Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some of the best university courses available online for free?

399 pointscurious1690 comments

The course topics can be anything.

Herb Gross's ultra-classic old-school chalkboard delivery of "Calculus of Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra" should not be missed:

https://youtu.be/BOx8LRyr8mU

It turns out he also produced a complete series on the precursor material, "Single Variable Calculus" as well, which I only just now discovered:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-18-006-calculus-revisited-si...

This professor has a great delivery and a ton of enthusiasm for the subject material, (but you can't just watch it, to absorb it you have to take notes, maybe recreate the examples in Python or something).

That cold open joke is amazing. I miss MIT.

Also, that is the best definition of the real numbers I have seen so far

Herb Gross! Love that series. Brings me back to my old days. I actually wrote him an email and he wrote back so kindly

Thank you for taking the time to write to me. It is greatly appreciated. I am extremely pleased that work I did over 40 years ago is now available to help others. I hope you will keep me posted on your progress.

I wish I could be more helpful to you. However you might find it a bit strange to know that the five years I spent at MIT were a pleasant diversion from my career work. More specifically the rest of my teaching career was spent in helping “math phobic” adult learners at community colleges and in prisons learn to cope successfully with arithmetic and basic algebra.

I retired at the age of 75 in 2003 so that I could develop my own website where I am posting my videos, power point presentations and other written material in arithmetic and algebra for anyone to use free of charge. In fact I would be delighted if you found time to look at it and let me know what you think about it. You should feel free to comment in my guestbook if you so desire.

The bad news is that I have virtually no knowledge in the areas of more advanced mathematics. However part 3 of Calculus Revisited which was just posted last week by OCW does have introductory lectures in differential equations, complex variables and linear algebra.

I wish I could be more helpful to you but my hope is that the material that is posted on OCW will give you a good background in your pursuit of higher mathematics knowledge.

I wish you the very best and look forward to hearing from you again, especially if you ever feel that my input can be of help to you.

With warmest regards and best wishes,

Herb

Note the above mentioned website no longer works I removed it - I think it may be hacked, not sure what happened to it :(

He died a few years ago, so probably someone else owns the domain now.

Is it on internet wayback archive?

Ah just realized he passed in May 2020 RIP.

1. Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34591291

2. Ask HN: Recommend me a course on Coursera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22826722

3. Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745042

4. Ask HN: Top Coursera Courses? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245125

Found some mind-expanding, really edifying courses in these thread.

There's also a website dedicated to MOOCs, and some underrated gems are there: Class Central.

There was a recent list in freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/coursera-free-online-cours...

Intro to Database Systems by Andy Pavlo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeYBdghaIjc&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...

MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems by Robert Morris - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQP8WApzIQQ&list=PLrw6a1wE39...

I can absolutely vouch for the 2nd course which is on distributed systems - it’s a gem. It also has lab exercises which are high quality stuff too.

It looks interesting and relevant!

Edit: link to course planning and labs https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html

Syllabus and coursework for the database course: https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2022/schedule.html

It looks really good

OMG I owe me pushing my career to the next level due to Pavlo's course! There's so many technical interviews where I've impressed my interviewer with explaining low-level details of how databases do things. Don't be fooled by the course name though, it's pretty rigorous but so rewarding and practical (especially if you are a data engineer). I give this course an A+ for teaching me about B+ trees in C++ :D

I am quite fond of the three molecular biology courses from MIT on edx [1][2][3]. Not only are the lectures great, but they also have spaced repetition built in. The exercises are often great counterfactual questions that encourage deep understanding.

[1] https://www.edx.org/course/molecular-biology-part-1-dna-repl...

[2] https://www.edx.org/course/molecular-biology-part-2-transcri...

[3] https://www.edx.org/course/molecular-biology-part-3-rna-proc...

Edx should be promoted around the world as the greatest gift the internet delivered!

It was before they sold it to 2U. Such a shame what it has turned into.

Thanks a lot, I was on a path to learn bio/med (there's a coursera bioinformatics minimooc too).

Anybody in computational biology btw ? slack, irc.

MIT's 16.687 - Private pilot ground school. If you want to become a private pilot or start your career, this is the place to begin. The professors are approachable and the content is comprehensive. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-687-private-pilot-ground-scho... all of the videos for the lectures are available on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63cUdAG3v31...

Thanks for this, I haven't flown in 14 years and was looking to get back into it. This is perfect for a refresher.

"The Making of Modern Ukraine" by Timothy Snyder: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz...

As Prof. Snyder mentions in his introductory lecture, it is kind of wild that there are zero other classes, at any American university, focusing specifically on Ukraine given its importance in the current geopolitical climate.

