
Show HN: HN.Academy – Top online courses recommended by Hacker News users - yaj54
https://hn.academy
======
Dowwie
Going to recommend the most widely taken course at Yale at the moment, which
fortunately is now available as a MOOC on coursera, "The Science of Well
Being": [https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-
being](https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being)

This is a positive psychology course based on work by Seligman et al.

~~~
mattnewport
Would this be Seligman of "none of my positive psychology results replicate"
fame?

~~~
barry-cotter
Do Positive Psychology Exercises Work? A Replication of Seligman et al. (2005)

Results: Repeated measures analyses showed that the PPEs led to lasting
increases in happiness, as did the positive placebo. The PPEs did not exceed
the control condition in producing changes in depression over time.

Conclusions: Brief, positive psychology interventions may boost happiness
through a common factor involving the activation of positive, self-relevant
information rather than through other specific mechanisms. Finally, the
effects of PPEs on depression may be more modest than previously assumed.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Myriam_Mongrain/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Myriam_Mongrain/publication/259956843_Do_Positive_Psychology_Exercises_Work_A_Replication_of_Seligman_et_al/links/5a370f73aca27247ede1c782/Do-
Positive-Psychology-Exercises-Work-A-Replication-of-Seligman-et-al.pdf)

~~~
mattnewport
My point exactly.

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projectramo
This list mostly passes the gut check: the courses near the top are almost
universally high quality, and quite reputable.

Now, why did I say "mostly" and "almost"?

Two reasons:

1\. The best technical courses are on Udacity. You may disagree but I think
enough people would agree that it ought to be somewhere on the list.

2\. Learning to learn is popular but its kind of vacuous. (You may disagree,
and this time I may be in a tiny minority who hold this view). So I think the
sentiment reader might need tweaking.

Still, all in all, a great resource. I am bookmarking it and am glad you did
this.

~~~
FabHK
> The best technical courses are on Udacity.

Is that universally agreed on? The Udacity courses I had looked at (full stack
development, AI for self driving cars) were good and insightful, but somewhat
half-baked, and not as good as edX or Coursera.

~~~
mojoe
I'm not a fan of Udacity, mainly because I paid them $800 for a single course
(the first in the self-driving car series) and then they blocked all my access
to the course content because I didn't finish the projects in the allotted
time. I was hoping to finish later because my work schedule changed, but they
were completely inflexible. I should have read the fine print. The course
content was OK, but I don't think they have great policies.

~~~
SilasX
I was frustrated with Udacity for the same reason, plus, their ostensible
expertise is _way_ overstated [1]. The entire reason I'm paying for a course
is to be able to bounce arbitrary questions off experts. They provide people
who are still in the fake-it-till-you-make-it stage that's so popular.

[1] Earlier comment where I asked a basic question that went beyond the
understanding of the literal face of the course.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18596450#18601298)

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yaj54
Hey HN,

Check out HN.Academy and let me know what you think. It's the result of mining
the HN archives for references to online courses and then ranking them and
displaying all references in one place.

Ranking currently takes into account HN stories (points) and comments
(sentiment, karma, estimated points).

I had started with a much broader set of course providers, but Coursera ended
up swamping the rankings of pretty much all the other providers. edX is also
in the rankings with a few courses. I plan to add more providers but as of now
none of them will impact the top rankings.

If you were looking to start a new learning endeavor in the new year... here
ya go.

Best, Yaj

~~~
jczhang
Interesting, wonder if that's because Coursera is perceived and thought of as
better in general or is it due to other reasons such as general popularity.
May make sense to have some kind of normalization to unbias it if the latter.

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gregw134
You're missing fast.ai for machine learning. It's been mentioned or linked
700+ times on HN.

~~~
yaj54
I'll need to take the fast.ai course first so that I can upgrade my course-
extraction-from-text code from regexes to deep learning. ;-)

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ccwilson10
I'd throw this resource in the ring since it has the most material out of
anything on the list:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230314)

Awesome page, though!

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hyperpallium
Is there a sort of "axiomatic high school maths" course, that builds up from
the basics without handwaving? i.e. that covers the actual reasons and proofs
for things, not just the mechanics/tricks/techniques. The way geometry is
taught.

Some might be beyond high school level, like fundamental theorems of
arithmetic (unique prime factorization) and algebra (polynomial
factors/zeros). There's also non-integer exponents, defining reals etc.

All this stuff is used in High School but must be taken _on faith_. Good for
believers, bad for skeptics.

Or is this just _Mathematics 101_? [my engineering maths didn't cover it]

~~~
rjblackman
Not a course but I believe

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A.D. Aleksandrov, A.N.
Kolmogorov , M.A. Lavrent'ev

may cover this in book form. (FWIW I have not read this, but intend to at some
point)

~~~
sonabinu
It’s an amazing book! And very well written. Totally understandable!

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qwerty456127
What about high-quality intros and tutorials you can complete in less time
[than a serious academic course] to acquire practically reasonable
understanding of particular technologies/subjects?

