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Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#201

Post by vsundar »

Malcx wrote: post #130
carusooneliner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jennifer Widom, Databases, Stanford. This is not the flashiest of a topic, but oh boy was it well organized. Couldn't agree more. I took this course in 2011 but didn't have a need for working with databases until 2014. Three years after I took the course I was able to jump in and work fluently on databases -- Mongo, Sqlite, Firebase, etc. The least I can say is the course helped me internalize database concepts. Th…

Is it this one? https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/db/2014_1/...

Looks like it got broken up into smaller mini-courses available here: https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

Main page: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/DB-mooc.html

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#202

Post by antman »

carlosgg wrote: post #185
antman wrote: post #163

As a serial MOOCist I cannot single out any one so here is a list per domain. Data Science Introduction to Probability - The Science of Uncertainty,math oriented MIT/EDX Difficulty:5/5 Videos:5/5 Material and exercises:5/5 Usefulness: 5/5 Learning from Data, math oriented formerly Caltech/EDX now on caltech, check the exercises and you will see the difference in quality with Andrew Ng: Difficulty:4/5 Videos:4:5 Mater…

Hey antman, thanks a lot for the comment! Can you elaborate a bit more on how MooCs have made a difference in your life? Thank you.

I was a mech eng manager in industrial automation. Did the MOOCs, chose a domain, started a phd in ML and AI by showing my MOOC results, got picked during the 3rd year from one of the big consulting companies, now running a series of international projects. Banking(IT only), AI, CompVision and Analytics.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#203

Post by leavenotracks »

Not a full MOOC, rather a video lecture series, and one I cannot recommend enough is ‘Human behavioural biology’ with Robert Sapolski. Mind blown. Have listened to some multiple times. I found it to be a fascinating tour of so many facets of biology.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL150326949691B199

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#204

Post by jadbox »

carusooneliner wrote: post #64

Financial markets by Robert Shiller: https://www.coursera.org/learn/financial-markets-global I wanted to invest better so I took this course to learn the basics of financial markets (I'm a software guy and have zero training in finance). After taking it, not only do I have the basics nailed down but have gained a massive appreciation of finance as a technology that, at its best, mitigates risk and advances society. S…

I actually just finished this course and loved it! It covered all the financial ground that I was looking for... stock, options, brokers, financial planning, insurance, and financial theory.

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#206

Post by rectang »

gmiller123456 wrote: post #112

Nand2Tetris was my favorite. I can't say the information (particularly the first half) has much practical application for me, but it was a lot of fun and deepened my understanding of what's going on at a low level. Homework is very well designed with a simulator you download to test your work on, then submit for automatic grading. Udacity's Differential Equations course was pretty awesome too. I had taken Calculus pr…

Coding The Matrix had a great concept. The learn-math-by-coding approach allows the student to see applications of the material from early on. The treatment of complex numbers was especially strong.

The tradeoff is that the student must debug during the exercises (an activity which is unrelated to the material), but it's worth it.

Regrettably, Coding the Matrix was taken down down along with a lot of first-generation Coursera courses. However, there's still the book, the website at http://codingthematrix.com and the the lectures from the Brown University version of the course:

https://cs.brown.edu/video/channels/coding-matrix-fall-2014

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#207

Post by andy000 »

randyzwitch wrote: post #106

I found Udacity CS344: Intro to Parallel Programming (CUDA) a great class, not only from a practical standpoint of learning CUDA but also had some decent explanations/whiteboarding behind the algorithms

Think that was taken down for some reason. I tried watching it last month

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#208

Post by barry-cotter »

smoyer wrote: post #149
jcadam wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nicest: Andrew Ng, Machine Learning, Coursera. Interesting topic, well-planned material, very well avoids going into the mathy details, but still conveys a feeling of understanding of the topic, so accessible to a wide audience. (Martin Odersky, Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Coursera, was almost equally nice, but had some rough edges in the first run.) Have to agree with all of this. I've taken Andrew…

Agreed Ng's Machine Learning and Odersky's FP in Scala were my favorites. I'm looking for a good bioinformatics course at the moment. I wrote a small program for my daughter that attempts to find CRISPR sites for my daughter and it would be great to know more of the background.

Have you seen this before?

https://www.edx.org/micromasters/bioinformatics

Re: Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

#209

Post by ansible »

mr_overalls wrote: post #80
dmytrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Probabilistic Graphical Models, Daphne Koller – the first course in the specialization has a very good and engaging start, but the gap between lectures and problems widens quickly after that (maybe that's why the author boasts about a "challenging" course "not for everyone"). I'm hesitant to take the next course of the specialization.

Is PGM still relevant as it was five years ago, given the renaissance in deep learning and other NN techniques?

Yes, I think so. PGM or some improvement on that is relevant to doing things like reasoning correctly based on evidence.

I envision more sophisticated AGI systems to use DNN or other NN techniques to learn about the world, and be able to take in uncertain input and make sense of it. PGM or similar would then be used to correctly (in the mathematical sense) reason about what to do to accomplish the agent's goals.

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