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Comment by mattlong | Hacker News Reader

I'm partaking in both the AI and ML classes and I find the ML experience much more user-friendly and polished than the AI class. For example, being able to speed up the lecture videos is brilliant. I find the AI class video questions a bit frustrating to use. IMHO, Know Labs has a ways to go.

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Agreed. The ML one is much more organized and the design and experience are both incredibly better. It has more of a classroom and course feeling to it, rather than the AI class's here's some video lectures and quizzes, now do the tests.

The ML class also has a full-fledged Q&A forum (which has LaTeX markup support), which, to me, is a necessary component. The about page[0] lists Stanford students as developers (the first one is an undergraduate sophomore named Frank Chen), and the team is different than the guys behind Know Labs (from a quick search.)

Andrew Ng is an excellent teacher. Seriously, the ML class is the most fun I've had learning in a college course environment. That speaks volumes.

[0]: http://www.ml-class.org/course/aboutus/index

for what it's worth, I'm taking Stanford's version of the ML class that Prof. Ng is offering, and aside from being a couple of weeks and ahead and having to do a final project, it is pretty much the same offering as that available the outside world. I think this could explain the level of quality of the website, or at the very least it having more of a course feeling to it.

I share your opinion.

I wish I could spend the whole week to dive into AI, IMHO without previous knowledge a regular person can't catch up with course progress. Unfortunately I can't leave everything behind to study the deeps of AI and in this case the ML does a great job, Professor NG presets lectures and a few quizes to see if you understand that sensible topic, then you can apply those concepts with programming exercices and homework.

I'm almost giving up about my dream that is attend a course in Stanford. I'm a 28 college dropout who had to start working to help family. I don't live in US, I'm married, I have a great job (that I believe is far more interesting than most of you guys). But I have this itch for Academics. *

I'm glad I've been playing around with both ML and AI classes but I think that Stanford should stick with Professor NG didactics.

ps: I know that my statement sounds like the "occupies" but is hard to see dreams not becoming reality. I feel sorry for those who dropout Stanford/MIT to create a landing page startups.

It's kind of funny how a summer project of 3 students lets the effort of a backed SV startup look like a project from a 13 year old child.

I mean what are "knowlabs" even contributing here? The Videos are hosted on Youtube and recorded using... PAPER???

Ok you might say: but there are quizzes!! Those quizzes are the least userfriendly quizzed I've seen in my life. ML & DB-class are way ahead on this front.

Seconded. I've had to drop AI class because the lack of downloadable videos means I can't watch them when I like - out internet speed is appalling when I'm free to do things like this. Still going with db-class though.

It does make me wonder why ai-class went its own way with the website and delivery methods. especially as db-class and ml-class worked closely together on it.

the lack of downloadable videos means I can't watch them when I like

Take a look at this: http://www.reddit.com/r/aiclass/comments/lqm0e/an_easy_comma...

not sure if it is of interest to you anymore but there are a couple of scripts around the internet to scrape ai-class.org & youtube to get you offline videos.

FWIW, I'd _love_ if you could download a single file "something" (mhtml, swf, pdf or heck even one of those new wolfram document format) including both all video lectures for a single db/ml units, subtitles and quizzes.

Yes the db and ml class websites are outstanding. The video and in class exercises are very smooth, but the best part are the exercises in both classes. The db teacher said some students threw all of it together over the summer. Very impressed.

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