Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive? - <AUTHOR> Tomorrow UC Berkeley is removing all of their lecture videos from Youtube. Thousands of hours of content will be lost to the public. (This has already been discussed at length on HN.)
I'm in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically available. (This is a throwaway account b/c I don't want to run afoul of any legal issues.)
What I have so far:
- CS61 Series (61A, 61B, and 61C)
- CS162 Operating Systems (Kubiatowicz)
- CS164 Programming Languages & Compilers (Hillfinger)
- CS186 Intro to Database Systems (Hellerstein) <comment><USER2> All of it has already been archived (EDIT: thanks to the hard work and quick response of ArchiveTeam and /r/DataHoarder).

[edit: link to Archive Team project-specific page removed to reduce excessive load; replaced with Archive.is link below]

[https://archive.is/D1Ail](https://archive.is/D1Ail)

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, if Berkeley requests that the Archive Team remove their videos, I assume they would comply? There must be a reason they want their videos taken down, and could presumably use the threat of legal action to have them removed from any archives? Why choose to take down videos being hosted at no cost on YouTube if you're willing to allow them to be "pirated" (aka preserved) elsewhere?

<comment><USER2> I don't speak for Archive Team or Archive.org. Archive.org has DMCA exemptions but will comply with robots.txt access restrictions post-archival.

I operate independently as a digital archivist, providing support when possible. I will keep my own copy in cold storage as long as I'm alive, outside of the US jurisdiction but accessible globally.

The reason they're being removed is ADA subtitle compliance and the cost/effort associated with that (cheaper to purge/remove access rather than comply). Is UC Berkeley going to pursue people attempting to preserve knowledge without their consent? That's up to them. They would, of course, be unsuccessful.

<comment><USER3> For crying out loud. I understand the importance of accessibility, but when complying with mandatory accessibility regulations results in _everyone_ losing access to educational information... well, everyone loses.

Since you can't beat regulation, the real course of action here should not be to archive the videos where nearly nobody will find them, but rather to elicit donations to produce the subtitles. Also, if the content is so extensive, it should probably find a home on a dedicated site other than YouTube which may one day also disappear. It is such a shame to have educational resources essentially become part of the deep web - your average user can find this content on YouTube, but has very little chance of ever discovering it in an archive.

If Berkeley has not already postponed to the maximum extent possible, I would happily donate to the cause. I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to comply.

<comment><USER2> > but rather to elicit donations to produce the subtitles

I intend to engage someone at Youtube/Google to use their internal automated subtitling system and open source/release the captions along with the existing content [1]. (Why UC Berkley didn't use this, I'm unaware)

In the event the above is not possible, I'll roll my own when time permits (voice recognition with distributed human verification).

> I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to comply.

Agreed. Hence, archival.

[1] [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> Automated subtitles without human review of every spoken phrase likely doesn't comply with regulation. It would be very poor quality to have anything transcribed incorrectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that those same considerations apply here.

If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they couldn't give away these videos for free without e.g. subtitles -- are you equally against this effort? Because it accomplishes the exact same thing: the availability of some useful education videos that are unusable by (some) people with disabilities.

If you're not, how do you reconcile that? Your position seems to be something bizarre like:

A) "Yeah, Berkeley should release free, deaf-unusable videos, but gosh darnit, they better well do it through back channels, because we need to respect the disabled."

B) "It's great to release the videos, as long as someone other than Berkeley endorses and/or hosts them, because we need to respect the disabled."

I just don't see a way to reconcile them, and yet I get the impression that some posters here do hold both views (the judgment was justified, and this effort should not be halted/is good).

Edit: Here are the discussions I am referring to, courtesy of BenElgar:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764)

<comment><USER5> The ADA already reconciles these viewpoints, by allowing for people who would otherwise be in violation to claim exemption because complying would cause an undue burden. So we shouldn't expect a random person on the internet to pay for captioning 20,000 videos, because that would be (presumably) ridiculously outside their means. On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.

<comment><USER6> It's fun to assume things!

Anecdotal evidence I hear from UC Berkeley employees is that there just is no money to be had. The real solution is spend the money to make the videos ADA compliant. I don't know how much that would be but UC Berkeley isn't interested in spending the amount it would take, whatever it is.

