Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which courses (online or not) have had the greatest impact on you?

54 pointsdebanjan1642 comments

Impact can be from the viewpoint of career, hobby skills or life in general. It is you who knows what aspect of you the course has impacted. And why do you think so?

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MITx had a profound impact on my life when the platform launched in 2011. Ditto edX.org in 2012.

At the time, I was a college dropout. My job history looked like: self-employed, Starbucks, and a bunch of catering per diem gigs. I didn't know what a "software engineer" did, although I had a vague desire to make video games (but no idea how).

I was technical enough to install WordPress with Cpanel and resell hosting to mom/pop businesses, but I couldn't really code beyond copy/pasting PHP snippets.

The Intro to Computer Science series on MITx changed everything. I remember finishing a homework assignment (hangman game), then immediately looking for more things to code, even though the assignment took me 8+ hours.

I was hooked! Within a few months, I landed a gig at a video game studio ($15/hour dream job). My job was a mix of QA, systems admin, gameplay design, and tools programming.

A few years after that, I shook Ned Batchelder's hand after his Pycon 2015 talk. I was a software engineer at Red Hat by then, but still feeling like I'd snuck in through the back door. Knowing that I'd aced MIT coursework helped me push down my insecurities, even years later.

By my early 30s, I was millionaire - thanks entirely to my software engineering career. I quit my day job last year to take another swing at entrepreneurship, and it blows my mind to compare then/now.

Thanks to everyone who made MITx and Edx.org. Y'all changed my life!

That’s amazing. I’m only a Software engineer for a year now but I don’t think I would have managed to learn programming without college forcing me. I love programming but it took a while, and I know how lazy I am.

Thanks!

I've met some excellent programmers over the years, and most also describe themselves as lazy in some way.

The millions of people who took a similar route and didn't become millionaires would like to point out that this story is exceptional, as in well above average, extraordinary and very uncommon. Congrats on thus far making the most of your life and abilities, though.

Ah, yes. My journey has not ended in me being a millionaire, but I do okay.

https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...

That's an interesting life story, JD

I didn't mean to imply this is a repeatable process. I know that I've been fortunate, and in my mind that chain of luck begins with stumbling upon the MITx courses. The OP asked about courses that impacted your life, so my story felt appropriate.

This might not be super to HN's tastes, but during my undergrad I took 2 literature classes that had an enormous impact on my worldview.

The first was a year long British Literature seminar. The professor, Siobhain Bly Calkin, was a brilliant teacher and lecturer. The course was nominally about British literature, but she made the course an incredible historical walk through British history and the history of religion in Europe. Her explanations of religious debates, and the royal bloodline feuds and twists of fate, radically shifted how I viewed European history and how people lived in Europe and the British Isles before the modern age. I've found history classes in general to have an enormous impact on my worldview.

The second was a year long seminar on Modernist Literature. The professor, Dana Dragumoiu, was not the best lecturer, but she was a brilliant scholar and had almost unreasonably high expectations for everyone in the class. Everyone got Cs and Ds on their first essay, which came to a shock to many, but then she methodically worked with us to improve our arguments and writing skills. It felt like learning to read all over again. She taught me, and my fellow classmates, to exceed the minimum and to excel through hard work, she believed in us in a way that is very rare in academia (she considered us as adults) and I can attest that it was very satisfying.

"Learning How to Learn" BY Dr. Barbara Oakley really changed my perspective towards learning in my late 20s. I was starting to feel (of my own accord) that I was starting to lose/had already lost the cognitive function needed to learn as intensely as I had during my undergrad years. This course flipped that idea on its head, and gave me the tools and mental model to pick up learning new (and hard) things again.

Strongly recommend!

Yeah. I liked that course too. I heard it mentioned on the radio and it was a pretty short course if I remember correctly. The only thing I really remember from it is "Pomodoro is Cool" and "If you're stuck on something mental, go take a walk for several minutes."

The third big part of the book is the concept of "Spaced repetition" as a key to learning. In practical terms: Use Anki.

