Is it getting harder these days to come up with new similar ideas, maybe due to legal pressures?

Mostly due to intense competition… from people inspired by post like this and information marketing courses.

That said, there is always opportunity for someone with a bit of drive and some specific domain knowledge.

Excellent list, thank you!

Can the Stanford compiler course be self-taught given the online material? What's missing?

I've seen it available on Coursera. And a lot of the current material is available online. But I tried the Coursera one awhile ago and got stuck.

I'm finishing a CS degree but there's no dedicated compiler course here.

I like Peter Thiel's quote: A-B testing only works if you have a billion years (from Darwin)

Is linear algebra useful to learn for distributed systems?

I'm taking graph theory next semester and wondering what else might be useful. I took a distributed systems course already and we used no math at all.

Definitely, may be not directly, but it lies at the heart of software engineering(or more appropriately computer science). It helps with thinking differently, for example I don’t know if ndergrad courses teach distributed search algorithms using eigen vectors and values, but it helps to understand invariants and transformations better.

These are great. I wonder why he didn't just handwrite the notes. These are much better, but they seem like they would take a long time unless you can type latex quickly.

He, infamously, wrote these notes realtime in lectures.

To add, here is an interesting resource on how one might go about doing that using Vim and LaTeX:

https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

This is fantastic. Writing notes has always been a bugbear of mine, because 1) my handwriting is terrible and 2) writing notes takes me out of the lecture.

It seems like this is more than fast enough to keep up with the lecture and have something to review properly after the lecture is over.

>> These lec­ture notes — in­clud­ing fig­ures — are made while at­tend­ing the lec­ture and have not been edit­ed af­ter­wards.

This is truly incredible to me.

What kind of math is involved in building a faster database? Genuinely curious. I would guess maybe linear algebra, indirectly.

Not at all. I'd highly recommend CMU's 15-445/645 Intro to Database Systems course (sponsored by Snowflake lol) because they put all their lectures online on YouTube [1]! Here's what's involved in making fast databases from the syllabus [2]:

This course is on the design and implementation of database management systems. Topics include data models (relational, document, key/value), storage models (n-ary, decomposition), query languages (SQL, stored procedures), storage architectures (heaps, log-structured), indexing (order preserving trees, hash tables), transaction processing (ACID, concurrency control), recovery (logging, checkpoints), query processing (joins, sorting, aggregation, optimization), and parallel architectures (multi-core, distributed). Case studies on open-source and commercial database systems are used to illustrate these techniques and trade-offs. The course is appropriate for students that are prepared to flex their strong systems programming skills.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjbohkNBWQs_...

[2] https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2020/syllabus.html

Oof... CMU courses directly sponsored by Snowflake. Gross.

Please elaborate? I can see a lot of ways a sponsored course could go badly, but I can't immediately see which ones apply here.

I'm not qualified to evaluate this particular course. But any time there is a corporate sponsor of a course, it provides strong incentives to the professor to not harm that sponsor at a minimum. If there's a methodology that the professor would like to teach, but that sidesteps, or calls into question, the sponsor's main offering, then that content is in jeopardy. The corruption will always take root given enough time, so that's why editorial and advertising, or academic content and corporate sponsors, etc. should always be at arm's length. Snowflake should give money to CMU to fund "database-related research and teaching" and the university should decide what to do with it. There's still a possibility of improper influence, but it's harder to achieve. This is particularly bad because it's CMU and not University of Phoenix... CMU is in the highest echelon of computer science universities, so it's sad to see it so debased.

What if Kodak sponsored an imaging class in 1990... what do you think they would have said about film vs. digital photography?

A lot of ML classes at CMU (and probably other prestigious campuses) are sponsored by AWS or GCP through cloud credit donation, including the popular Cloud Computing class. Is that any different ?

Not really. Cloud computing has a lot of benefits, but a lot of risks and drawbacks. Who is sponsoring a class to teach about those? About keeping users’ data private by building your own infrastructure? CMU is actively tilting their students, who are the top CS students in the world, towards cloud computing, based on the choices of these sponsors.

Sounds kind of conspiratorial.

I think any increase in educational content is good, even if ‘bad actors’ are funding it.

Bad actors funding it always leads to bad actors writing it. Then it's hard to argue that an increase in its quantity is good.

Best courses for mathematical maturity besides the standard CS ones? I'm thinking Algebra, or maybe Real Analysis.

Yeah both are good. Basically anything that forces you to prove a lot of theorems that look trivial (but are not easy to prove) is good because they build up a system from small theorems. Back in school we use Rudin for Real Analysis and it's a good textbook. But I'd recommend taking a class if you are still in university because Math is a bit tricky for self study IMO. If you already graduated maybe follow some MOOC.

I'd actually recommend Number theory if you want more fun or if you are interested in Cryptography which is related to CS. Elementary Number Theory throws you tons of questions that even a toddler can understand but you might hit bam head on walls for nights to prove them.

Thanks, I'm doing a Masters now and I was planning on taking Number Theory and Abstract Algebra next term. I took mathematical cryptography this term and it got me interested in more related math.

That's pretty much enough for anyone who wants to have Math Maturity. Good luck!

Lately it's been math majors. Zoom and Stripe founders were math majors.

Thank you! I really needed this.