The multi hundred dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser like 20/20 hindsight, considered a disaster. The football team's management has a new scandal every few months. The team's record is abysmal. The theory was that spending money to develop the football team results in greater alumni donations.

In UC Berkeley's defense, the state of California and the legislature is profoundly uninterested in funding the UC system at the levels it used to. The university has to get money from somewhere. Renovating Memorial Stadium was a part of that.

<comment><USER7> > The multi hundred [million] dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser > like 20/20 hindsight, considered a disaster

Is it though? The Pac-12 distribution per school is over $25m/yr, and despite lagging the Big-10 and SEC, it's only expected to go up. Given the efforts of the conference to launch the new network and compete with those other conferences, it's likely that there's a certain facility level expected of their member schools. If there was any chance that Cal would be dropped from the conference without the renovations, they start to seem a lot more reasonable...a 5-7% APY isn't really that bad.

Also, while fielding a competitive team might have been a nice benefit, there's at least one other significant benefit I see to retrofitting a stadium that sits directly on top of an earthquake fault line. See if you can guess what it is :)

But to your point, it does seem disingenuous to talk about money spent on a revenue-generating portion of the school when trying to justify the need to spend in ways that are revenue negative. Even considering the abysmal record and scandals, the football team brings in money to the University. If I were an AD at a University, I'd be very worried about football-related liability when former players start to experience the effects of CTE, but until those lawsuits start happening, it's natural that Universities will keep spending large amounts of money on Football.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a former UC Berkeley student, I just want to add that besides the public lecture videos, there are also many private, unlisted course videos on YouTube from the last couple years (after it became an issue). The Archive Team has missed these videos as they're only accessible via UC Berkeley's student portal if you're a student in the class. The Archive Team and current/former students need to work together here to retrieve the private YouTube playlists and download the videos.

<comment><USER9> It was mentioned on reddit as well that there are videos on iTunes that are not on YouTube and that the iTunes videos will be removed as well.

<comment><USER10> He mentioned private videos on YouTube, not the iTunes.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and the person you are replying to is pointing out there are videos on iTunes that aren't on YouTube. So if someone wants to fully archive the content, then the iTunes videos also need to be archived.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but did you read The Archive Team initiative? They are aware of the iTunes courses, but they aren't of the private YouTube videos.

<comment><USER9> No one (including my parent comment) equated the private YouTube videos with the iTunes videos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not CS related, but I've found these courses to be of great value:

\- Sociology 150A (Robb Willer) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edfKMAePWfE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edfKMAePWfE)

\- Geography C110 (Richard Walker) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5PdPZ_w0&list=PL4rxxS6x1H...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5PdPZ_w0&list=PL4rxxS6x1HEaN670KGN4pGdq_- PonwT_L)

\- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents (Richard Muller) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0)

There's also an audio course on Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch, if you're interested. Now seems to be available only on iTunes.

[https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...](https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=391538994)

<comment><USER13> Is there a chance that you or somebody you know have a copy of the Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch you mentioned? It seems like the archival efforts missed this one. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure which of the following are actually available on Youtube, but here are the courses I enjoyed the most and I think are the most valuable as a CS major:

\- CS161 Security (Wagner preferably)

\- CS189 Machine Learning (Shewchuk)

\- CS170 Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems

Not a comprehensive list, just my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER15> That is a great list to have so far! On top of that, I have to highly recommend CS168: Internet Architecture (preferably with Scott Shenker), CS 161: Computer Security (with either Wagner, or Weaver), and CS169: Software Engineering (with Armando Fox, also available on EdX). These are the 3 courses that were most influential on my Undergrad experience (on top of the 61 series and 162)

</comment><comment><USER16> Archive CS294-112 Deep Reinforcement Learning Sp17 [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkFD6_40KJIwTmSbCv9OV...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkFD6_40KJIwTmSbCv9OVJB3YaO4sFwkX)

It's not on the main UC Berkeley YouTube account so I don't think it will be deleted but better safe than sorry

</comment><comment><USER17> CS188 Intro to AI [http://ai.berkeley.edu/lecture_slides.html](http://ai.berkeley.edu/lecture_slides.html)

<comment><USER18> Seconded. It's one of the few good 'classic' AI courses with videos available to the public, though personally I prefer Patrick Winston's 6.034.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb-k...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb- kVBiQHYe_4hSi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I'm in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science > courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically > available. (This is a throwaway account b/c I don't want to run afoul of any > legal issues.)