Do you have a link ?

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

Thank you

- Single Variable and Multivariate Calculus from MIT-OCW was my first ever MOOC. Was in Junior year in High School. This changed for my whole life how I see Math, learning, and knowledge itself. Before it, I was just a algorithm-following, practicing, A+ getting student with not much love for Math. This enabled me to learn Math properly.

- Not a MOOC, but I read Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker, and it also had the same big impact on me- in terms of changing my whole worldview about learning and knowledge and books.

- In my last year of college, I took IBM Data Science Professional Certificate course on Coursera. It did not have much technical depth at all. But it introduced me to Data Science.

- Then I took Andrew Ng's ML and DL on Coursera. Learned a lot. Connected the dots from back. Learning the Math properly that was triggered by MIT-OCW, finally paid off as all ML concepts were promptly undetstood by me.

- fast.ai course. It helped me build practical AI projects. Jeremy Howard is among the best instructors out there. I got my first job after this course. I made a lot of projects as well.

- Deep Learning course by Yann LeCun and Alfredo Canziani from NYU. Learned most DL from this course. It has made me a much better researcher.

               ____

What has had the most impact in my life is that I learned Math properly early in life. I don't mean like being a Math whiz. I was never that, and never tried. But understanding each concept in Math from the ground up- from HS Junior year to Master’s degree- has made all the difference.

               ____

Not impactful yet, but learning came in a full circle after going through:

- Mathematics for Machine Learning from Imperial College, London.

- Computational Neuroscience from Neuromatch Academy. It has unlocked the "Hacker mentality" in me.

Algorithms and data structure is the only career-related value I got out of university. It was essential knowledge.

However the mandatory engineering class were the most valuable overall, as I would never have studied those otherwise. They keep coming up in everyday life.

In community college (rough approximation of what CÉGEP is), I had a bunch of bullshit classes that changed the course of my private life: film, photography, philosophy, etc. It made me amore well-rounded person, even though I didn't see the point at the time. That's why the classes were mandatory.

Taking a Data Security course in college and learning about the OSI model was the first time the modern computing paradigm clicked with me. Everything felt vague and abstract till then.

There after understanding basic threat modeling it gave me much more confidence in myself as I could see my own programs as a cake to which I knew every ingredient and possible way it could be poisoned… one step closer to being an all round dessert chef.

Care to link the course you took? The OSI model was always a bit abstract to me since college.

I was lucky to attend a series of jazz workshops by Conrad Cork at the start of my playing career. Conrad authored "Harmony with LEGO Bricks"[1] approach to jazz improvisation and used the workshops to test his teaching technique on live subjects at the college where I was working. In a nutshell the approach links listening, understanding and improvising. The book is pretty dense, and I feel very grateful to have had the benefit of the author explaining it to me.

I play jazz as a semi-pro but have backed some pretty hardcore players from time to time. Conrad sadly died in 2021[2] but I've had decades of benefit in terms of confidence on the bandstand from that course.

[1] https://jaelliott24.wordpress.com/2021/09/21/harmony-with-le...

[2] https://londonjazznews.com/2021/05/18/obituary-conrad-cork-1...

For me it was ConLaw as part of the first year of law school. It forced me to relearn US civics, and confront all the gray area that exists in trying to build and maintain a functional democracy. It expanded my view because it retaught periods of US history from a very different perspective than I'd encountered previously. Considering the interpretation of laws and policies through the lens of precedent and separation of powers made things far more complicated and interesting to me. I made peace with the fact that answers that start with "it's complicated,..." and "it depends,..." are generally better (if less satisfying) than ones that start with "clearly,..." or "obviously,...".

“Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered” Available on edX and MIT OpenCourseWare

Putting money to a good use, caring about society and the environment.

What impact did it have on you. How did you change afterwards?

It made me realize there are ways for capitalism to be “ethical”, that not all banks are trying to make a profit at all costs and that there are investors that track and optimize for other metrics besides monetary returns, e. g., community impact.