Prof. Snyder is a great lecturer and the dynamics that shape Ukraine are fascinating and useful for understanding European history more broadly.

I really liked The Theoretical Minimum lectures on classical and quantum mechanics by Leonard Susskind (suggestion: google up the guy, he’s cool) at Stanford. You can buy books, but the lectures are all free on YouTube.

Classical mechanics playlist can be found here https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL47F408D36D4CF129 and then there’s quantum mechanics available too, should be easily discoverable. And also there’s just https://theoreticalminimum.com/

Not sure if they qualify to be a “true” uni course though, because in this case nobody’s gonna give you assignments and grades :)

ViaScience also has a great playlist on the 'story' of quantum mechanics. I don't have much background in the field or physics in general, but the presentation and explanations in the series are (to the degree possible) followable and an incredible example of straight-forward, no frills, presentation with excellent visualizations. There are long digressions into the actual math and equations as well, though if you're just interested in the history you can skip those. Simply as a story of problem solving and imagination the story of quantum mechanics is fascinating in its own rite.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL193BC0532FE7B02C

That's the one I was searching for. Thank you!

Negotiating Salary by the havard business school: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/negotiating-salary

gilbert strang's linear algebra https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL49CF3715CB9EF31D. he has a few other linear algebra themed courses on there. very good because (1) he’s an incredible teacher, and (2) linear algebra is beautiful

Came here to say this. Go through the actual course methodically though - readings, summaries, problems solutions. It's incredible. Miles ahead of coursera equiv.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06sc-linear-algebra-fall-2011...

Having taken his class in person, I would like to second this. The man is a beautiful thinker and he presents linear algebra in a way that is extremely comprehensive and approachable.

His lectures helped me through my engineering degree. My lecturers made it hard to understand, Gilbert's teaching made it easy to understand.

Yale's American Revolution by Joanne Freeman

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDA2BC5E785D495AB

Her enthusiasm, depth of knowledge and breadth of perspective make for a contagious, enlightening and thought provoking learning experience.

Cryptography I by Dan Boneh.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/crypto (note even though it says crypto it is NOT related to blockchain crypto).

It is related, but only in the sense that crypto currencies are built on cryptography primitives.

Adding to this, before "crypto" became a household term that meant, roughly, "blockchain stuff" it was instead a general term for "cryptography". It's what is (perhaps was) meant when people say not to "roll your own crypto"[0] because it's so easy to get wrong.

[0] Since 2021 this phrase has been expanded to "roll your own crypto scam" and it's only used as an ethical statement. Don't "roll your own crypto scam" because it's wrong. (Okay, maybe this part is just a joke and people don't really say that. It's hard to say for sure.)

crypto on google trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=crypto&h...

Human Behavior https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

Innovation https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sts-081-innovation-systems-for-s...

I simply cannot recommend Sapolsky enough! The man is wonderful. And not just his course, his books are deliciously insightful as well. My only gripe with him is that he speaks continuously without enough pauses. Probably a sign that he knows the materials like the back of his hands but I wish he'd take some time to rest and allow the mortals to catch up.

I will thirdly recommend this course! Very fun and informative

Databases by prof. Widom, from Stanford. Currently the course is at edX, and split into 5 mini-courses. Everything in the course is well thought out and apparently polished and perfected over years of teaching practice and experience. There is nothing useless in the video lectures, and the course homework probes every topic from the lectures.

https://online.stanford.edu/courses/soe-ydatabases-databases

Songwriting, at Coursera, from Berklee College of Music. The guy just sits in a dark room, and explains the process of writing lyrics to songs. He just explains it very well.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/songwriting-lyrics

Seconding Widom's course. It's a fantastic primer on databases. I did it during the first run, back in like 2011 or 2012 or so. I can't imagine it's gotten any less relevant in the intervening years.

I probably owe much of my 10 year software eng career to Jennifer Widom’s open courses on databases that I went through in 2011-2012. I was writing out unions and other queries on yellow notepads while working phones in tech support, devoured the courses, and really boosted my path.

Thirding Widom's course!

It's my go-to recommendation for anyone wanting a strong foundation in SQL.

The Science of the Solar System (Planetary Astronomy)

by Caltech Professor Mike "plutokiller" Brown

https://www.coursera.org/learn/solar-system

I really liked this course. Here's the blurb:

Learn about the science behind the current exploration of the solar system in this free class. Use principles from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology to understand the latest from Mars, comprehend the outer solar system, ponder planets outside our solar system, and search for habitability in our neighborhood and beyond. This course is generally taught at an advanced level assuming a prior knowledge of undergraduate math and physics, but the majority of the concepts and lectures can be understood without these prerequisites. The quizzes and final exam are designed to make you think critically about the material you have learned rather than to simply make you memorize facts. The class is expected to be challenging but rewarding.