Um, hate to break it to you, but you're not going to run into legal issues for saying that you're going to grab archives and make them publicly available. You're going to run into trouble for _actually making them publicly available_ (if the license doesn't permit that). The only thing you change by using a throwaway account is that the legal trouble isn't associated with your main HN account.

</comment><comment><USER20> The archive files can be accessed here:

[https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%2...](https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%22UC+Berkeley%22)

Should contain the full backup.

</comment><comment><USER21> I want to archive these two:

[http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeprlcourse/](http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeprlcourse/)

[https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1453965/pages/cs294-12...](https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1453965/pages/cs294-129-designing- visualizing-and-understanding-deep-neural-networks)

<comment><USER22> as far as I understand, they're only taking down pre-2015 stuff

<comment><USER21> OH really! That's good news!

<comment><USER22>
       Instructors with course recordings on YouTube recorded fall 2015 or later
       will experience no change.

from [http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public- cou...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course- capture-content/)

of course, it can't hurt to run youtube-dl on it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dunno if CS 161, Computer Security, is available but it's a great course. Wagner or Weaver both have their points.

CS 70 should make the list but the lecture notes are enough.

Strongly prefer Kubi for OS or pretty much anything.

<comment><USER24> I've been looking for CS 161 but it doesn't look like it's available unfortunately.

<comment><USER23> Again, the course notes (Wagner's for the most part) are really excellent.

[http://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/sp16/](http://www- inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/sp16/)

The slides are really excellent. You will miss the opportunity of Weaver frothing at the mouth and using expletives willy nilly. Popa is clearly smart but needs to turn her mic up.

This is a great course. Unless Kubi is teaching 162, anyone should sub 161 for 162. And suffer. Berkeley has a murderers row of good security people. Song, Weaver, Wagner, Popa, .... If Song teaches 261 again, I'm gonna sit in.

<comment><USER25> You didn't even mention Paxson and Shenker, who are big in ICSI as well. However, 161 is substantially easier than 162 doing the substitution you recommend should reduce suffering.

<comment><USER23> I thought 162 was easy but then I knew a shit ton going in. My GSIs did not like me. No, they didn't.

I sat in on 161 since I live in the area. Some of it is a repeat of 70 material. I just think it's a great course.

I'd been a reader for 61C (another great course) and I'd suggested adding a stack smashing lab. This was before Wagner created 161 and they were ummm hesitant to teach undergrads the dark arts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Would it not have been better for Berkley to reach out to the community to ask them to help improve captioning if money was an issue ? Is this not a legal way to solve this problem instead of taking it down for lack of funds ?

<comment><USER27> Berkeley's response was actually that they'll rather use the funds to create content that's both accessible and not old. So they do have the funds, and are using them in a smarter way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> CS189 - I've been going through this course and I like the presentation and content. Specially, all the plots that are brought in to explain and also the notes.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP941GogrXs32AiRNeQKT...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP941GogrXs32AiRNeQKTLwGsiEblxL__)

</comment><comment><USER29> The proximate cause of this removal is Gallaudet University [1] [2].

What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is _free_ , but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest? I don't want to excoriate them without knowing the whole story, it could have been just someone's doh! moment turned into a really bad outcome.

I know there are closed-captioning format standards. Perhaps someone can create a site that runs closed captioning underneath YouTube videos, with the closed captioning supplied by volunteers (kind of like how closed captioning was done by anime fans)? Hook it up to a GitHub backend so closed caption data can be refined by anyone, with appropriate sidebar discussions. Hook it up to Google Translate to generate Braille and foreign translations of the hand- curated closed captioning, and let users refine the auto-generated translations. Then prevail upon the DOJ and Gallaudet University to give this time to develop instead of hammering on UC Berkeley, and let Creative Commons- licensed closed captioning fill in the content _everywhere_ for all access- challenged students, for _all content_? Google might be interested to use this as a corpus for Deepmind.

