Hacker News Reader

Yea, that would have stumped me, expecting a trick/trap. What if my birthday is tomorrow? By the time my teacher checks it, it's wrong. "Your birth year" would have prevented that.

This is a problem I have with certain parts of computer science and math education. Everything is encouraged to be exact, then, suddenly, variable names are used inconsistently, niche cases are ignored arbitrarily and explained with essentially referring to "common sense".

View on HN

It's graded immediately (automatically), so there wouldn't be any issues. Further, the text of the problem makes it clear that I'm not actually going to check their age - they can return any valid number (although it does check >0 and <100, perhaps discriminatorily). It would be a little invasive to their privacy otherwise, I think.

Isn't that more or less what happens in the real world?

Software engineering is all about mapping dirty nuance to formal systems.

But general purpose education isn’t „the real world“. I think the opposite argument is often made to justify teaching theory when it doesn’t seem to have many real world applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com