securitylectures
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2016–2020
47:20 · 171K views · Aug 26, 2012
The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.
HN regularly recommends Hamming's lecture series as a fascinating, wisdom-rich course on how to approach hard technical problems and a career, often preferred to the book.
6 comments from Hacker News
I love programming, but never got the hang of Mathematics due to various reasons. Failed a big project as a solo programmer long time ago, when I was 17, because I could not create the necessary mathematical model and no help was available, with everything else completed, infrastructure, web site/interface database etc. Soon afterwards set off on a different career path, but always kept an intimate relationship with programming, doing some both at work and for fun at home. Recently, after watching R.W. Hamming lectures and reading his book "Art of Doing Science and Engineering" [1] [2] decided that I would try learning mathematics again. I found it really hard to do. There are so many implicit assumptions, so much ground that is not covered. I was about to give up again, when I found a book [3] by retired computer science professor, who seemed to have written it specifically for me! it really felt that way. Now I recommend it to almost everyone, especially tech-savvy people. I am no longer afraid of mathematics, with the help of this book, and great advice by Hamming, I am finally "getting it". If you find learning new programming languages easy, but struggle with mathematics, check it out! The book is not aimed at teaching you mathematics, rather, it teaches you those missing pieces, that almost every other book either assumes you already know, or describes vaguely and badly, gives you context and valuable advice. To me it almost feels like it is teaching you a functional pr
Sapolsky - Biology of Human Behavior 25 lectures [LINK] It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge ("buckets" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur. Hamming - Learning to Learn 32 lectures this video The famous "You and your research" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinating. History of computers, AI, codes, n-space, digital filters etc etc. Mainly it's great seeing how his mind works, his thinking style. (I've since read a few of his books, and I love how they're soaked with practical experience, in the same way these talks are. It's all stuff he's lived .)
If your are interested in learning hard subjects, I highly recommend Richard Hamming's wonderful course The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn [1], and the related book [2] [1] this video [2] [LINK]
I love all his books - you get the know-how, not just know-that. But the complete Learning to Learn lectures are on youtube, which is even better: this video
These are encoded with Speex, the precursor to opus. If you actually want to download the audio, you can use youtube-dl to get opus encoded audio-only recordings directly: > youtube-dl -F this video [youtube] this video Downloading webpage [youtube] this video Downloading video info webpage [info] Available formats for this video format code extension resolution note 249 webm audio only DASH audio 51k , opus @ 50k, 16.97MiB 250 webm audio only DASH audio 57k , opus @ 70k, 17.50MiB 171 webm audio only DASH audio 99k , vorbis@128k, 31.57MiB 251 webm audio only DASH audio 106k , opus @160k, 32.55MiB 140 m4a audio only DASH audio 132k , m4a_dash container, mp 4a.40.2@128k, 43.56MiB 160 mp4 194x144 144p 69k , avc1.4d400c, 30fps, video on ly, 10.50MiB 278 webm 194x144 144p 86k , webm container, vp9, 30fps, video only, 22.85MiB 133 mp4 322x240 240p 121k , avc1.4d400d, 30fps, video on ly, 17.77MiB 242 webm 322x240 240p 153k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 26.6 1MiB 18 mp4 352x262 small , avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2@ 96k, 114. 86MiB 43 webm 640x360 medium , vp8.0, vorbis@128k, 136.89MiB (b est) The lowest quality version (opus @ 50k) is around 17mb compared with this author's 1.5mb speex version.