Gallaudet University could have pioneered a solution and become the world leader in automated accessible content generation working in partnership with Google Deepmind, for example. That would have brought in way, _way_ more funding through licensing than this short-sighted approach they are taking now. If Gallaudet University established a CS focus upon this, it would draw in top global talent for a variety of specialties. HAL-like accurate automated lip-reading coming out of this, with even more accuracy when using mic arrays? Yes, please; you get something like that even 90% accurate and you just gave a mindgasm to every meeting-organizer in the world who wants meeting notes taken. And as much as you all hate meetings, if you had a near-irrefutable better-than-stenographer CYA from meeting notes just once, I guarantee you would love that mechanism, increased meetings frequency or no.

This is a darkening of the Net and education in general, and it should not stand. Unless the reporting on this development is simply not including their side of the story, that Gallaudet University is not front and center of this issue trying to get ahead of the outcome by seeking win-win solutions should be making them a pariah on the Net and in the education world. Gallaudet University pursuing a perfect-is-enemy-of-good tactic likely has not considered that they just pulled free education for hundreds of millions of young minds in the developing nations who cannot afford anything close to a world-class education, but have family and friends willing to translate for them. That's unnecessary.

[1] [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california- berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content)

[2] [http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over- regu...](http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-regulation- forces-university-to-delete-20000-free-online-educational-videos/)

UPDATE: I glanced at the YouTube API, and it seems the IFrame Player API supports returning playback status and elapsed seconds [3], so closed captions running underneath an iframe'd video and dynamically responding to the state of the video appears feasible. Only a 5-minute glance, though, so I might have missed other bits for analyzing for feasibility.

[3] [https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#P...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#Playback_status)

<comment><USER30> > What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf > of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material > competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but > that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their > ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential > consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into > the real story behind their protest?

It's all in the DoJ letter. [https://news.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf)

It's a bit worrying that you have such strong opinions when you haven't read the DoJ letter yet.

> Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet > University and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what > she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based > scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including > Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to > use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes, > including the UC BerkeleyX course, "Journalism for Social Change," but > cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley's online content were > accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her > lectures.

Berkeley is a public institution, offering educational services, under the ADA.

Berkeley has a legal duty to make accessible this content, unless it would be unduly financially burdensome, or unless it would change the nature of what they do.

Berkeley has some policies around accessibility. They were not following those policies.

Berkeley were not just discriminating against people with hearing impairment, but also people with visual impairment and people with manual disability.

Berkeley chose to remove all the video rather than i) make it accessible during creation or ii) pay to make it accessible after creation.

Don't forget the law is 27 years old. Most of these videos are 10 - 5 years old.

<comment><USER29> The going rate to _manually_ close caption transcribe those 20K videos seems to be missing. Apparently the DOJ did, but did not share that number in the letter, yet charges ahead that doing so would not be "unduly financially burdensome".

Back of the envelope: assume an average 60 minutes per video, 20,000 videos. Googling around, I see manual, high-accuracy transcription and captioning goes for about $5-6 per minute, and up from there. The DOJ nailed UC Berkeley on the existing automated captioning being not accurate enough, so we're no longer in low-ball territory. Say it is $5 per minute. 5 * 60 * 20K = 6M. I don't know what rarefied circles you run in, but $6M to comply is not chump change to my sensibility to just take care of the backlog, not to speak of run rates and now periodic attorney reviews to ensure they don't fall afoul of inaccuracy charges again.

Does this set a precedent that _any_ public organization that produces _any_ educational content for free have to do this as well? A homeless shelter publishing self-help videos for runaway teens? A domestic violence center publishing videos on how to navigate the court system? A food bank? It is unclear to me reading Title II and III of the ADA as a layperson if any of these kinds of organization accepting local/state/federal financial support are exempt; it doesn't seem like it but I'm not an attorney.

Is there a cutoff below which an organization won't have to comply, and if so, what is that cutoff metric? Near as I can tell without Lexis-Nexis handy to look up the cross-references in the DOJ letter, there is no such cutoff other than the whims of enforcement.

