Show HN: Watch Stanford CS Lectures Together | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Watch Stanford CS Lectures Together

classroomies.com

360 points___karim49 comments

Nice work!

I almost entirely prefer pre-recorded classes to live ones, except for being able to meet classmates and study together. You can watch at your own discretion, change playback speed, etc.

I think there is a big opportunity with ideas like this to make online lectures feel less isolated.

Totally agree!

For those who want to join, you can do so with the code LY9114

Why restrict it to Stanford? Why not include MIT, Berkeley, etc? BTW these are not CS lectures (all this startup stuff is not CS, like say algorithms, os internals, database systems, ML theory, etc)

EDIT: I like the idea very much, but not in its current form.

This is strictly a content issue. I wouldn't apply demerits to the concept based on the selection of content available.

It should expand, but forced limitations on available content make sense -- it concentrates students into "rooms" while the site's traction is still light, allowing the desired levels of collaboration to come to fruition. Too much content while the site is small risks running only one or two students per room, which keeps the true purpose of the site from showing itself and may even defeat the concept before it has a chance to thrive.

It's just restricted for now, but will gradually extend the content from a variety of universities.

I'd love this - except, where's the CS? I just see a lot of business/startup stuff, which I'm not interested in.

Judging by the description, it looks like it alternates between CS and startup lectures.

I don't see a single one in the schedule.

Most lectures are actually all CS classes organized by YC

I'm simply judging from the titles but I also don't see anything that directly relates to CS. Could you mention a couple of titles that you think relate to CS?

The schedule looks to be only for a single day, none of which are CS related. However, the homepage does state:

> Watch & discuss pre-recorded Startup & CS lectures from Stanford together, in real-time.

Schedules are updated every Monday and Thursday, so I'm guessing there will be CS lectures listed in the future given the description.

I like that you're building something in this vein, but the benefit is not immediately clear to me.

Has it been your experience that talking with others during a lecture is helpful?

It is. Going deeper into particular topics or having folks share additional resources has been incredibly valuable. The lectures serve as conversation-food and not the 'core' of the experience here. That's the premise of the experiment.

This would be kind of like watching someone play a videogame on Twitch— indeed, you could just about implement this as a Twitch channel where people turn up and watch a taped lecture together.

Twitch has this for Bob Ross painting shows

https://m.twitch.tv/bobross/profile

Yeah, with IRL courses, it's much better discussing after the lecture than during one.

This is awesome ! As a largely self-educated engineer I recall feeling (and still do) that most of what I was missing from taking online courses was the « lecture hall » feeling, having discussion immediately afterwards, &c. Nice work !

This is cool! I think it's always useful to see how other people react to the stuff you learn. Do you plan to loop lectures perpetually?

Great idea, and love how you've integrated advertising. I love that there's a schedule - following the paradox of choice, I hate choosing, and you have a good selection of videos.

Voting on the schedule might be a good idea, especially if voting power was weighted based on how much each user has engaged.

Brings in a whole can of worms: how do you measure engagement? Is it gameable? What happens if someone games the system and gets by far the largest weight in the system?

Use invite code: LY9114

As we're watching Sam Altman on Startups, a group of 4 or 5 people (including myself) have been doing collaborative note taking on Google Docs. Its fun to do! Maybe this is something the devs can bake into their platform as a feature...

This reminds me of twitch in some ways which I feel is a good thing. The use of a schedule is a nice add in to give the appearance of a channel or live stream yet with something to look forward to or schedule appropriately.

I think you just made me realize the value a lot of people get from twitch (and even YouTube, to a certain extent). Which, as a bit of a text fascist, I've had trouble grasping / not really been interested in.

From the love (young) people have for live media/streams - and research into the negative effect of recorded vs live, in person lectures - it seems obvious that "twitch for lectures" will be huge.

Probably not something I'll like any more than unscripted TV series, but probably still huge.

Then again, I do seem to relate to chatting on irc while watching regular scheduled TV (like a buffy episode).

So I do see social/group-interactive viewing as something that'll be great.

Even see this working for stuff like video courses in 3d/game design, development - like an art class. The video is the lecturer, and you can see what 3d models/apps/.. your fellow students create (and how). And maybe even copy/"fork" in real-time.

I think this is great. Reminds me of Twitch.tv, except for academia. Good work!

This is very cool. Can I ask how you keep the video synced for all clients?

It looks like the page is embedding a YouTube video with a specified start time in an iframe, with that specified start time based on when the page was loaded.

It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page. I have no idea without doing a Google search what time it is in UTC. Also, is the current class title displayed somewhere?

> It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page

yes, but it IS hard to remember every little thing when launching a new service. try giving feedback with a little better tone. its beta software.

Nice. A quick suggestion: would you allow users to select there time zones and then show the schedule based on a user's timezone?

This is great!

Can you do this for youtube videos so that I can use this for conference talks?

(Or so that I can watch videos with my brother back in the US)

I also created something similar. People were really interested at first. But we learned after sometime that people loose interest when learning with strangers. We could not retain people after a week of sign up. Although this is bit different so might work. Good luck to people who created this.

Wouldn't part of the point be to introduce people, so they're not strangers anymore, after a while?

Encourage chat/discussion in scheduled breaks?

Can't scroll to the bottom of the schedule on chrome / Android. It only goes down to something about Dropbox (it's cut off.) Is this the wrong schedule entirely? Do the CS lectures come after the point where it stops scrolling?

Looks really interesting. Could possible be something like facebook live or insta live where you could still have prerecorded stuff available through links as well and have live comments based on time stamps through the lecture videos.

I would love something like this integrated into VRChat

I love it! I've been watching some, but still haven't received an invitation and thus cannot take part in the chatroom :(

Any interest in selling/licensing a whitelabel version of this that I could load my own videos into/control access to?

It’s been one of the things I thought about. Not sure yet but send me an email (on the site’s about section)

I'm working on something like this right now. Shoot me an email if you want to chat: brett@mindstamp.io

Love this! :D excited to see where it goes.

Good job! Is there a way to engage with other students after the class? Would be nice to ask follow up questions.

Anyone else getting a 500 error?

Click to unmute doesnt do anything on the ipad right now. Awesome work tho!

Awesome concept, well implemented! Might use it.

What’s the end goal?

Nice work! :)

Received an early look at this through my subscription to Fairpixel's free & open-source logos newsletter: http://logodust.com/ ... Awesome company

btw the email stated it was for viewing "how to start a startup" lectures, not CS

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