I think this is a great idea, although I don't know if I'm a good candidate for it, since I never officially got past a Pre-Calculus level. I recently decided

I think this is a great idea, although I don't know if I'm a good candidate for it, since I never officially got past a Pre-Calculus level. I recently decided in the past couple weeks to go through Khan Academy from the very beginning (simple arithmetic! :), and run through every one of their exercises. I'm moving pretty fast through all the refresher courses, and I'm amazed at what I've retained (and disappointed at what I've lost). I've completed 113 out of 171 exercises in my off hours in the past couple weeks, and once I've gotten through them all, I'm going to run through MIT 18.01 Single Variable Calculus, 18.02 Multi-Variable Calculus, and 18.03 Differential Equations. From there, I was planning on doing MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra, so even though I don't think it would work out for me to jump in to a group like this without the proper background, I'll be following the progress of things closely. In fact, the idea of HN being a platform for self-directed group education is a brilliant one. While there are already websites focused on that, I know we're all impressed enough by the HN readership that there is an obvious advantage of organizing it here. Hopefully this experiment can work for other areas of study as well.