And once this is done in English, can UC Berkeley rest assured Gallaudet University and the DOJ won't come back after them for Spanish/other languages? Braille? Note that those are 2-300% more per minute. Just add Spanish and suddenly you're looking at an $18M tab, minimum. Add Braille on top and you're talking $30M.

I don't see bright lines being drawn here, and the lack of discretion around freely-available content with highly valuable social benefits may very well have a chilling effect upon the spread of free educational content on the Net.

I see far more promise in working on automated transcription that learns from manually-curated crowdsourced edits so the access-challenged gain greater freedom from relying upon other people to perform the transcription for them in the future. As the population age bulge floats upwards, there is constantly-increasing pressure to solve this problem, and the access- challenged today will find their numbers swelling with the elderly tomorrow.

Why is it acceptable to your post's position for this law to be used as a bludgeon to force everyone who wants to share free educational content to now use cognitive bandwidth to decide if they want to risk an enforcement action? Is your position that it is better for the world to have far fewer, and far more expensive educational content that complies (because extremely few people and organizations are going to spend this kind of money unless the access- challenged community ponies up the business case in some form or fashion), than wider distribution of knowledge for free?

Once this content is gone from public access, even the access-challenged community will not easily gain it back. That means the community has _zero_ chance of accessing it, whereas in its current flawed form the community has _some_ chance at some point in the future, or a guaranteed chance if members of the community decide to pay for transcription now for specific content they want for actionable results.

Media Studies 104A seems to have around 26 lectures. Call it 30, two per week in a 15-week semester. About an hour each, so $9K. The BerkeleyX course Journalism for Social Change likely has the same (can't get at the videos, course is closed now). So, for the sake of say $20K in transcription costs, they are effectively shutting down billions of dollars worth of education around the world over the next decade, once you take the chilling effects of this enforcement action on other content into account? This is akin to "if I can't have it, nobody can", applied to free educational material, is it not?

Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley for them, but the scheme went very awry?

Taking away these resources via this enforcement action, as flawed as they are in their current format for the access-challenged, is like burning books. The ideology is different, but the effect of destroying access to knowledge is exactly the same. How does this restricting access to knowledge in any form benefit the access-challenged community? For all we know, there is a kid in sub-Saharan Africa/Shanghai/Nepal/ _etc._ today that could consume this material because they can't afford traditional college and in their time deliver sight to the blind, regrown bodies to the maimed, or sound to the deaf tomorrow.

Perhaps this is a culture clash, and I simply do not understand the access- challenged POV since I'm not immersed in that community. If so, then please educate where my reasoning is going off the rails from that perspective. Thanks in advance.

<comment><USER31> From the disability community's perspective, the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 are key safeguards to protect them from discrimination. Not enforcing these laws because the lectures benefit able- bodied people is ableism and discriminatory against the disabled community.

UCB was found to be in non-compliance. UCB could have chosen to fix the accessibility issues, but it did not. It wasn't the deaf community that took down the videos, but UCB's choice.

<comment><USER29> I appreciate the disability community's "hand up, not hand out" attitude. But Bloomberg TV's and CNBC's closed captioning for example, are nearly incomprehensible much of the time. Far, far more of the disability community's members are impacted by timely, accurate financial news than the ones who wanted to take UCB's free video courses.

So why single out UCB? Why single out free educational content instead of for- profit content with a wider, more actionable impact?

I understand UCB pulled the videos. From my layman's perspective, that doesn't actually address the DOJ's enforcement action. The Title II compliance demand still stands even after taking down the videos from public access. I am concerned that UCB will simply ban all the videos from even student access, and only allow them back into use as they are vetted, one by one, slowly, by their Web Accessibility Services team, and now with expensive attorney time on top, and only when an actual disabled student attends a specific course.

The disability-compliant transcription processing cost is about 2.5X more expensive than stenography transcription. An all-day deposition will cost in the range of about $1K, and 8 hours of closed caption transcription will run around $2.4K. Yet court stenographers are not mandated absolutely everywhere on the off-chance a court-accepted record might be needed, only in a court where their output is required to make a decision. So why is the criteria for ADA compliance set so much broader?

Would Gallaudet University have pressed the case if the fewer than a handful of courses that were desired were re-done and transcribed to meet their accuracy requirements? If not, what is the rationale for a blanket injunction to transcribe all courses regardless of demonstrated need? The services to meet compliance are very expensive, is advocating for indiscriminate enforcement as a blanket policy economically realistic at this point of automated transcription development?

I want to see us reach the point where all media is seamlessly, automatically and practically for free transcribed for the disabled in a variety of formats. But we're still in a world ruled by scarcity for quite a while longer, and I am currently unable to reconcile the enormous costs placed upon society at large and content creators in particular. Please share your perspective, thanks in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone looking to create a personal archive for any YouTube content should look into these scripts: [https://rg3.github.io/youtube- dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

They're very easy to use and well documented.

</comment><comment><USER33> How/where are you planning on making them publicly available? I suppose UC Berkeley might actually turn a blind eye if one where to simply repost them on YouTube - because UC meant for them to be public in the first place. Alternatively, maybe repost on Vimeo?

</comment><comment><USER34> I would be curious to read the background discussion at HN you refer to?

<comment><USER35> From a quick search:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764)

TLDR: The videos were removed because of a lawsuit relating to the lack of captions, making them inaccessible to the deaf.

<comment><USER30> > The videos were removed because of a lawsuit relating to the lack of > captions, making them inaccessible to the deaf.

It wasn't a lawsuit. It wasn't just people with hearing impairment (although they were the complainants) - the content was inaccessible to people with visual impairment and manual disability too.

<comment><USER35> Don't know why you appear to be being downvoted. You're right, I'm wrong. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Could someone make a torrent with all of the videos? I would but I've never done it before and don't have the time to learn. :(

<comment> et-al Don't know if you've seen the other posts, but Archive.org already has torrents (click on a course and check out the Download Options on the right):

[https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%2...](https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%22UC+Berkeley%22)

<comment><USER36> Oh, awesome! Thanks for pointing that out. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's super easy to download a video off of Youtube with jdownloader 2.0 . Works in Linux and MacOSX (probably windows too, I have no experience with it)

You select the youtube url, copy it, download, done.

[http://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2](http://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2)

<comment><USER37> Youtube-dl is another option:

[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Physics C10 (aka L&S C70V)

</comment><comment><USER39> Anything with Hubert Dreyfus

</comment><comment><USER40> So what would happen if someone created a youtube account called "NotUCBerkeley" and reuploaded all these videos with their playlists intact? Asking for a friend of course!

</comment><comment><USER41> As far as I know this course has been archive in archive.org, you can find it there with berkeley as a keyword.

</comment><comment><USER42> Could you get CS170 with Papadimitrou, EE 16A/B, and multiple semesters of 61A with Harvey? Thanks!

<comment><USER43> Ahh Harvey. He was really one of the best teachers I had at Berkeley.

<comment><USER42> Unfortunately, I only ever got to know him through the self-paced CS9 series.

I truly wish I had gotten to take 61A with him - and before it switched away from Scheme. I don't think the current incarnation is a worthy successor of the SICP based one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Berkeley CS 61A Berkeley CS 61C Berkeley CS 162 Berkeley CS 186

</comment><comment><USER45> Anyone want to chime in with a way to simply grab them all?

<comment><USER46> youtube-dl

<comment><USER47> you and the above poster are heros.

        $ youtube-dl
        The program 'youtube-dl' is currently not installed.
        You can install it by typing:
          sudo apt install youtube-dl

        $ sudo apt install youtube-dl

Not many things I love more than discovering that someone wanted the program I'm about to write, and wrote it better than I'd have had time to. This is why I still love the Linux/BSD ecosystem after all these years

<comment><USER48> Just a note, in the FAQ[1] it states "distribution packages are often outdated". There are (very simple) cURL/wget instructions in the repo's README[2]. Then you can update with:

       sudo youtube-dl -U

There's also an .exe for Windows as well as pip, Homebrew, and MacPorts packages.

