Free Textbooks on Machine Learning | Hacker News Reader

Free Textbooks on Machine Learning

metaoptimize.com

179 pointspkuhad12 comments

"you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library"

I really like that quote from Good Will Hunting. Unfortunately, most of us aren't savants and there's a lot more that goes into learning something than finding one free textbook on it.

I think we're starting to see a lot more free textbooks because we're learning that, when it comes to education, resources are not as important as practice, community, and engagement

I don't see how that follows. Except in a few cases where a paid online course is coupled with a free textbook, why would people realizing textbooks aren't as important mean they would release them as free ebooks?

why would people realizing textbooks aren't as important mean they would release them as free ebooks?

Perhaps because they are realizing that people aren't buying them? I'm sure they don't have to be free though, but rather just not expensive.

Obviously the price of textbooks isn't the ultimate bottleneck for learning stuff. But, there are important difference between free & cheap. Easier access has all sorts of catalyzing effects.

For example, a free textbook can be referred to. "For a more detailed discussion of this read chapter 4 of Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning."

When I was a high school student trying to learn subjects outside what my school taught, free access to books was pretty much necessary.

Hmm, it looks like "Free Textbooks on [choose subject]" submissions are an easy way to get some link karma on HN.

I've seen this happen quite often lately, and usually these kind of posts go up in the ranks pretty quickly -- they also generate near zero discussion :-)

Personally i don't care about Karma on HN and what others Karma is. All i care about is good link to something useful - technically atleast. "Title" of the post matters a lot.

Discussion: guess somebody will post more links to some good technical material or post some useful comments.

Well, I was looking for some implementation for Locality-Sensitive Hashing, then I landed on metaoptimize.com from Stackoverflow, thereby clicking on 'Hottest' gave me this first link, and I know that HN people love this sort of stuff, in fact while submitting this link I had this intuition that it has already been submitted earlier. As far as the title is concerned it is intact from the source, but if you consider this template : Free textbooks on [choose subject] , then the only thing which matters and can attract people is 'subject'.

1) So what? Personally, I don't give a shit about karma and would rather not see it, account age or even usernames, but that's another discussion.

2) Perhaps you're being shortsighted. Popular educational submissions now could seed wider, educated submissions/discussion later. The immediate number of comments doesn't necessarily encompass the entire value of a submission towards discussion on HN.

I'm currently taking Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning, and I'm loving it so far.

Those books might get handy in the future.

[Not Safe For Michigan]

You mean Minnesota, if you are referring to the ban on Free online courses.

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