun? Well, ok, but it's more understandable if we explicitly mention cold space, and here's a nice example of ...".
> Chemistry [...] contradicts
Yeah. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. A fun US state curriculum spec required teaching both "atoms are conserved by chemical reactions&...
Huh, until now I've only ever thought of "number cruncher" as a euphemism for "processes numbers rapidly like a creature crunching through food".
But, now you say this ... early 'computers' (eg adding machines) of course did have teeth (they used mechanical gears) and would literally be 'number crunchers' and so would fit a description of "crunches numbers with it's teeth" as a literal term.
Now, a number cruncher in UK English is used to refer to a person, like an accountant: I suppose in the past they crunched numbers using mathematical machines (analogue calculators).
Also, of note is that originally a 'computer' was a job role of someone operating a mathematical machine.
Obviously then a 'computer' became the machine, and it still 'crunched numbers' except it did it silently using transistors.
It sounds like that textbook was not wrong but perhaps just needed explanation.
Third grade textbooks in late 90s in Kochi, India teach us that a CPU has an Arithemetic Logic Unit and a Control Unit. A light pen is an input device that can be held againt a Video Display Unit. They repeat this for a few years.
FWIW. Since you've mentioned Byju's... my Indian friend here informed me that they have a nexus with the Google Playstore team too and bypassing all Playstore policies. For instance, they release a free app without any in-app purchase; but after some time, they'll lock the app and will call the parents to pay 50k rupees.
yup, BYJU is getting CRAZY amounts of support in India and no major newspaper questions their claims.
there are a lot of conspiracy theories about why it is so - some people say it is coz they have political support
Edit: just a brand ambassador. He's still complicit in misleading millions of Indian kids.
Edit2: the techcrunch article shows a picture of Karan Bajaj (WhiteHatJr founder) with Baba Ramdev, so it's very possible that they have political backing.
Yeah I am from India. I think we could have guessed this is the ultimate stage of IIT JEE rat race that's getting more and more aggressive over some years.
While I don't subscribe to all ideologies of socialism, I can only think of free high-quality education by government as a solution to this aggressive game-the-system and FOMO mentality so deep rooted here.
For context I studied in Rural Governement schools till 10th and even after that I didn't have to pay 20% of what an average Urban "Middle class" peer pays for education. The education quality is not much different. Only when I had to study engineering I came across stupid expensive not-worth-the-cost education.
A lot of the stress associated with IIT JEE stems from aggressive fear based propaganda by coaching classes. Things were much more laid back in the 90s, pre-Kota mania. Fear sells. They make it sound as though if you are not in an IIT, your life will be a flaming wreck.
This is far from the case, even if you confine yourself to the tech sector.
>I can only think of free high-quality education by government as a solution to this aggressive game-the-system and FOMO mentality so deep rooted here.
I am also from India and I am really perplexed and pained by this. Why is it not possible to have a genuine business catering to the same market but with actually good content and trained teachers? If nothing else, WhiteHat Jr has demonstrated that there IS a market and people are willing to pay for educational content. A genuine company might take more time to succeed, but they will eventually win the war, right?
Why are we perennially doomed to be stuck with either scammy companies like these or the mai-baap government doing everything under the sun? The free market seems to be able to solve these problems in other countries. What makes India so unique?
The sheer population in competition I guess, gaming the system is almost always the way to win. This is true everywhere but more pronounced in India, because we have very large number of people very eager to game the process. Maybe it's a culture thing, or just the effect of competition and FOMO, idk. (The coaching mania so fierce in North is less aggressive in South)
When I was studying K-12 or PUC or whatever it's called, Byju's (the company that acquired WJR) was doing most aggressive promotions. There were a few similar education startups putting genuine effort but way less aggressive promotion. I liked the content of one of those startups called Toppr. I never went to purchase anything, tbh (I was a rural student), but the quality doesn't necessarily win.
The entire coaching ecosystem is also like this. They teach lot of formulae and shortcuts. These years success in IIT-JEE is a combination of super hard work and having access to highly expensive coaching material. (Tbh, as a rural student, I dropped the dreams of getting into one of these "good" institutes halfway because of this).
Whitehat JR is just misusing FOMO of urban Indian parents. I don't think pushing programming on children of 7-8 years is worth it. Instead it needs to be properly taught at high-school level.
EdTech in India is a predatory environment midwived by unscrupulous VCs. Please raise your against it if you can. And this is not an Indian problem. These companies are making their way to US and worldwide.
