Hacker News comments are assigned reading for UC Berkeley CS 10 course

...that is thankfully three years ago, modest enough (compared to what HN has become in recent years sigh) and no longer open for further comments.

What's ironic about your statement is that there are many in the US that clamor for "free" university education for "everyone" -- citing how it's done in Europe. However, like everything, there are tradeoffs and unintended consequences that go beyond the simplistic thoughts of the politically and economically naïve. The University of California system, in my amateur opinion is extremely good. In fact, the state university systems in most US states are all of pretty good quality. I spent a bit of time living near the University of Avignon (France) and, compared to a typical American community college, I was very suprised at how deficient the French university was. In France, university is "free" but as you said, you get what you pay for. Of course, there are exceptional European universities and there are terrible American universities, but overall, American university systems seem to be much better than the equivalent in "free" university countries.

They have really a lot of assistants! For comparison, this term I'll be a LA at the largest Swiss university in a class of ~140 students, we are 1 prof 2 TAs and 4 LAs and we give twice as much homework. Having taken that class myself, I really don't see why we would need more LAs. Unless you want to go the one-on-one hand holding route, also it's not a funding issue, since LAs are basically free. This is probably more due to a difference between the US and European teaching philosophy.

Just make sure you don't mix them up, I don't wish learning from YouTube comments even on my worst enemies.

Although today, well, yeah you can pretty much learn anything online and with ebooks if you have the focus and drive.

You are right, yet, I believe there's a lot of wisdom and value in the comments here. Quite often I tend to read the commends before the articles/posts themselves.

I think, in a meta sense, that this comment feels also really gratifying to read, there goes my upvote.

Out of interest (and having only read Siddhartha and The Glass-Bead Game), what would you say was his best novel?

Which reminds me of the Devil's Dictionary's definition of admiration:

  Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

See also "oscar bait"

>Oscar bait films are theatrical, a word which here means “keeps reminding you that you’re [in] the audience.” So don’t be fooled when the panegyrics pour out over a Spielberg flick about a dog that sniffed out its owner’s cancer and then flew to D.C. to campaign for healthcare reform. The actors are side characters, background dancers. The hero is the camera. It’s the one with the character growth, guilt and redemption, it’s the one for whom the score sings. Which means the hero is…

Obligatory upvote. I actually had never heard of n-gate and now, I feel, as if I can waste time more efficiently and humorously than ever before. I agree though, n-gate ought to be required reading!

Wow, this is fucking great!!! thx

This Internet thanks you for the reminder!

is it me or others also see that CAPTCHA and "loading" thing on main page?

http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ This is pure gold !

> Tesla finally launches a product as advertised. Hackernews, based on Youtube videos, reverse-engineers a spacecraft down to the metallurgical level and then sagely debates the maintenance characteristics of an aircraft that exited service before any of them learned to read and none of them have seen in operation, mostly derived from blog posts by people they're pretty sure knew a guy.

Oh yes, n gate is pretty awesome! Any clue who runs it?

I think even though n-gate provides another perspective on HN comments, some of it just a hateful rant that doesn't add any values itself.

I remember chuckled reading n-gate, until I read a rant about Monica[1] on n-gate. Monica, i think, is an awesome app to keep in touch with your best friends and family. N-gate said it's just an app that makes you creepy because you stalk your family and your best friend. Can't find the n-gate link though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

I don't see why. n-gate sometimes makes reasonable points, but not usually. Even when it does make a good point it is rarely of any help to anyone who wants to learn about something concrete like algorithms.

Scratch is a good introduction to programming concepts, regardless of age. How fortunate for your sixth grader; if such courses were common in earlier grades, a course like this could start with more challenging material.

This is not an EE class, it's an intro CS class, one that's not for those with prior knowledge who know they'll choose CS as a major. This kind of course can get new people interested, those who didn't think they'd like or could do CS. Even if they don't major in it, by taking this one course, they know more about an important part of what makes our world work.

CS50 at Harvard College [0] is also a very large, popular course that gets more people interested in CS as a major but is also useful to those who don't take another class. It also starts with Scratch though it switches to other languages very quickly and appears more challenging overall than this course.

[0] https://cs50.harvard.edu