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Comment by auntad | Hacker News Reader

I really like his example at the end - step-by-step deep dive into a specific topic. 30 hours of learning, direct links to resources, come out the other end as informed and aware of the topic at hand.

I usually find it difficult to wade through the mountains of possible (often outdated) resources on a topic I'm unfamiliar with - At one point I was thinking it'd be useful to crowdsource those kind of step-by-step guides across a variety of verticals. Kind of like an online class, except pulling from the best up to date blog posts and specific resources from around the internet, instead of relying on a singular POV of the guy who made some videos and called it a course.

Anyone know of anything like that? How do you approach deep diving into unfamiliar spaces?

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I think this is a great idea. It's really saddened me watching the internet turn from a place where people deeply invested in a topic or passion share their work personally to a SEO-ranked shit show where millions of low-effort 'blogs' compile second hand knowledge for views and commissions.

While compiling great resources in one place is a good stop-gap I'd love to hear some ideas about how we can move towards a Web where people are rewarded for creating original content and putting effort into their work, rather than the current mess of clickbait and rehosted/paraphrased content. Doing a Google search for a technical topic is much less effective now than in the past, by my reckoning.

I have found that good high quality blogs typically link to other high quality blogs. Most of the ones I am familiar with are math/computer science blogs run by researchers.

If those topics are in your wheelhouse there is definitely a ton of high quality original content from the advanced undergraduate level to the research level.

so maybe a lot of the internet is seo ranked shit show...but not all of it.

> so maybe a lot of the internet is seo ranked shit show...but not all of it.

Just the parts you can actually find.

lol

I have found myself asking the same question. While I don’t have an answer I can share my plan. I am studying the social impact of the printing press. I don’t think you can go wrong studying history.

I'm building this right now actually. Superclass [1] is a place to submit online learning resources by topic, then upvote/comment on the most helpful ones.

The goal is eventually something just like you described, kind of a crowd-sourced curriculum builder.

This version is rough and buggy, but would love everyone's thoughts/feedback (sam@directedworks.com)

https://superclass.co/

Edit: sign up for occasional email updates here: http://eepurl.com/dwgBnP

Hey, I just checked your project out and it's awesome. One thing id like to see is a way to filter submission types. Specifically it would be nice to filter out products likes apps and books.

That's a great idea, I definitely plan on doing this soon. Thanks for the feedback!

This is a great idea!

This is a great idea, good luck!

typo on front page: Superclass makes it easier by "gathing"

It's a good idea. I'd like to see this succeed.

Whoops—thanks, I’ll fix it!

Why is there a log in button at the top right but not a sign up? I know with the google auth thing it's the same, but as a user you don't know it.

Perhaps make an entire "contact" page, I dislike mailto: links. It opens my company's preferred Email client called IBM Notes and it sucks.

Once you have your MVP, please add transitions/animations. The site is too instant so to say, when clicking a button you expect some small delay. Even if you pre-loaded this, it's sort of important.

Good thoughts—thank you

Honestly, this is why I just read technical books cover to cover. It’s just about the best point to point resource out there.

I think I remember seeing where Cornell offered a course structure where you’d do one course, all day, for 3 weeks and then move to the next. It was years ago, but I remember thinking I would have loved it.

Just to clarify, that's Cornell College, not Cornell University.

This is generally called a Block Plan[1] and is a great system for some students. Looks like Cornell College offers it, you got my hopes up as I'm a Cornell University student and juggling five technical courses at a time has heavy context switching penalties. On the other hand, last year taking Linear Algebra and at the same time having to apply it in a signals processing class was a good combo.

[1] http://www.expertadmissions.com/ExpertAdmissionsBlog/tabid/7...

Yeah, I used to take intersession courses back in my college days where I focused on one course for four weeks. That fit my mode of study way better than taking 4/5 technical courses at the same time. Doing a deep dive on one subject and then moving on was just way better for subject retention in my opinion.

Interleaved study leads to greater retention than blocked study.

http://www.indiana.edu/~pcl/2014/01/interleavedblockeddelaye...

https://www.northeastern.edu/learningresearch/interleaved-st...

What makes you think that it was better?

Condensed studying feels easier, but leads to lower long-term retention. Now, there are methods used to help mitigate that, but those can also be used to increase retention of spread out studying too.

I've tried that for a couple topics (Reinforcement Learning, Linear Algebra, Bayesian Stats) over the last six months and I found for myself it was much harder to retain information than spacing it out over several months and chipping away at it little by little (which I'm doing with Python, Algorithms, Control Theory). I personally prefer practicing interleaving, as I find that applying one subject to another make me remember a lot more of the concepts than block learning techniques.

Also in the grand scheme of things, three weeks isn't a lot of time. Granted, I'm not a fast learner!

imo you should definitely do linear algebra before learning RL or stats. it will make everything else much easier.

Intensive courses in the summer aren’t unusual, especially in the summer and especially for language classes.

This also reminded me of some summer classes. Maybe one month, 5 days/week?

Some of the things that best remember from undergrad were learned over the summer.

I still don't know whether it was the short/intensive set up of the courses that improved learning, or if it was the fact that I was only willing to do summer courses in topics I knew I'd do well in. Either way, it's my best memory of school.

I always took advantage of summer quarter as an undergrad. It was a better experience though course selection wasn’t great (especially for CS).

FYI, the author is a woman. And her twitter account is very much worth a follow:

https://twitter.com/intent/follow?original_referer=https%3A%...

I love her Twitter. Rarely see girls post highly technical content. This is her only non-technical one I guess and all her posts are high quality and about assembly which helped me get started with it although I’ve never done anything in assembly before. I’m a web developer but recently got interested in assembly because of her account

Some great suggestions here already but thought I would add Metacademy [0] and Learn Anything [1] (White Paper here [2]). These are designed to create a map of skills and concepts for a given topic. I find an interactive visualisation to be really effective in understanding the broader ideas before starting out or during the early stages when it’s hard to see how the pieces fit together.

[0] https://metacademy.org

[1] https://learn-anything.xyz

[2] https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything/wiki/White-...

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