Yep WhiteHat JR has started expanding to the Phillipines as well, where they're continuing their MO of targetting hapless parents and children with blatantly false advertising
Instead of refuting the claims with evidence, this company prefers to take down content which criticizes them. Clearly, they have no leg to stand on and have resorted to bullying.
Exactly! If you look at their employee Twitter feeds, it is littered with under 18 kids who somehow have twitter accounts & are tweeting the same generic content linking back to their websites.
Also questionable is internal slack screenshots being shared of harassing female interviewees, mass reporting critical tweets & other content across YT & LinkedIn.
EdTech in India is a huge mess. My mom was the principal of a high school for about 12 years and has first hand knowledge of the kind of overt corruption companies engage in to get a school contract signed. It is a huge and booming market and everyone wants to cash in through the shortest route possible - cheat and bribe.
I understand. That’s isomorphic with accusing Google of employing a 9-year-old, which might suggest a path to investigate with the aim of getting Google to issue an admittance or a categorical denial of this outlandish claim.
It's gonna get worse. Criminal Defamation laws in India put the onus on the defendant (Poonia, dont know legal terms) to show that he did not defame the company, or to show that he did it in interest of public good. They are skewed towards the company or the person alleging defamation. In other countries its the person alleging that needs to prove that he was defamed unfairly.
There are various cases where the onus is on book writer or publisher to show the intent was good faith and not defamation. Look at the case of The Wire v Arnab Goswami a couple of years back, or even the current Priya Ramani case. This is not a well known fact and thats what makes life difficult in India.
> Going through the provisions of Section 499, it is clear that the accused has to not only prove that his/her statement is true but also made in the ‘public interest’, a phrase that is as vague as they come.
One mistake I made when i wrote this was that I wasnt aware if this is a Civil Defamation or a Criminal defamation. Frankly, I dont know the difference even now, just that these two exist as a sheer legacy of British laws and govt never moved to correct them.
As I mentioned in another thread, these EdTech companies from India seem to have a nexus with Google. My friend tells me that Google India is very aggressive on advertising and for a decent budget they'll bend any policies.
Yeah, I used to live in a shared accommodation with many of their newly hired Civil Engineers for sales/business development roles. They had to close a family at the end of the day as part of their target, usually in the same neighbourhood. All of them got fed up & left en-masse in a few months.
Big ad companies and media houses need to put pressure against false advertisement. I have not seen a single article by any indian newspaper on this topic.
Offtopic-I would like this to blow up disproportionately because the only way whitehatjr is gonna backoff is because of a media backlash
Their claims are absolutely false as witnessed by the numerous Slack screenshots. When I first came across their ads, I dismissed them as scammy and even reported a few. Scams are common place everywhere but they're particularly vicious in India because parents will fork over their life savings for securing their child's future.
If there is actual an actual court case against WhiteHat Jr, they will likely tone down their scammy ads and might get slapped with a bit of fine and life will go on.
The problem is wider with such startups using money to copyright strike or takedown critical content. They abused Content ID to take down valid & legal use of copyrighted content in reviews as well.
So typical that all the social media platforms are complicit in their little scheme. All of them are happy to silence this guy who is pointing out blatant fraud and corruption without a second thought. Broken copyright system once again a major player.
Why do we allow these massively profitable companies get away with this crap?
A company which didn't innovate their product and used MIT's Scratch. Couldn't even innovate on their name/brand and used Scratch Jr's branding is using copyright notices to stop the truth. Normal 2020 for India.
It teaches coding to kids of age 6 charging upto 1500$ for 100 clases.
To sum up, this is very high amount from any standar, parents take loan to fund this. Second, they use black hat marketing tactics claiming 10year old student now earns million of dollars.
I'm not sure if there tactics are even legal. Platforms like FB, Google should fact-check on ads.
Seriously how can you believe a kid is earning 10mn$ a year. And has no mention anywhere on the web.
The original post reads "he didn't study at WhiteHatJr". I think it was a satire, as I found it was a pretty funny remark. I believe you are pointing your finger at the wrong person.
no. they dont even try. i heard recently that byjus had "done a promotion" at a relative kids' school last year and the only reason they didnt go for it is because his father is not exactly weathly.
the same bs. asking children over the top questions then showing them pretty animations and promising the stars.
this whitehat is another level of disgusting.
i have relatives who i have been slowly teaching scratch, arduino, even a 3 year old who does gcompris and they can now use a computer. will that give them a job? absolutely not. will it help them get a tiny bit interested in computers? yes most definitely.
there can be paid alternatives taught by actual harvard professors but the genius of khan academy is that its the very best in education, anywhere in the world at a staggering cost of zero. no paid offering can beat that
The truth is much worse than this suggests: This recent article in The Morning Context gives a lot more detail as to why this company is absolutely unethical: https://themorningcontext.com/indias-whitehatjr-is-startup-h... [Requires sign in to read unfortunately]
WhiteHat Jr. is the sleaziest company to emerge from India's start-up ecosystem. They have used underhanded and unethical means to take down fair criticism online. They have used misleading and outright false advertising to sell their product to parents.