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smarttack
You know these are all affiliate links?

~~~
_lpa_
I'm curious - do you think affiliate links are a problem, and if so, why?

~~~
GrumpyCoder
I have seen lots of udemy affiliate link spam on "learn programming" type
subreddits. They use alt-accounts for fake reviews and make affiliate links
looks like regular links. I'm okay with them as long as there is transparency
and don't start a spam race.

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hyperpallium
The calculus course appears twice (same eventual URL), with different HN
citations.

> Calculus: Single Variable Part 1 - Functions Coursera · University of
> Pennsylvania [https://www.coursera.org/learn/single-variable-
> calculus](https://www.coursera.org/learn/single-variable-calculus)

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maroonblazer
I took the one and only Linear Algebra course cited in this list and did not
care for it. I found Strang's MIT course on the subject much better. I seem to
recall reading other's had the same experience.

Perhaps we need a separate index that's just YT (and Vimeo?)?

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tyagis
The pop-up to subscribe every 2 seconds is extremely off-putting. Made me want
to just close the tab multiple times. The curated content only kept me from
doing it.

Edit: Nice work! Next steps would be to sort and collate similar topics.

~~~
yaj54
Ick, that is a bug. Mind sending me details on your browser setup? yaj@the-
domain-of-the-linked-story.

------
taherchhabra
I like the idea. Would be interesting to see Gadgets recommended by HN users,
Travel destinations recommended by HN users, Books recommended by HN users,
Games recommended by HN users Movies recommended by HN users

~~~
RustingSword
As for books, there's already Hacker News Books
[https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-
news](https://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news)

------
nl
Recommendations need to decay by date more.

Eg, the Johns Hopkins University "Data Science" course isn't worth doing
(unless maybe it has been updated?), and note that most of the comments are
pre-2017.

It's an R course, but it teaches pre-Tidyverse R.

Also it's not a great course in that the assignments aren't synced to the
lectures - you need to know lots of stuff which haven't been touched on to
complete the assignments at each stage. (Source: I did it in 2014 or 15)

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feluso
I've been looking for something like this, thank you a lot! I wonder if
something similar exists for HN book recommendations?

~~~
james_s_tayler
Just Google HN book threads.

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time0ut
Awesome work!

It'd be neat if there was a search feature that let us search by subject or
keyword or any other course metadata.

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aashu_dwivedi
I am curious to know how you built it, do you keep polling for the new a items
on the HN? How do you figure out if it's a course? Do you use regexes for it
or something more sophisticated / complecated?

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fhars
Looks like the list counts complaints that a course does not exist as a
recommendation, or why is the Crypto II course on coursere in the list? What
was the original start date, September 2014 or 2013?

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mrhappyunhappy
Any list like this one for finance / investing material? Thanks for the
resource - will be put to good use. I’d love it if there were categories for
paid, non-paid and overall most recommended.

~~~
arvinsim
Chalk me as one of those interested too. I decided that it was worth learning
mastering that domain rather than continue on expanding my technical
programming skills.

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xchaotic
The biggest concern I have with this is that it promotes what's already
popular to the top.

This means Blockchain and crypto are there and I doubt that's the most
valuable thing you can learn this year.

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sandov
I didn't even know there was an academy TLD. Is it saturated yet?

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paraschopra
I’m planning to enroll in statistical mechanics course. Anyone else wants to
team up and study as a group? We may finish faster that way. Email me:
paras1987 <at> gmail

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heyjudy
I'm looking for, and haven't yet found, a practical-as-possible, intermediate
language design |& compiler design MOOC video course. Ideas appreciated.

~~~
yahnu
I haven't taken these courses yet but Automata Theory is in my todo list.
These are offered through Stanford Lagunita (Stanford's implementation of
openedX)

* Compilers: [https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/Compilers/...](https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/Compilers/Fall2014/about)

* Automata Theory: [https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/course-v1:ComputerScie...](https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/course-v1:ComputerScience+Automata+SelfPaced/about)

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state_less
Recommendations and upvotes are a neat little signal to make sticky content
rise to the top. This site is a great example.

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DarthMader
I wonder if anyone ever made a list of paid only courses worth it. Now that
would be really novel.

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mettamage
Hmm... where are Gilbert Strang his courses? He is recommended quite a bit,
isn't he?

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samstave
It would be helpful to be able to filter between free and paid off the main
list.

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Asparagirl
This is a useful site, but you should probably disclose on it somewhere that
you're getting affiliate revenue from every person clicking through and
signing up for Coursera courses through your links...

~~~
yaj54
I do, on every course page. Big grey box.

~~~
Asparagirl
I missed that and I am an idiot. Mea culpa.

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ramon
AWS, Udemy and others also offer a bunch of free coursers.

It's incredible how these free courses are rolling out.

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jefflombardjr
Love this! Thank you!

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lbj
Where's SICP ?

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wpmoradi
This is awesome!

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reckemal
thanks!

