Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 287 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#91

Post by hadjian »

nerusskyhigh wrote: post #41
ww520 wrote: post #32

Gilbert Strang's lectures on Linear Algebra [1]. Prof Strang is an amazing lecturer with a unassuming style. He's the expert on Linear Algebra and makes the topic so much approachable. Ken Joy's lectures on Computer Graphics [2]. Prof Joy is another amazing lecturer, making the Computer Graphics topics seeming easy. Stanford CS221 Learn AI (2019) by Percy Liang and Dorsa Sadigh. Both professors are great lecturers. A…

Can you articulate on the first one? In the last semester I tutored for a Linear algebra course which used his book and it was a nightmare. Ideas seems to be presented in reverse order and a lot of students ended up having trouble understanding basic concepts.

So strange. It was the best book I’ve read about the topic. It’s been a while, but I don’t recall anything not presented in the right order. Going from linear equations to a geometric interpretation of the rows, then to linear combination of the columns. Then Gauss-Seidel to LRU.

I liked his approach of “ideas first, rigor later”. I think after reading this book, you can easily grab a book with more formalism, if you feel lacking rigor.

I’m interested to understand where you felt the order was wrong?

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#92

Post by JDEW »

lab11 wrote: post #67
spike021 wrote: post #31

I graduated with my CS degree back in 2016, but admittedly really disliked the curriculum at my university and have lacked some crucial knowledge. One of the series I've picked at and skimmed at times for reference and relearning some concepts is MIT OpenCourseware's 6.006 (and other courses) taught primarily by Erik Demaine. He's much better than any instructor I had at San Jose state university and I've learned thi…

true brilliancy expressed in teaching and research BTW. Did he not coauthor quite a revolutionary proof recently? Cannot put my hand on it or remember what it was.

Paper [0], Quanta Article [1]

[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10774 [1] - https://www.quantamagazine.org/father-son-team-solves-geomet...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#93

Post by skanga »

lab11 wrote: post #64
antipotoad wrote: post #25

Walter Lewin’s MIT lectures on Physics. Quite sad to see that they’ve been removed from MIT OpenCourseWare [1]. [1]: https://news.mit.edu/2014/lewin-courses-removed-1208

sad? I'd say tragic :(. I have never looked at rainbows the same since that lecture, I could stare at them for hours.

Yes - The rainbow lecture is so great!

All of you have looked at rainbows, but very few of you have ever seen one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXZ9K_1rJww

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#94

Post by PennRobotics »

There are many great suggestions---some that I might argue are better than what I have to add (Lewin, Sapolsky, Sedgewick, Boyd)---but I have some to add that I enjoyed because they were extremely well-taught:

* Donald Sadoway's Solid-State Chemistry lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL36EC6A6180271B0F

* Anything by Patrick Winston, e.g. "AI": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb-k...

* robert ghrist's calculus lectures, which were somehow clearer/more engaging than others I had found: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKc2XOQp0dMwj9zAXD5Ll...

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#95

Post by bajsejohannes »

Ben Eater building an 8-bit computer. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...

This series teaches you so much about how a computer works from the ground up. Although I had already learned that you can build a CPU with only NAND-gates, this is what really made it click. It's also densely packed with facts and techniques (debugging, using an oscilloscope, ...). It's quite refreshing compared to other youtube content where every little fact needs a ten minute video.

Re: Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?

#98

Post by nerusskyhigh »

hadjian wrote: post #91
nerusskyhigh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you articulate on the first one? In the last semester I tutored for a Linear algebra course which used his book and it was a nightmare. Ideas seems to be presented in reverse order and a lot of students ended up having trouble understanding basic concepts.

So strange. It was the best book I’ve read about the topic. It’s been a while, but I don’t recall anything not presented in the right order. Going from linear equations to a geometric interpretation of the rows, then to linear combination of the columns. Then Gauss-Seidel to LRU. I liked his approach of “ideas first, rigor later”. I think after reading this book, you can easily grab a book with more formalism, if you…

A bit everywhere. One thing that really bothered me is that you have to wait until chapter 3 to introduce the notion of vector spaces. I know that it is not an easy concept to grasp, but once you manage to understand it a lot of previous things become trivial.

When I was first introduced to the idea of solving linear equations, we already had the idea of space vectors and basis, so solving a system of equations was just an application of finding the coefficients of the linear combination.

> I liked his approach of “ideas first, rigor later”. I think after reading this book, you can easily grab a book with more formalism if you feel lacking rigor.

This sentence made me think. Maybe there was a disconnect between my experience (Physics background, bottom-up approach) and the one taught in the course (Data science for Linguistic, top-down). Each time I tried to use the notion and examples I had in mind with the students I found myself hitting a wall because they had not covered the topics yet.

Post reply on HN