I can only hope that people wake up to how evil this company is.
The apparent success that WhiteHat enjoyed with a $300 million exit within 18 months of founding has unfortunately inspired the current generation of entrepreneurs in India to also try their hands in the edtech space over everything else.
Most of them however don't know the scale of the fraud and unimaginably shady marketing and operating practices WhiteHat engaged in to reach that valuation.
Recent post by the Pradeep Poonia showing proof how fake their ads are. There is a slack screenshot posted where the employees (including their CEO) talking about creating a fake app that they advertise as an app made by a 13 yo kid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/jyt7et/whitehatjr_fi...
299 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadTheir ads are highly misleading and straight up false with made up names of students who earned millions of dollars in salary while their fellow peers are playing Cricket. (https://in.news.yahoo.com/wolf-gupta-byju-whitehat-jr-090945...). You can imagine the effect this will have parents (especially in India where parents are known be super competitive).
This guy, Pradeep Poonia, has been actively campaigning against them. His youtube channels were taken down, Quora account was taken down, Twitter, even Reddit (if i'm not wrong). His current youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdv4_YNXrIQtGHSVXnY-1mg) has lot of videos on this.
He especially has a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN1DOE7GoYw) where he accessed their internal slack (shady I know, but even Whitehat Jr is also not playing fair) and showed their organized effort into suppressing online dissent by fake twitter accounts, trolling etc.
WhiteHatJr was recently acquired by another firm Byju's (whose CEO is the plaintiff in this lawsuit) that also does the same thing, but for entire school curriculum.
In a world, where there is Khan Academy, they sell their subpar product at a very high price, exploiting Indian parents' ignorance and willingness to do anything for their kids education.
Some years ago, when I started getting into machine learning, I couldn't tell he is a fraud. Considering that just before he was broadly exposed as a fraudster, he was invited by the European Space Agency (ESA) to give a talk, I was in good company. I think the only reason he got exposed is because he started making stupidly bold claims, attributing high-profile original research to himself. If it weren't for this, he would probably still be accepted by the mainstream because the case a few experts could make against him wouldn't be strong enough.
My point is: it is hard to see what is fraud and what isn't. If the ESA can't tell the difference, how can average parents?
https://www.sage-health.org/
https://www.sage-health.org/about-us/
https://twitter.com/whiteHatSnr/
(A quick sidenote: funny he took the handle "whiteHatSnr")
> It seems that fairly early on, WhiteHat Jr figured out that it can create temporary nuisance for everyone by reporting their video as a copyright or trademark infringement. Which is why after say, 15-30 days, several of Poonia’s videos were reinstated, after having been taken down.
[1] https://themorningcontext.com/indias-whitehatjr-is-startup-h...
I have fond memories of a visit to a children’s hostel in Hyderabad, India in 2006, and a rote answer they were taught in their textbooks:
“Why is a computer called a number cruncher?”
“A computer is called a number cruncher because it crunches numbers with its teeth.”
Dad took the children to the office where there was a computer and showed them that it had no teeth.
I’m glad to say that the children don’t go to that school any more, and that I haven’t found such egregious errors in textbooks for any subject more recently (I’m over there again at present), and there is less rote in their education than there was, though still more than is ideal as it’s hard when the teachers and students are all used to that method.
But many students and parents don't prefer them. There is a proliferation of 'cut-to-the-chase' guidebooks (similar to Cliffnotes but much much worse) that they use to cram before the exam. What you describe is very likely one of these.
The questions are usually from recent question papers. So the guidebook author just makes stuff up for the answers.
Ignorance is quite refreshing, if not actually bliss.
Scammmers get scammed.
source: experienced this in my math classes in the CBSE board of education from india
If you are earnest, you can contact people in the math and science community in India. This will mean substantially thorough vetting, because the corrections will themselves have to be checked across multiple sources for consistency. (The worst examples are in Chemistry. As you keep digging, you will start finding that B.Sc. material contradicts High School material, and M.Sc. material confirms the High School material. None of these are "incorrect", it is a matter of how deep one wants to go.)
A good place to start will be to look at the list of editors listed inside the textbook, look up their webpages and try them one after the other.
(1) https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/shikshak-parv/TwoDaysConclaveDetail...
