Hacker News .hnnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | freigeist's commentslogin

I like Udacity's new focus on courses designed by companies.

Traditional education is far too detached from what is required in industry, and has trouble keeping up with the pace of innovation.


Funny, as I have found most of the newer courses seriously lacking any tangible depth or usefulness (Intro to Hadoop/MapReduce took a few hours and barely covered the basics). The old Artificial Intelligence or Parallel Programming are probably some of the best on the site.


That's my general impression as well. That's why I didn't get a master in CS rather a MBA which is kind of relaxing and fun (my company offered for my master degree, otherwise I'd never go... ). Pretty much all CS master courses not that much in depth in comparison to an engineering master degree. And all these tech degree are quite "generic", which greatly reduce their usefulness in real life.

I feel like graduate school are for people who do not know what they want or interested in at the moment. Once they do, you already locked up in that degree plan, and have no time to go ahead implement the idea.

I much prefer to take classes from edX-like course education sites which I'm not obligated to anything. Once I feel I got a hang of this new field, I can just go and do my stuff.


The newer courses seriously lacking any tangible depth or usefulness

Interesting. I have to admit that I didn't participate in one of the newer coures yet.

Sure, good ideas != good execution.


Ha, yeah, very funny.


Selling something may not create value, but it does realize it.

I like PG's distinction of wealth (i.e. value) and money: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

So, while selling realizes a monetary gain, it does not necessarily create wealth also.

Here is why I still think it does create wealth:

* there is economic value in allocating resources efficiently

* (non-monetary) user acquisition increases the value of network effect driven products

* money goes to work when infused into a productive company (instead of being idle, money is invested in wealth creating assets)


Teaching myself, I found the following resources helpful:

* Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

* Steve Huffman's Web Development Class: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253

* Balaji Srinivasan's Startup Engineering Class: https://www.coursera.org/course/startup


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: