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Comment by trhtrsh | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that every unit of an undergraduate CS curriculum needs to be an HN submission.

It's a bit silly to hear people way that college curriculum is irrelevant and then spend a drawn out period of time cobbling together a college curriculum.

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The perceived hypocrisy vanishes once you remember that not everyone else on HN is the same person. (And as to your actual point: zero-knowledge proofs are interesting, and that's all the excuse that an interesting topic ever needs.)

Also, this community has a lot of smart people with different expertise areas. That means that my basic knowledge of 0knowledge proofs, or other "basic" topic will most likely be heavily augmented when the experts start talking about the deep bits that aren't covered in "cool crypto primitives 101".

The reason people say college is irrelevant is precisely because you can cobble together the curriculum yourself. Obviously there are a lot of complicated benefits and costs both ways that people can debate, but it's not obviously silly.

Kind of. The reason college is usually touted as irrelevant is because while a lot of this type of thing is interesting and to some it is necessary knowledge, most people don't need to know most of the material. (Some of HN may find zero-knowledge proofs interesting, a few might even need to know it, and the vast majority doesn't really care a whole lot. If everyone here was forced to read about it, there would probably be whining and gnashing of teeth.)

The support for that position is because of what you said. Namely, if you find yourself needing it later in life you can just look it up. Because you can stitch together the curriculum when needed, doing it all up front isn't necessary. (So goes the argument; but personally I think it's somewhat short-sighted in some ways.)

The "stitch together the curriculum when needed" argument ignores the possibility that there is significant value to learning an interrelated body of knowledge, even several such interrelated bodies of knowledge, including their relationships to each other, at the same time. Education does not merely consist of acquiring a disarticulated set of independent factoids.

Well, I'm an engineer, so I had never heard of it before and thought it was incredibly interesting.

Gives you idea about demographics of HN readers

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