Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine | Hacker News Reader

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

newyorker.com

73 pointsCaiero19 comments

I remember reading this book in the early 1980s (it was in my school library and was outdated even then) when I had a home computer that I programmed in BASIC and laughed at it, because "That's not how computers work! You can't just ask them questions and have them give you the answer! You have to write a program to solve each problem!". But like the article mentions, this is quite similar to the way LLMs like ChatGPT work. And it even anticipated the problem that such chatbots may cause -- students using them to do their homework and not learning the material themselves.

I really liked the story when I read it. The computer was invented by an eccentric genius scientist character in a sci-fi setting, so its unrealism didn't matter, as I knew computers might be like that someday.

And now here we are!

My recollection of the plot is that Danny, Joe, and Irene had to solve all the problems themselves and store the answers for later retrieval.

And nobody in the book seemed to think that this wasn't cheating.

It was actually kind of vague as to what they did -- they talked about "feeding the textbook to the computer" which may have implied some sort of programming/presolving problems, but later they could literally (as in using voice) ask the computer to solve a math "word problem" and it could.

The book "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" was mentioned by one of the co-inventors of Usenet, Tom Truscott. "He decided it would be neat to have a homework machine." [1]

1. http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book-pdf/CHAPTER%2010.pdf

That's weird, if I open that link in Firefox (though with the HTTPS-only mode on), Tor Browser with default settings, and Ungoogled Chromium with default settings, it 404s (after going to a https link). If I directly wget on the http link it works though.

I also force all http to https using a proxy and I get a 404, too. If want to use https to retrieve the PDF, can use Wikiwix cache:

https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?rev_t=999999999...

PDF looks like crap anyway. Here's the original text-only version, available via https:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111215195747if_/http://www.col...

As http and https are separate origins, and this website might want to have secure cookies, I'm guessing that a while back they started moving to a more modern / secure web stack but had to figure out how to deal with legacy ~ URLs and made the decision not to break all of those URLs but instead just continue to serve them only as http and then have the rest of the website redirect to https. The reality is that, if you insist on redirecting http to https even when the underlying website doesn't want you to, you are going to end up with a broken experience sometimes and it frankly isn't notable.

Oh, how I loved this book (and the whole series) as a kid -- I probably read it for the first time in 1975 or 1976, when it was still science-fictional, and yet the personal computer revolution was just about to get underway.

Delightful books. Read them many times as a kid.

Also growing up fast is Danny Dunn: Invisible Boy, which prefigured the use of very small drones for nefarious purposes.

Hehe, I commented about this book a couple months ago, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194349 !

The only thing I mentioned that isn't in this far more comprehensive NYT piece is that a copy is available from archive.org at https://archive.org/details/dannydunnhomewor00will/page/136/... .

I had "Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine" as a child. I don't think it had a direct influence on my career in AI, but when I had a college job as a computer help desk consultant, I would keep it on my desk, and when a student would ask "This is a really strange question, but ..." and I had heard the same thing multiple times before, I would respond "Hmm, let me consult a reference manual", flip through "Danny" for a bit, and then give the answer that I already knew.

There’s an interesting line in the article towards the end about homework being a teacher’s way to exercise power over a student’s time when they are in their own home. I thought it was noticeable that the argument didn’t take the next logical step and observe that homework, in addition to demanding the child’s time, usurps the sovereignty of the parents in their own home by turning it into a workplace devoted to the school.

I wonder if and how parent’s perception of homework changed amidst the rise in remote work arrangements over the past few years.

This was just posted but got no comments despite being on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936076

I ordered the book because of that post and am looking forward to it!

I loved these as a 70s/80s kid - favourites being Time Traveller, Voice from Space and Invisible Boy. I’m surprised they all made it to the UK but all the children’s libraries seemed to have them.

Another good one is The Human use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener.

Followed by God & Golem, Inc. Wiener quite rightly directs us to consider the “should we” instead of simply the “could we”. Sadly it feels like we are on the hold my beer timeline.

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