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Comment by vikp | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone:

Very exciting to see this posted here.

I'm the maker of dataquest. I'm a self-taught data scientist/coder, and I wanted an easier way for people to get into the field.

I've been working on it for the past three months, and I'm really excited to see people learning with it.

I chose to teach python because it's one of the best first languages to learn, it's useful outside of data science, and a lot of production data science work is now done in python.

It's missing advanced content, but I'm working on it. Let me know if I can help, or answer any questions!

Vik

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Been having a play and it looks good, although the way that variable assignment is referred to in some of the problems feels inconsistent and is sometimes confusing. In some problems you talk about the variable first and the value second, and in others the value first and variable second.

Also it really pains me to see you recommending using a for loop to count list members when there's a perfectly good len function there to do it for you. I can understand the desire to do it from a fundamentals point of view, but it feels overcomplicated in the crime mission.

Edit: Is it ok to like the video bits but hate then stylus? It feels like an actual whiteboard or something that drew less artificial (and noisy) lines would be friendlier. The narration is good :)

It's really hard to approach problems from the perspective of a beginner. I did some testing around using "magic" functions like len vs building intuition, and it's really important to understand how the things are working. Otherwise, you can't really generalize the concept easily.

I'll look into the variable assignments more. Making content has been way harder than I imagined it would be.

I think I need a better graphics tablet -- I got a cheap refurbished one, and it lags a lot.

Feedback: the text of the left hand-side panel (instruction area) is light-gray and too thin to be readable on my 14'' screen, I had to play with the console to fix this.

You may benefit from staying away of fashionable design trends and focus on usability.

Otherwise thanks for setting this source up, looks great (and very usable besides the problem noted above).

This looks absolutely beautiful. Will there be a way for users to create and add missions of their own?

Thanks! That's a great idea, and would be good to build out in the medium term.

Right now, content is the main bottleneck, and I'd love some help. If anyone is interested in talking, shoot me an email (vik@dataquest.io).

It's great that you're doing this. I'm really thankful.

In the ...tooltip there's this text

> Hey there, Welcome to DataQuest! If you’ve got any questions or feedba…

I have no idea how to expand that. I can't scroll within it and clicking on it doesn't expand it.

Strange, you should be able to click on it to expand. I'll look into it.

Thanks for building a great resource.

This looks great vik! Good work!

Would you kindly share what resources you used to teach yourself data science?

Too long of a list to post here, but I did write a blog post about it a while ago. I need to update it, but these are still relevant: http://www.vikparuchuri.com/blog/resources-for-learning-stat... .

This looks great, vik.

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