Hacker News Reader

Pertaining to academics: I think this would be a wonderful tool to help students learn algorithms better. A lot of times when I'm working on a programming challenge the number of example inputs and outputs is too low for me to understand the problem. A professor could publish the algorithm closed source so that students can input their test cases to understand the problem better.

View on HN

I half agree with you.

I can see why even a black box implementation of the program would help learning in some instances. However, beyond checking your solution against the 'correct' solution I don't see much value.

Pertaining to Algorithmia - many pages list little to no information (i'm ignoring the weka/opencv/already open source implementations just put into the site for shits sake) as to what is being done to compute the output. If I'm looking to learn, this is not the tool i would use.

This suggestion isn't solving any problem and is introducing new ones. How will the students pay once they spend their initial free credits, will they get a university account, or make new ones each time, who will manage that, so many problems. You certainly don't need a service that charges to do so, especially where the complete list of participants is available. A simple service that runs on university servers should be able to handle this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com