> tyros [...] best educators
How to explain... The publisher of a cell biology tome of a textbook, praised their hundred-ish authors, and I half-seriously quipped, "Great! And how many for the second page?" Or... It seems every decade or so, some astronomy professor emeritus goes around suggesting it's embarrassing that in a field with an unusual focus on introductory textbooks, mostly authored by astronomy professors, the coverage of what color the Sun is, is so incoherent, that even most first-tier astronomy graduate students have it wrong. Despite being trivially explainable to a 5-year old. Hasn't changed yet. I chatted with a leading astronomy education researcher and educator, and my impression was they'd given up on near-term large-scale change. Or... Can one see an atomic nucleus with naked eye? To get the correct, rather than the 'almost always correct but not here' answer, and learn of a photo, you need someone with a research focus on nucleus dynamics. It's a small subfield, and if MIT has anyone, I didn't easily find them. So my quip is "MIT in isolation lacks the physics domain expertise to easily create an awesome childrens' picture book about atoms".
My suggestion is that transformatively better science education content is possible, but creating it would seemingly require collaboration on a scope more similar to that of the original science research, than of current informal artisanal handicraft authorship with a smattering of science education research.
And that's before hitting bottlenecks like a "yeah, that would be an insightful way to teach this topic... but my students are taking the medical school entrance exam soon, and it only tests for superficial understanding here, and our time together is limited, so I'd be doing my students a disservice if I didn't focus on the what they need for the test, lest they're years of dreams and effort go for naught".
> try them [editors] one after the other
A (US) OER astronomy text has a nice online ticket database for errata. The text did the usual getting the color of the Sun wrong. Folks pointed that out. It received a common remedy - just enough of a tweak that if you already know the correct answer, you can closely read the unclear text as not being wrong. But with no hope at all that students are getting it. Last I saw, the ticket was, despite criticism, tagged 'good enough, WONTFIX'.
So there are a lot of needles I can't move, or are not worth my pushing on.
Now maybe there's some part of the Indian education community with a greater emphasis than these, on non-rote non-test deep transferable understanding of the physical world? I'd love to hear of it.
But my current thought is to target early primary with supplemental material. Teaching things far earlier than they're usually taught (escaping teaching to tests), and better enough that the misconceptions avoided can pay for the effort cost.
In the US, parts of the homeschooling community might be receptive. One tactic might be to create a supplement for a text already in widespread use. The mention of NCERT texts, had me wondering if there was somewhere one might say fruitfully drop a pdf, "Oh, you're using NCERT's solar system intro? Yeah, it has the color of the Sun wrong. It will be easier for you to understand light and color if we fix that - here you go... Oh, and that bit about planetary heat coming from the Sun? Well, ok, but it's more understandable if we explicitly mention cold space, and here's a nice example of ...".
> Chemistry [...] contradicts
Yeah. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions. A fun US state curriculum spec required teaching both "atoms are conserved by chemical reactions&...
But, now you say this ... early 'computers' (eg adding machines) of course did have teeth (they used mechanical gears) and would literally be 'number crunchers' and so would fit a description of "crunches numbers with it's teeth" as a literal term.
Now, a number cruncher in UK English is used to refer to a person, like an accountant: I suppose in the past they crunched numbers using mathematical machines (analogue calculators).
Also, of note is that originally a 'computer' was a job role of someone operating a mathematical machine.
Obviously then a 'computer' became the machine, and it still 'crunched numbers' except it did it silently using transistors.
It sounds like that textbook was not wrong but perhaps just needed explanation.
Edit: just a brand ambassador. He's still complicit in misleading millions of Indian kids.
Edit2: the techcrunch article shows a picture of Karan Bajaj (WhiteHatJr founder) with Baba Ramdev, so it's very possible that they have political backing.
I'll take the Chinese Baijiu over Byju's any day.
While I don't subscribe to all ideologies of socialism, I can only think of free high-quality education by government as a solution to this aggressive game-the-system and FOMO mentality so deep rooted here.
For context I studied in Rural Governement schools till 10th and even after that I didn't have to pay 20% of what an average Urban "Middle class" peer pays for education. The education quality is not much different. Only when I had to study engineering I came across stupid expensive not-worth-the-cost education.
This is far from the case, even if you confine yourself to the tech sector.
I am also from India and I am really perplexed and pained by this. Why is it not possible to have a genuine business catering to the same market but with actually good content and trained teachers? If nothing else, WhiteHat Jr has demonstrated that there IS a market and people are willing to pay for educational content. A genuine company might take more time to succeed, but they will eventually win the war, right?
