A) If your message is "You're learning it the wrong way. You need to actively work to understand and do research on your own." then that is mildly rude and also not really very germane to the discussion. The whole point of the service is to do the best possible job guiding you through learning programming; having to fire up Google to complete its exercises is a failure mode. The parent is offering specific, valuable feedback as to where and how it fails.
B) But you didn't just say that. Instead, you signed it off with a baseless, bullshit line insulting the poster and half of the userbase, and that's all it is, an insult; unless you have some very interesting studies in your back pocket, you have absolutely no idea whether "passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered [our] ability for meaningful learning." That is pure flamebait. Leave it in your keyboard.
Not to mention the younger generation's culture of.. cheap shot that always gets under my skin (though I'm not that young).
It's so ridiculous how people can appear insightful with some useless and completely untrue complaint about "young people today," "today's materialist society" or whatever.
Young people today do far far more self learning, actively pursuing stuff that interests them than any previous generation, in my opinion. They have much better tools. My younger brother (in his teens) has for several years been in a mode where he gets into little obsessions about learning this or that. Video special effects. Lock picking. Fishing. Whatever. A lot (maybe most) kids his age are like that. The topic can be whatever: diet, exercise, skin care, sex. Not necessarily the stuff that HN gets escited about but it is the stuff that interest them. I wouldn't surprised to learn that the mean skill level for application of make up has skyrocketed among teenage girls in the last ten years. Their starting point acquiring knowledge knowledge (who is the president of X?) is Youtube but that doesn't make it "passively consuming large amounts of content".
Want to test this? Try giving a group of 35-45 year olds and a group of teenagers photoshop lessons at work or school. Then give them a project. See how many of them are reading online tutorials and watching youtube videos to get things done vs how many are just using the prescribed material with the notion that they can't be expected to know anything outside of it.
This whole thread by the way is amazing. It's all about new ways that people are acquiring knowledge & skills. Full of anecdotes and opinions about what approach or tool for learning stuff is good or bad. What the problems are. Underlying it all is a sense that the best possible learning tools are incredible and coming soon.
Lets give credit where credit is due. Lets look at this as what it is: a discussion about how to make the awesome awesomer.
Thanks for calling the OP up on pure curmudgeonry.
