So this was not an easy question, which basically means you analyzed my data incorrectly

Treehouse are you using big data? to analyze my learning rate? or only your data that you have gathered? at anypoint you should open up those algorythms and data for free so I can see how you are computing my learning rate with the data you got from me, which in my opinion should be open to me to see.

Otherwise you could be using a bad learning rate purposely to slow my learning? Perhaps there was a hacker on the network that could skew it a bit?

Or on a different not you can overfit my data purposely as youtube has to make money off my data by putting the data first over my learning. This can happen in several ways:

A slower video(scarcity of the network would be an insentive to show worse quality videos if you don't want people watching videos, why not put it on television? that would be more economical if you are worried about that) a video that is showing me dumbed down information.

Information that is too hard or challenging for me. This happened in this case, you could have gradually showed me harder videos, but instead showed me something that was way different than before much harder, proving your algorythm overfitted the data, now i suspect you did this purposely using me as a test bed so you can sell my data later. Thus you would be scewing the results by putting the data first, if everyone in the industry does this than the industry as a whole will soon(or should i say eventually) not work because learning didn't come before data. MIT did this, from coursera and then blamed it on cheating once the questions go off treehouse web page then you can analyze the data and say I cheated on GOOGLE asking the question directly making me feel guilty while exploiting and selling my data. Meanwhile the documentation is ever more sparse an ambigous playing towards cultral prefrence when in reality there is no preference because there was no choice. Black and White for me please.

Will learning become nothing more than dodging obstacles thrown at us? Rather than tieing two and two together?

Two problems with this question:

1) A needle in the haystack tactic. It was by sheer luck that I found this one hyperlink in the python documentation which this question also neglected to state.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html#formatspec

2) Question was not stated gramatically similar, recursive definitions and ambigous loops mean several orders of logic must be taken to clarify which lead down dead ends and wasted time.

the link once found was entitled Format Specification Mini-Language

which isn't how the original question was stated, which was a format "operator" being the keyword.

So that link was wrong!! actually

Looking through the documentation by hand is not possible, and then the browser ctrl f only allows us to type one keyword at a time rather than format, operator

so by luck I typed "string formating" because "operator" didn't work

and found finally https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#format

the answer is % is the operator

3) multiple pages to find answers

There are problems with analyzing learning rates in big data it is a relatively new field.

To be honest I actually did learn something from this question.

Tree house could have at least stated the hyperlink to the documentation as a hint

I hear Julia is a good programming language which is like python syntactically I would love for treehouse to teach me that.

because the way the interpreter and questions are structured, with a learning rate to match my speed, I'll learn quicker. I think big data and treehouse can provide value to society, without nickle and diming and creating barriers to entry.