Ask HN: What is the best online course you took recently? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best online course you took recently?

39 pointsmznmel21 comments

would love to hear your recommendations. What is the best online course you took recently?

This an evergreen IMHO, and it’s very good:

Let’s try cryptohack.org

I really liked this course in radioastronomy: "EPFLx: The Radio Sky I: Science and Observations".

It's really well put together for an introductory course and gives a solid understanding, how radio telescopes work, principles, etc. However, I'm not sure: was the course so wonderful or was it my deep interest in the field contributing to all the enjoyment? :-)

Hope it helps!

If you are at all interested in getting into game development in Unity (so C#) then this is a great course - and free.

Make a full game over a 10 hour youtube video (obviously not in one sitting!).

I've been doing it and am at 5 hours 31 minutes and I think it's absolutely brilliant. I've been a developer for about 10 years and am confident with C# but had never used Unity or made a game outside of little prototypes in eg javascript that would just work in the browser.

Smart Biology has absolutely stunning animations for visualization of biological concepts. The course builds an entire cell from the ground up.

https://www.smart-biology.com/

This seems insanely cool

I took a Native American studies class from my local community college. Was really, really interesting how we basically have a ton of (what I'd consider) small shadow states everywhere, each with their own rich culture and history, but with only limited sovereignty and very little visibility today. It was kinda like learning that we actually have 100 states, not 50. Like states, many tribes have their own laws and governments and economies, and run the gamut from extreme poverty to filthy rich, from no land to huge reservations (but which they rarely own outright).

It was mostly a story about US betrayals and broken treaties and genocide and forced migrations over the centuries, combined with enduring resilience that eventually turned into dual citizenship and also some of the highest rates of US Armed Forces participation. It's a part of US history that was never really discussed much in school for me, and I wish it were.

First of all, native-land.ca lets you see whose land you are on, as well as view tribal websites, when available (it includes groups that have vanished, eg the Hopewells). The one thing I should note about it is that in places like Oklahoma, where land was often promised, it offers no easy way of distinguishing between tribes who historically inhabited the land and those who were promised land there.

I'd also recommend Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. It's a great book on how textbooks distort history and also busts a ton of myths. Also An Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

If your local library doesn't have them/you want to buy them, here are some buying options:

Better World Books (donates books too!): https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/an-indigenou... https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/lies-my-teac...

Bookshop.org (independent bookstores) https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-indigenous-peoples-history-o... https://bookshop.org/p/books/lies-my-teacher-told-me-everyth...

Direct from publishers: https://www.beacon.org/An-Indigenous-Peoples-History-of-the-... https://thenewpress.com/books/lies-my-teacher-told-me

Very cool recommendation. Thank you.

Lots of stuff from MasterClass. It's difficult to explain it to the HN crowd, but if something interests you, it's probably worth it. Most of it goes really deep and into other parts of life as well.

I've watched multiple series on MasterClass, and the quality of both content and production is outstanding. The courses go deep into various subjects and often extend into other aspects of life as well.

What makes them so good? Better than, say, a typical good or excellent YouTube documentary?

First, I think it's been polished up a lot more. Youtubers seem to bias towards quantity because the discovery process is someone searching for a particular topic. Whereas most paid classes will go straight into the most important point. It was a bit of an insight that Kasparov didn't go into opening moves in the opening like other chess tutorials. He goes straight into the most important principles, which is attacking two pieces at once.

Also like any good course, it comes to terms. It assumes that you're experienced. No explanation on economic formulas, but a reminder that economics is about human behaviour, which many master economists can forget. It then reviews why this human behaviour can be reliably modeled, some key things that the rest of the course is built upon. Like in Philosophy, it's reviewed why Socrates is awesome but the one big flaw in Socratic thinking is that it's emotionless. And then goes into Cornel West's principles relating it to humanity and love.

YouTube videos tend to either review these basics too often or assume the viewer knows.

The other thing is it cuts deep, really deep. There's a saying that books are the best investment because for $50, you get a lifespan of experience.

It's the people who have seen all of it. Some are quite old. They cut through all the hype. They've built lots of things and know what works, what doesn't. Sometimes it's a basic principle early on reapplied. Sometimes it's something more complex, but this is broken down into something simpler. Like cellular automata is just calculating the next tile, which can be used to calculate traffic and then a whole city. Or Monte Carlo is just throwing darts and getting a sample and building from there.

This is a terrific and very convincing explanation. Thank you! I think I'll give it a try.

for me it was the unique combination of interesting topics and instructors. Malcolm Gladwell teaches writing, Bill Clinton talks about leadership, Neil deGrasse Tyson teaches scientific communications, among many others ..

I recently took Wharton's Online Behavioral Economics course by Prof. Kessler. It was my first exposure to this topic, and I really enjoyed his teaching style. The content is supported by references to recent published papers and real-world use cases, which helped bridge the gap between theory and practice. The program is not cheap, it costs around $2600, but I found it to be worth the value.

This is superb: https://course.fast.ai/

I've been taking beginner cooking classes from BBC Maestro > https://www.bbcmaestro.com/courses/category/food

High performance SQLite by Aaron Francis is very good, I’m almost 60% through it. I’ve never learned the ins and outs of a database so deeply before.

I did those 100 exercises to learn rust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com