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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

Why is this the top link on HN? There are already numerous courses available that will allow you to learn this stuff for free from very highly ranked universities, including Stanford [1] and CMU [2], among others. This will just teach you similar things while also taking your money and giving you a "certificate".

I guess if you want to enter a new field and you need to have some certifiable expertise, this may be a good option. That being said, if the field you plan on entering really does require some documented education, having this certificate will not even put you in the same playing field as those with actual degrees in the field, not to mention those with advanced degrees.

[1]: https://www.coursera.org/course/ml

[2]: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/10701_sp11/lectures.shtml

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The Coursera courses are excellent, but Coursera, Udacity, CMU, etc. are offering a different set of courses than the UW progam. For instance, I don't think any of the current players are offering Hadoop courses... In general, it looks like the UW program is more technology-specific and applied than the other programs.

Personally, I'd prefer the less technology-specific topics already on offer. But, my employer would be much more likely to hire someone with UW's course-mix. So, there should be some demand for that.

And, if we are talking about a career decision, $3,000 is small potatoes compared to the value of getting the right topics.

BigDataUniversity (http://bigdatauniversity.com/) also has free courses and cover hadoop and some other stuff.

The site appears to be push sponsor products and don't really talk about alternatives. Expect to see lots of endorsements of IBM products.

For me, I'm wondering if I'm learning the right material. If I self teach, how do I really know if I'm doing this right unless I get feedback? Also, many hiring managers might not recognize self-taught expertise. I might not want to work for those managers, but unfortunately, this includes a very large swath of potential jobs.

Of course, I wonder if this certificate gets me anywhere as far as employment goes.

> Why is this the top link on HN? >

Because this is the response of the "university system" trying to protect its cash flow. Perhaps you missed it, but udacity said recently it will do some certification program for "minimal costs", which was the beginning of the conversation. Education should be free (Khan style), says Udacity.

The University establishment's response is "here we will give you certificates, but you have to give us three grand."

Money for certificates, knowledge for free.

I would think this would be more appropriate to add to an existing skill set in another field.

Yes, there are some good options available online. However, the certificate program and data science are more than just machine learning.

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