[1] [https://github.com/rg3/youtube- dl/blob/master/README.md#how-...](https://github.com/rg3/youtube- dl/blob/master/README.md#how-do-i-update-youtube-dl)

[2] [https://github.com/rg3/youtube- dl/blob/master/README.md#inst...](https://github.com/rg3/youtube- dl/blob/master/README.md#installation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Could you write a script that captures all of them?

<comment><USER50> I think there is an option in youtube-dl to download the complete channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Following

</comment><comment><USER52> 3.1 TB torrent

[https://mega.nz/#!EMF3lAZZ!sD2AK2lMFPNDZuoI-q8RMTZeXkAHTmvtg...](https://mega.nz/#!EMF3lAZZ!sD2AK2lMFPNDZuoI-q8RMTZeXkAHTmvtg7ooIGhHm3g)

[https://expirebox.com/download/4e808067f3610c1e366c49e048fe9...](https://expirebox.com/download/4e808067f3610c1e366c49e048fe94fe.html)

[https://archive.is/D1Ail](https://archive.is/D1Ail)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869086)

"And lastly I finished downloading all of the UC Berkeley. Videos, any transcriptions/captions and all other video info. I made a torrent as they are the most efficient at sharing. All 3.1TB of it, it's not hosted on the fastest server, but with a few seeds it should go quick enough. If you want to keep this great learning resource alive, feel free to seed or partial seed, I will seed it for as long as I can. [4] For video listings please look at this list [5]."

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny I downloaded exactly the same courses.

</comment><comment><USER53> None. If you are interested in some subject then you would have taken. And if you got interested in future there must be some course. So don't waste your hard disk space.</comment>


Part One: Strategy – Hatclone.com: A Study in Hybrid Physical/Digital Virality - <AUTHOR> Part Two is here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22286545
I studied physics and math as an undergraduate at Harvard not so long ago. So I love to break things down into conceptual building blocks. After a stint working at a quantum computing startup, I've found myself in the software startup world and increasingly fascinated by consumer tech. Lately I've been thinking about the elements distinguish "soft-tech" winners from losers.
The element which I aimed to master first is the "viral loop". I set out to build a product which has the shortest path from first impression to purchase. I wanted someone to be able to go from seeing a peer use the product to being able to purchase the product themselves in less than 10 seconds.
For my first product I wanted to create something that was easily monetizable. I wanted to prioritize rapid development and avoid investing a lot of engineering time into building a full-fledged app. So I elected to sell physical merchandise.
So I was constrained to sell physical merchandise with a viral element. Enter the QR-code. I wanted a loop of see, scan, purchase, show, repeat.
The next step was to choose the physical product to sell. I wanted a product that would be highly visible and accessible for scanning. This led me to choose apparel, and in particular I wanted something ubiquitous, inexpensive, and above all easily customizable. This narrowed the search down to two options: hats and t-shirts. I picked hats, and in particular I chose bucket hats because they are currently trendy.
So in summary the plan was to build a short viral loop that let people buy qr-code bucket hats that when scanned also let other people buy qr-code bucket hats.
TLDR: I made hatclone.com. Buy QR code hats, your friends scan the code, they buy hats, cycle repeats. <comment><USER2> Have you sold any? The site looks pretty barebones on mobile.</comment>


Mystery Google: You get what the person before you searched for. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysterygoogle.com/

<comment><USER2> The dense unoriginality of people tires me, 70% of other peoples' searches that I get are something like "what is this?" or "I don't get it".

Great idea spoiled by the banality of the morons using the internet.

Although whoever put "django is overrated" is likely to be from around here? ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I much prefer Ogori Google - <http://fi.bemmu.com/ogori/>

Made by HN user bemmu during a discussion here last week - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=854185>

<comment><USER4> I wish all the luck to puredemo's version, mine took all of 5 minutes to make and was just for a quick laugh :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks bemmu.. ours started out as a lark as well, but then we ended up spending a considerable amount of time on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you sure it's not some random search? How can I really know it's from the last person who did a search?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's really the last person who did a search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great demonstration of why not to use Adsense or other context-based ads on a site with a search bar and no context whatsoever.

