
Show HN: Watch Stanford CS Lectures Together - ___karim
https://www.classroomies.com/?4
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babl-yc
Nice work!

I almost entirely prefer pre-recorded classes to live ones, except for being
able to meet classmates and study together. You can watch at your own
discretion, change playback speed, etc.

I think there is a big opportunity with ideas like this to make online
lectures feel less isolated.

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___karim
Totally agree!

For those who want to join, you can do so with the code LY9114

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charlysl
Why restrict it to Stanford? Why not include MIT, Berkeley, etc? BTW these are
not CS lectures (all this startup stuff is not CS, like say algorithms, os
internals, database systems, ML theory, etc)

EDIT: I like the idea very much, but not in its current form.

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eganist
This is strictly a content issue. I wouldn't apply demerits to the concept
based on the selection of content available.

It should expand, but forced limitations on available content make sense -- it
concentrates students into "rooms" while the site's traction is still light,
allowing the desired levels of collaboration to come to fruition. Too much
content while the site is small risks running only one or two students per
room, which keeps the true purpose of the site from showing itself and may
even defeat the concept before it has a chance to thrive.

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pasabagi
I'd love this - except, where's the CS? I just see a lot of business/startup
stuff, which I'm not interested in.

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Bluestrike2
Judging by the description, it looks like it alternates between CS and startup
lectures.

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kencausey
I'm simply judging from the titles but I also don't see anything that directly
relates to CS. Could you mention a couple of titles that you think relate to
CS?

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Bluestrike2
The schedule looks to be only for a single day, none of which are CS related.
However, the homepage does state:

> Watch & discuss pre-recorded Startup & CS lectures from Stanford together,
> in real-time.

Schedules are updated every Monday and Thursday, so I'm guessing there will be
CS lectures listed in the future given the description.

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ukulele
I like that you're building something in this vein, but the benefit is not
immediately clear to me.

Has it been your experience that talking with others _during_ a lecture is
helpful?

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___karim
It is. Going deeper into particular topics or having folks share additional
resources has been incredibly valuable. The lectures serve as conversation-
food and not the 'core' of the experience here. That's the premise of the
experiment.

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mikepurvis
This would be kind of like watching someone play a videogame on Twitch—
indeed, you could just about implement this as a Twitch channel where people
turn up and watch a taped lecture together.

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fjsolwmv
Twitch has this for Bob Ross painting shows

[https://m.twitch.tv/bobross/profile](https://m.twitch.tv/bobross/profile)

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donkey-hotei
This is awesome ! As a largely self-educated engineer I recall feeling (and
still do) that most of what I was missing from taking online courses was the «
lecture hall » feeling, having discussion immediately afterwards, &c. Nice
work !

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mwambua
This is cool! I think it's always useful to see how other people react to the
stuff you learn. Do you plan to loop lectures perpetually?

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maximp
Great idea, and love how you've integrated advertising. I love that there's a
schedule - following the paradox of choice, I hate choosing, and you have a
good selection of videos.

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gingerbread-man
Voting on the schedule might be a good idea, especially if voting power was
weighted based on how much each user has engaged.

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tomsmeding
Brings in a whole can of worms: how do you measure engagement? Is it gameable?
What happens if someone games the system and gets by far the largest weight in
the system?

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___karim
Use invite code: LY9114

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rhokstar
As we're watching Sam Altman on Startups, a group of 4 or 5 people (including
myself) have been doing collaborative note taking on Google Docs. Its fun to
do! Maybe this is something the devs can bake into their platform as a
feature...

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nyxtom
This reminds me of twitch in some ways which I feel is a good thing. The use
of a schedule is a nice add in to give the appearance of a channel or live
stream yet with something to look forward to or schedule appropriately.

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e12e
I think you just made me realize the value a lot of people get from twitch
(and even YouTube, to a certain extent). Which, as a bit of a text fascist,
I've had trouble grasping / not really been interested in.

From the love (young) people have for live media/streams - and research into
the negative effect of recorded vs live, in person lectures - it seems obvious
that "twitch for lectures" will be huge.

Probably not something I'll like any more than unscripted TV series, but
probably still huge.

Then again, I do seem to relate to chatting on irc while watching regular
scheduled TV (like a buffy episode).

So I do see social/group-interactive viewing as something that'll be great.

Even see this working for stuff like video courses in 3d/game design,
development - like an art class. The video is the lecturer, and you can see
what 3d models/apps/.. your fellow students create (and how). And maybe even
copy/"fork" in real-time.

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beeks10
I think this is great. Reminds me of Twitch.tv, except for academia. Good
work!

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rubberroad
This is very cool. Can I ask how you keep the video synced for all clients?

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oplav
It looks like the page is embedding a YouTube video with a specified start
time in an iframe, with that specified start time based on when the page was
loaded.

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russellbeattie
It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page. I have
no idea without doing a Google search what time it is in UTC. Also, is the
current class title displayed somewhere?

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devmunchies
> It's really not that hard to provide local times on the schedule page

yes, but it IS hard to remember every little thing when launching a new
service. try giving feedback with a little better tone. its beta software.

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kipdotcom
Nice. A quick suggestion: would you allow users to select there time zones and
then show the schedule based on a user's timezone?

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afarrell
This is great!

Can you do this for youtube videos so that I can use this for conference
talks?

(Or so that I can watch videos with my brother back in the US)

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kamalkishor1991
I also created something similar. People were really interested at first. But
we learned after sometime that people loose interest when learning with
strangers. We could not retain people after a week of sign up. Although this
is bit different so might work. Good luck to people who created this.

~~~
e12e
Wouldn't part of the point be to introduce people, so they're not strangers
anymore, after a while?

Encourage chat/discussion in scheduled breaks?

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Gracana
Can't scroll to the bottom of the schedule on chrome / Android. It only goes
down to something about Dropbox (it's cut off.) Is this the wrong schedule
entirely? Do the CS lectures come after the point where it stops scrolling?

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bharadwajk
Looks really interesting. Could possible be something like facebook live or
insta live where you could still have prerecorded stuff available through
links as well and have live comments based on time stamps through the lecture
videos.

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ybrah
I would love something like this integrated into VRChat

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baby
I love it! I've been watching some, but still haven't received an invitation
and thus cannot take part in the chatroom :(

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alexknowshtml
Any interest in selling/licensing a whitelabel version of this that I could
load my own videos into/control access to?

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ladybro
I'm working on something like this right now. Shoot me an email if you want to
chat: brett@mindstamp.io

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HiroshiSan
Love this! :D excited to see where it goes.

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ertand
Good job! Is there a way to engage with other students after the class? Would
be nice to ask follow up questions.

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wpasc
Anyone else getting a 500 error?

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rapt
Click to unmute doesnt do anything on the ipad right now. Awesome work tho!

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superkarolis
Awesome concept, well implemented! Might use it.

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matte_black
What’s the end goal?

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spekulatius2410
Nice work! :)

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rambossa
Received an early look at this through my subscription to Fairpixel's free &
open-source logos newsletter: [http://logodust.com/](http://logodust.com/) ...
Awesome company

btw the email stated it was for viewing "how to start a startup" lectures, not
CS