Community impact is certainly one angle to consider capitalism from, but for me the most important and damning aspect is the investor-ownership of the means of production. I think the people doing the work should be the ones getting the profits for said work. I don't think it's right for anyone to claim ownership of another person's work. It's inherently antagonistic to have parasites built into the economy.

Hmm. Thx for the recommendation. I'll have to check this one out. I just finished reading Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered." I suspect you might have gotten some of Schumacher's arguments in the course. I can't really recommend it unless you're super interested in hearing arguments from a mid-20th century economist in an era where intangibles had yet to dominate the financial world.

But this is something I'm interested in, so I'll have to check that course out.

In 92 I took a class that focused on "The theory of programming languages" It was one of the first classes I took (Master Programme in Computer Science)

I think it's instrumental in my ease of reading and understanding code bases in new languages.

Which book was used?

Intro to Financial Markets, taught by Burton Malkiel.

As an impressionable 20 year old with no background in finance, it introduced me to passive investing, Vanguard, the efficient market theory and the power of compound interest.

It's funny, 20+ years later I still think back to some specific lectures in his class whenever I encounter the CAPM or Black-Scholes in my day job. Prof. Malkiel helped me develop a healthy skepticism about claims in finance that has served me really well in my career and my personal finances.

My Turbo Pascal teacher in high school, he taught us all the ways of systems programming, provide me a path to learn about Object Pascal recently introduced in Turbo Pascal 5.5, that later made me get hold of Turbo Pascal 6 when it got released, improve that knowledge with Turbo Vision.

This experience taugh me the ways of systems programming without the perils of C (that I would discover later), while setting a baseline of what to expect from a programming language environment.

My digital logic course in college. Before that course I knew a bit about how computers worked, but after it I understood exactly how computers worked, and designed and implemented my own simple 4-bit processor. I built it from the ground up with logic gates. It had a huge effect on how I understood how electronics worked and enabled me to write my own NES game. The book and course material were lacking a bit, but the projects were great.

Took Andrew Ng’s machine learning course on Coursera back around 2015 as my first taste of machine learning.

I was studying for my PhD in Physics at the time and didn’t know what to do with myself with graduation only a year or so away. I was fascinated by the whole machine learning topic and got me interested in learning more - looking back it was the gateway to my data scientist career, which I’m still doing 8 years and 3 countries later.

I think I got quite lucky that this was around the time that data science was becoming a hot topic in industry, but there were very few qualifications in it (sorry statisticians) so people like me with STEM PhDs and relatively little training could go straight into a job from graduation (with varying results)

For career it was Colt Steele’s Web Development bootcamp on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/

It showed me that I could build and program things without learning C++ (or Objective C) and from more of the visual side, not just terminal “hello world” apps.

I’ve started a channel where I talk about ways I failed to learn programming and how I eventually learned programming later in life: Why I failed at learning to code https://youtu.be/eIOuog3QGHc

Front end conference https://aneventapart.com because it helped focus on the important parts of the web, like new standard features and accessibility.

The Science of Well-Being from Yale University

https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being

Go ahead and down-vote me now, I'm going to criticize academia here. The question was "which courses have had the greatest impact on you?" and not "which courses have had the greatest POSITIVE impact on you?"

I am sad to say my junior year honors literature course had the most impact on my career. One of the assignments was an analysis of one or two Matthew Arnold works (Matthew Arnold's a 19th century poet & critic who's pretty well known in academia.) He's not my favourite, but not horrible by any means. I'm more of a Browning or Houseman fan, really. But in academia you study more than just the stuff you like.

Turns out my prof was a guy who was REALLY INTO ARNOLD.

I write a paper and pull some argument out of my ass; can't even remember it now. My paper came back with an F. Not because I pulled the argument out of my ass, but because it was the same argument made in an obscure journal by an obscure academic. My prof demanded to know a) why I didn't properly cite this obscure academic and b) where I had found a copy of the journal article. He apparently had the last printed copy in Texas and it was starting to deteriorate. It wasn't in our school's library, so where could I have possibly found the article? (this was before everything was on the intarwebs.)

