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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Drat. If I'd known they were going to do that, I'd have made sure I was in the top 1000.

edit: why is this getting voted down? I would expect there are a fair number of people here who took the course with a casual approach, like I did. E.g., I usually watched the lectures early Sunday, then did the homework that night. Then, for those topics that I enjoyed and wanted in more depth, I read the sections in the book on them. This approach is relaxing and fun, but does increase the tendency to make silly mistakes and not catch them (which I in fact have done a few times now).

I am, it turns out, enjoying the material enough that I think I would like, if I ever find myself looking for a job, to find one where I can use this stuff.

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Maybe that is why they didn't say they were going to do this—the sort of person who goes all in even with nothing to gain is what they're looking for.

(Lest I seem overly harsh, I'm in the same boat.)

My guess is that you are being modded down because your statement is of a form that many people have heard in real life and associate with poor performance. It shows a lack of thinking about jobs. However, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are young and not really worrying about such things.

Basically your answer is like the classic "I could have got a 5.0, but I partied", which is a statement that says a number of things. 1. "I think all the kids who got 5.0 are boring and don't party" (untrue). 2. "I am not capable of getting a 5.0 and partying" (probably true).

That the person would even make the statement says something about their general level of intelligence. Hence when you say "If I had but known, I would have been in the top 100", you are saying "I had no idea that a hugely publicized course at a renowned university might lead to job opportunities". This lack of intelligence seems to contradict your first statement. Or it could be that you are not in the habit of thinking about such things. I hope you are either a kid, or an incredibly wealthy trust-fund baby living in isolation. Usually, however, I hear such remarks from people who are not smart enough to realize they are not smart enough, or they are quitters, or they are victims.

Actually, the modding has reversed and my comment is now at +9.

The "partying" I was doing instead of putting a non-casual effort into the class was dealing with some projects at work, and starting to read a book on analytic number theory because I'm tired of being someone who doesn't understand the proof of the prime number theorem.

> you are saying "I had no idea that a hugely publicized course at a renowned university might lead to job opportunities"

Yeah, I did not think it would lead to much in the way of job opportunities. That's because the class is just an introduction. If you compare almost any section of the class to the corresponding section in the Russell and Norvig book, you'll see that they are leaving out a lot of detail in the class. The homework in the class almost never pushes any limits of what was done in the lectures. Many of the homework problems are just things that were done in lecture with the numbers changed.

I would have expected the job opportunities to start at a deeper level than the class reaches.

I would have expected the job opportunities to start at a deeper level than the class reaches.

Aptitude and interest goes a long way.

Is there any way to know how well you are doing (before the end of the course)? I thought I wasn't doing too badly, but with 100000 enrolled students there are bound to be lots who have 100% scores.

I don't think it is anywhere near 100k students. I can't find the cite, but I thought they commented somewhere that 20k or something like that people took the midterm.

I presume people are guessing how they are doing by just looking at their homework and midterm scores so far, weighted according to the appropriate weights.

I think I saw somewhere that 100k+ students had signed up initially. However, according to this NYTimes article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/technology/khan-academy-bl...):

"But in education circles, Mr. Khan’s efforts have captured imaginations and spawned imitators. Two Stanford professors have drawn on his model to offer a free online artificial intelligence class. Thirty-four thousand people are now taking the course, and many more have signed up."

Not sure if "taking the course" means advanced track and completed midterm or not.

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