It is also taught at Caltech, see https://mikebrown.caltech.edu/teaching/science-solar-system

Jeremy Siskind's jazz piano courses taught out of Fullerton College.

https://jeremysiskind.com/jazzclass/

This is a bit of a cheat because these courses are not free ($50USD for California residents and around $400 for non-CA residents) but they are so good that I had to mention them.

I am nearing the end of the Level II course and have learned so much stuff. They force you to do so many things that you otherwise would not do. Basically, ever week you have to post a video demonstrating what you learned from the previous week. And the video is in a public discussion forum with the other students so there is this incentive to do an extra good job. And he gives great feedback on your assignments.

Hey, I appreciate this post and gave a re-upvote.

Is this course more about composition or performance? I realize jazz is about improv which is a skill I'd like to have.

Hey thanks, it is very hands on and focused more on performance than composition. It covers comping, soloing, playing in different substyles, pretty much everything if you take both courses. Sometimes the units fly by too quickly and you need to note to yourself to revisit a topic and apply it in all 12 keys or apply it to a bunch of Real Book tunes.

I knew I'd pay for recommending a paid course but it's really great and the price is a steal given that Berklee Online courses are around $1500 and private lessons w someone of this teacher's calibre might be $100/hr. I'm not affiliated w the teacher/college at all other than being a student.

All of Michael Sugrue's (former Princeton professor) lectures on YouTube are phenomenal. They single-handedly inspired me to study philosophy. His style is eloquent but off-the-cuff, he is so knowledgeable and ties together the history of philosophy so gracefully that all the lectures left me enraptured.

Example: https://youtu.be/d-vcItYxM9U

Big fan of steve brunton's control bootcamp series. Helped me through my control systems courses greatly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7l8mMjYVE&list=PLMrJAkhIeN...

Great for robotics, or anything where you need to control complex physical systems, from f1 cars to 3d characters in games

Thanks for the recommendation

can second this...also recommend his books

This one is really amazing: Introduction to the Hebrew Bible by Christine Heyes, learnt so much!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyuvTEbD-Ei0JdM...

Open Yale course on the philosophy of death is great.

https://oyc.yale.edu/death/phil-176

University of Helsinki provides free courses on Python, Java, Data Analysis and so on: https://www.mooc.fi/en/

The one I've enjoyed watching more than once: Death with Shelly Kagan, Yale

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2J7wSuFRl8&list=PLEA18FAF1A...

I've started to watch this per your recommendation and one question that popped into my mind with the first few classes, is how does this theory of dualism that differs the soul from the body, withstands the ChatGPT era, where computers start to show signs of consciousness. ie- If consciousness is also a matter of physical matter that can be replicated by machines, is the human soul a real spiritual thing, or created by physical connections in the brain, which is recently simulated by vector and by the amount of parameters in the model.

I wrote something about consciousness as the result of computation (an idea I'm sure is not new, and somewhat related to attention schema theory, even if I disagree with the author of that on determinism), it's a little bit of a mess as I setup the assumptions, but I still think gets the idea across (as did Shelly to some degree, though his primary interest was the implication for the value of such a life, which I continue to fail entirely to make sense of in the continued text, which I don't recommend reading).

http://dusted.dk/pages/thoughts/OnConsciousness.html

You might find it interesting because Shellys lectures inspired me a lot when writing it, and because it touches on the same subject as your are thinking about.

Andrej Karpathy has an introduction to AI series on YouTube that deserves an honorable mention.

https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

I am quite a fan of Andrew Ng's courses on machine learning. Well made, improved over time as he got more experienced, and he is just a likable guy frankly.

MIT: Alexander and Ava Amini http://introtodeeplearning.com/

I've heard only the best things about Andrew Ng's machine learning course but never came around to do it. It is pretty old by now and with the dramatic development in recent times I wonder how relevant it still is?

Apart from the programming exercises being in Matlab (which nobody uses for ML nowadays), the course is still solid. The theoretical concepts and math that the course covers are still relevant and provide a good foundation for someone starting out.

Now it uses Python: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/machine-learning-in...

That's not the course OP is talking about.

