Ask HN: Pmarca's advice – BitCoin/BlockChain and AI/ML in 2 hours a day

[hackaflocka]

Before vanishing from twitter, Pmarca, my favorite tweeter, posited that if he had to start from scratch today he would focus his energies on learning BitCoin/BlockChain and AI/ML.

I want to start devoting 2 hours each day (starting tomorrow), total, to studying BitCoin/BlockChain and AI/ML. No specific goal apart from that at the moment. I trust that the eventual goal will emerge once I start getting competent at these.

Six months ago, I got started on the Princeton/Coursera BitCoin/BlockChain course but it sort of overwhelmed me. I think I watched a total of about 2 to 3 hours of video. Maybe I need to do some kind of "pre-requisite" beforehand?

Also, I have played around with ML... mostly with CART, using the the GUI R tool Rattle and other tools such as Weka and Orange.

I know a little Python and R, and a fair amount of JavaScript and PHP. I can set up a LAMP server.

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Hacker News: suggest a curriculum for me so that I can pick up BitCoin/BlockChain and AI/ML on 2 hours of study a day. Give me specific tuts, courses, URLs in the order I should tackle them in.

[andirk]

I am happy to join you in that. My main goal is to understand what the "mathematical puzzles" are when mining. It looks more like a guessing game to me.

[hackaflocka → andirk]

So I've been feverishly researching both topics, and how to learn them. I've decided to take these 2 courses from Coursera (starting soon, in Oct 2016). Both are free, and for the ML course, one can pay after completing it and get a certificate (there's no certificate for the Bitcoin course).

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency#

Hope you too will join these, and post updates on this thread right here.