Gee, based on these comments you'd think some of these HNers have never read a math word-problem. Or did you all think that guy really did need 98 oranges?
Yeah, a perfect thread to demonstrate the lower than average social literacy of HN users. It makes this community come off as a bunch of fun haters. This kind of fun low stakes “engineering problem” is exactly the type of thing that should be shared here, but everyone’s a critic I guess.
Yeah getting a similar feeling. Lots of moral grandstanding about it too. HNers can’t see a fun thing without finding a way that it’s “problematic” or “misleading”
Put another way, they played trains with the kids, then argued about layout options with some other adult after bedtime, and came up with some novel solutions which were tested with the kids next day.
However if I’m any guide, a basic game ends up with me fighting a broken soldering iron or a bug in some language I don’t understand while the kid asks if we are there yet.
Introductory math word problems often involve unrealistic quantities of things. "Alice had 100 oranges and Bob took two. How many does Alice have?" That sort of thing.