The good news is that someone converted the matlab/octave exercise templates into numpy, and published them as jupyter notebooks that can work with the course's auto-grader: https://github.com/dibgerge/ml-coursera-python-assignments

A series of distributed systems courses from UIUC at coursera where you learn about systems design, distributed algorithms, and has you build projects like a distributed DB, implementing algorithms like gossip protocols, etc. in C++:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/cloud-computing

Quantopian introduction to quantitative trading

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRFLF1OxMm_UL7WUWM31i...

MIT 18.S096 Topics in Mathematics w Applications in Finance

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63ctJIEC1Un...

Aswath Damodaran on corporate finance, valuations, investment philosophies

https://www.youtube.com/@AswathDamodaranonValuation/videos

khan academy, a nonprofit with the mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

https://www.khanacademy.org/

Harvards CS50 course changed my life. It was the first course that got through to me about how to code. Without that course and the enthusiasm of Professor David Malan I wouldn’t be where I am now and I’d be stuck falling back on an electrical engineering degree which bores me to tears.

cs50.net

Cryptography I by Dan Boneh (Stanford University)

Programming Languages by Dan Grossman (University of Washington)

Both are on Coursera.

Big +1 to Cryptography I. I didn't finish it completely, but the first ~half satisfied my curiosity about the theory I wanted to know, without getting to a lot of the practical details that I don't need to remember day-to-day.

Dan and Victor also wrote a course book: http://toc.cryptobook.us/

MIT OCW Signals and Systems is excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xaaeop7gJ8&list=PLADC1A1B7F...

Financial Markets by Robert Shiller https://oyc.yale.edu/economics/econ-252

Justice

https://pll.harvard.edu/course/justice?delta=0

Frederic Schuller's course of Gravity and Light, covering General Relativity. It has a few tactical gaps but it will give you everything you could ever practically need.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFeEvEPtX_0S6vxxiiNPrJbLu...

Anyone found a good course on matrix calculus? The OCW course doesn't have any videos:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s096-matrix-calculus-for-mach...

Everything by MIT Open Course Ware

"Awakening from the meaning Crisis" by John Vervaeke

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5e...

Some introduction for uninitiated?

We are experiencing a mental health catastrophe. Anxiety disorders, sadness, and despair are on the rise, and suicide rates are rising across North America, parts of Europe, and other parts of the world. This mental health crisis is caused and exacerbated by problems in the environment and the political system, which are in turn entwined with a deeper cultural historical catastrophe that I refer to as "The Meaning Crisis." It is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives. And there's a feeling of drowning in this old ocean of nonsense. And we need to figure out why this is the case. And what are we going to do about it?

Mentioning a number of folks who have talked in ways that will supply us with the resources we require. We'll discuss ancient figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha Gautama, and the Buddha, as well as present significant figures. We'll discuss people like Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche. We'll discuss Heidegger.

More humanities than STEM but I'm a fan of damn near anything out of Yale's open courses. Personal recommendations are the Introduction to the Theory of Literature w/ Prof. Fry and the recent course on Ukrainian history. Both are fairly intro level in terms of structure but the details and depth don't suffer too badly for it. There's more interesting stuff like a class on Dante's Divine comedy so it really is mostly just a question of navigating the video library.

This website has a long story of teaching tech. Almost every french programmer have made their first step thanks to them. It started with PHP about 15 years ago as leSiteDuZero and became https://openclassrooms.com/en/courses (now available in English) in my opinion the best place to get started on any professional topic. programing language, Career, Management.

I'm looking for a course that uses tools like WinDbg and ETW and memory dumps to diagnose crashes, hangs, etc... It would need to include an introduction to basic assembly language because without that you don't get very far with WinDbg.

I'd like to learn about some of the stuff that Bruce Dawson talks about on his blog: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

There are 2 courses on WinDbg at : https://p.ost2.fyi/

I took the Architecture 1001: x86-64 Assembly course at https://p.ost2.fyi/ and enjoyed solving the last two labs.

Thanks for sharing this.

I really enjoyed the free content on Udacity (https://www.udacity.com/). I'm not sure if it's "university" but their content was presented well and I came away learning new things about math, python and ML.

Stanford, The Fourier Transform and its applications:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1780FAF4A29FE679

Helped me through signals and systems. The lecturer is fantastic.

CS50 is Harvard's introduction to computer science course. It's pretty good. https://cs50.harvard.edu

This one From Yale is really good.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0

5.111x Chemistry by Catherine Drennan on MiT OCW.

CS3510 Algorithms Georgia Tech on Youtube.

This course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZn0GhwjjD4

Also similar courses on the topic from Yale and MIT.

And, all the courses by Aswath Damodaran on YouTube.

edx CS50

edx.org,

ocw.mit.edu

Reply on news.ycombinator.com