Why are we perennially doomed to be stuck with either scammy companies like these or the mai-baap government doing everything under the sun? The free market seems to be able to solve these problems in other countries. What makes India so unique?
The sheer population in competition I guess, gaming the system is almost always the way to win. This is true everywhere but more pronounced in India, because we have very large number of people very eager to game the process. Maybe it's a culture thing, or just the effect of competition and FOMO, idk. (The coaching mania so fierce in North is less aggressive in South)
When I was studying K-12 or PUC or whatever it's called, Byju's (the company that acquired WJR) was doing most aggressive promotions. There were a few similar education startups putting genuine effort but way less aggressive promotion. I liked the content of one of those startups called Toppr. I never went to purchase anything, tbh (I was a rural student), but the quality doesn't necessarily win.
The entire coaching ecosystem is also like this. They teach lot of formulae and shortcuts. These years success in IIT-JEE is a combination of super hard work and having access to highly expensive coaching material. (Tbh, as a rural student, I dropped the dreams of getting into one of these "good" institutes halfway because of this).
Whitehat JR is just misusing FOMO of urban Indian parents. I don't think pushing programming on children of 7-8 years is worth it. Instead it needs to be properly taught at high-school level.
Also questionable is internal slack screenshots being shared of harassing female interviewees, mass reporting critical tweets & other content across YT & LinkedIn.
Something different would need to be done about the bad-faith takedowns and coordinated harassment, however.
https://twitter.com/whiteHatSnr/status/1330455721897443329/p...
Shame on Whitehatjr and on Byju's. This is outright fraud.
WhiteHatJr's ads are complete BS. They advertise that a 9 year old kid (wolf gupta, yes that is apparently his real name) got a job at Google
Afaik this is incorrect. Could you please give a source. I just read a tweet by anirudhha malapani too that the onus is on whitehat.
> Going through the provisions of Section 499, it is clear that the accused has to not only prove that his/her statement is true but also made in the ‘public interest’, a phrase that is as vague as they come.
[1] https://www.thebetterindia.com/162334/criminal-defamation-in...
One mistake I made when i wrote this was that I wasnt aware if this is a Civil Defamation or a Criminal defamation. Frankly, I dont know the difference even now, just that these two exist as a sheer legacy of British laws and govt never moved to correct them.
Coincidence?
Is n’t 18 the legal age to be employed in the corporate world?
Unfortunately any dissent is limited to social media as Indian media will peddle whatever the advertisers/government want them to say.
A good writeup by Forbes.
Big ad companies and media houses need to put pressure against false advertisement. I have not seen a single article by any indian newspaper on this topic.
Offtopic-I would like this to blow up disproportionately because the only way whitehatjr is gonna backoff is because of a media backlash
https://thetechportal.com/2020/10/28/byjus-owned-whitehat-jr...
https://inc42.com/buzz/whitehat-jrs-ceo-files-2-6-mn-defamat...
Anyone know of anything better?
Lawyers of HN, does this not backfire in legal settings for false advertising? They are literally accepting lying
If there is actual an actual court case against WhiteHat Jr, they will likely tone down their scammy ads and might get slapped with a bit of fine and life will go on.
Why do we allow these massively profitable companies get away with this crap?
Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Tencent, Sequoia Capital India, Sofina, Verlinvest, Owl Ventures, Naspers Ventures and others.
It teaches coding to kids of age 6 charging upto 1500$ for 100 clases.
To sum up, this is very high amount from any standar, parents take loan to fund this. Second, they use black hat marketing tactics claiming 10year old student now earns million of dollars.
I'm not sure if there tactics are even legal. Platforms like FB, Google should fact-check on ads.
Seriously how can you believe a kid is earning 10mn$ a year. And has no mention anywhere on the web.
i pre-emptively apologise, don't sue me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
project website: www.ubuntuunity.org
I, by no means support such sleazy company.
the same bs. asking children over the top questions then showing them pretty animations and promising the stars.
this whitehat is another level of disgusting.
i have relatives who i have been slowly teaching scratch, arduino, even a 3 year old who does gcompris and they can now use a computer. will that give them a job? absolutely not. will it help them get a tiny bit interested in computers? yes most definitely.
https://themorningcontext.com/indias-whitehatjr-is-startup-h...
(behind paywall)
WhiteHat Jr. is the sleaziest company to emerge from India's start-up ecosystem. They have used underhanded and unethical means to take down fair criticism online. They have used misleading and outright false advertising to sell their product to parents.
I can only hope that people wake up to how evil this company is.
Most of them however don't know the scale of the fraud and unimaginably shady marketing and operating practices WhiteHat engaged in to reach that valuation.