I tried to explain I had simply pulled the argument out of my ass, and that it seemed reasonable. His counter was there was no way a mere undergraduate could have produced such a sophisticated critique of Matthew Arnold.

So I got an F on that paper and every paper I turned in afterwards. Sadly, it was past the point I could drop the course, so I wound up with an F. I dropped out of the honors program and eventually left that university.

I still pursued natural language research and still love the intersection of semantics and syntax. Fascinated by Sapir-Whorf, think Chomsky's a first class mind, &c &c

Before that class, there was a non-zero chance I would have pursued a PhD in literary criticism. Afterwards? No. F that and F academia. I still write, but not as a career. And I still enjoy reading both high-brow literature and low-brow genre. And the cool thing now is I pretty much read what I want to. I don't have a stack of "serious" books I have to read. I don't have to read everything Doris Lessig wrote. I can read another Saul Bellow novel and not feel guilty (though obviously, I'd feel pretty depressed afterwards.)

So... that one class definitely dissuaded me from a life in academia. I'm out in the real world banking coin and doing what I want.

Now... please feel free to down-vote me because I criticized academia and had the temerity to suggest I was capable of independently constructing a reasonable critique of a 19th century poet.

Since I've been a jerk and focused on the negative, let me say the course that had the greatest POSITIVE influence on me was an Optics course I took. I think I took it the same semester as the lit class above. I didn't go on to an optics career, but the instructor was an exceedingly gifted educator. He was able to present the material in a way that most of the class was right there in the derivations... you felt like you really understood what was going on as he presented it.

There was also a bit of math towards the end that I was a bit shaky on... but again, the examples in class really made it clear. I can't say I remember too much about Optics, but the rudimentary Complex Analysis in the course gave me the confidence to take other courses that used "difficult" math.

Since this prof was accusing you of plagiarism I think you could have appealed this and taken the case to your department’s head of the dean, why didn’t you do that?

I have a feeling that if you articulated your case well enough the prof would have eventually dropped the issue.

I have to say, this seems like it’s mostly on you not defending yourself. Sure the professor was wrong and being an ignorant ass but you shouldn’t have rolled over like that.

You’re right, of coarse, but at that age it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go to the dean. Students are used to the teachers having all the power. My high school junior is still told where she has to sit in class. It’s ridiculous.

He's not right, he's just victim blaming. It's not reasonable to expect college students who are barely adults to have to defend themselves against abusive professors who have a position of power over them.

This was an undergraduate course at a state school. There was no appeals process. When I asked, the remedy was "oh, you can re-take the course from another instructor next semester." But the course wasn't offered again until a year later and the same prof had taught it for the previous five years; there was no indication he wasn't going to teaching it the next year.

Academics can be maybe the largest class of midwits. (This doesn't apply to people like Chomsky, he's a couple standard deviations higher).

As a high-school Valedictorian, I too was set up to do very well in academia, but could tell it would be too hostile and backwards from what I wanted. You're expected to be way too submissive and highly discouraged from original/independent/unpopular thought that conflicts with those already invested. I was excited to get to "real education" after conforming to high school but the rules only tighten, and it's 100x hyper-political.

So I skipped it, self-taught, and started stacking money. No use in casting pearls before swine and try to "fix the system" (and likely just be sacrificed to it, like Semmelweis). To the people trying to fix problems, thank you for choosing to be the martyrs so I don't have to; on the other hand, Max Planck had the right attitude when he said things advance via funerals, so why let it be your funeral?

Academics are good for bagging my groceries and delivering my pizza though, so I am grateful for their contributions. (I'm dunking on them here in jest, but PhDs -- pizza handling and delivery -- are above midwits but just often grossly misapply efforts. Sad to see).

Richard Hamming's "Learning to Learn" lecture series, and "You and Your Research" in particular.

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