<comment><USER7> Looks fine to me, still serving up ads. And I want to learn how to make free electricity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something to do with flying kites during rainstorms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can imagine ways in which these services will be spammed to death.

BTW is there anything useful in these services?

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides entertainment?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 185: you are -killing us- over here. My ribs hurt and I'm almost crying.

You know who you are.

<comment><USER9> Requires further explanation. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We can see all the searches coming in, lets just say one person had some excellent, twisted ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Don't click "I'm Feeling Lucky."

<comment><AUTHOR> Unless you're _actually_ feeling lucky.

<comment><USER11> You might get lucky and go to jail in some countries.

Or at a minimum redflagged.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually we're filtering the input fairly extensively. At this point there shouldn't be any searches that would be considered illegal. Raunchy maybe, but not illegal.

* Ironically the terms that get flagged aren't what people would expect. Anarchy, animal rights, veganism, and food not bombs all get flagged in the U.S.

<comment><USER11> Veganism ??

That's about as non-violent as it gets!

Even the eggs are safe from vegans.

<comment><USER12> Google "Earth Liberation Front"; the "eco terrorists" are very high on the fed's shit-list.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but to equate vegans with eco terrorists is a bit much isn't it ?

Most of them are far from it, I've yet to meat ;) a single vegan that came across as aggressive in any way. I'm sure they exist but it definitely isn't the norm.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proto Actor – Fast distributed actors for Golang and C# - <AUTHOR> http://proto.actor <comment><USER2> We should be really skeptical of (or perhaps we could charitably say, "We should contextualize these,") speed claims. Akka does well in benchmarks too, until you put significant memory pressure on the VM and find it handles less gracefully under load than a more JVM-natural approach using approaches in java.util.concurrent.

Actor-based approaches with hundreds of thousands of actors are really amazing, powerful and often simpler than equivalent channel based systems, conceptually. But they require special GC considerations to be made "efficient" of a really high level of mechanical sympathy to make sure you aren't creating pathologically bad situations for the garbage collector.

<comment><USER3> My favorite conference talk is about the multiple facets of Erlang that combine to make it such a great language. Take an opinionated language, an opinionated VM, and a focus on a specific problem space, and magic happens.

Take one or two features from Erlang into another language, and you have meh.

<comment><USER4> Considering the production system that the Erlang VM has been deployed to(and the length of time it's existed and thrived) it's hard to make an argument to re-invent it in another language.

If that's what your domain space needs, use the BEAM and find a way to talk to it for the parts that you can't move to Erlang.

<comment><USER5> It's not hard to justify; that's laughable. It's simple redundancy!

<comment><USER6> Sometimes the concurrency benefits just don't add up when compared to other business/project concerns.

I say this as an big fan of Erlang, truth is, sometimes you just have to accept that your job is to write a python/Django backend without a line of JavaScript in order to serve as a line of business app, and if the load gets bigger, you just throw another server at it.

That said, erlang is great, elixir is awesome, and both are 100% worth _every_ developers time to learn.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure where concurrency plays into this at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am interested and I will certainly read the Go version of the documentation, but the .NET of the docs are showing Go code instead.

[http://proto.actor/docs/dotnet/hello%20world](http://proto.actor/docs/dotnet/hello%20world)

<comment><USER8> And im getting bunch of 404s for .net docs. Which means its not really a serious project

<comment><USER9> Tried to click on the "Books" link and got a 404. I get the feeling they really aren't ready for visitors yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> .NET and Go are a weird pairing, especially since the library isn't actually "cross-platform." It's two separate implementations. I wonder what the impetus was to develop this library on those two particular platforms, especially since there's already Akka.NET and most people can't shut up about how much they love Goroutines as a concurrency primitive.

<comment><USER11> I think for a communication framework cross-platform has a different meaning then for a simple program or library. I would interpret cross-platform here as "interoperable between platforms", or I can connect one Actor on platform A to another Actor on platform B. IMHO that's something really desireable, because it doesn't one to using a single programming language on a bigger distributed system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've captured a few other open source actor implementations: [https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#other-actor- impleme...](https://gist.github.com/macintux/6349828#other-actor- implementations)

</comment><comment><USER12> One of the major things will be the tooling around it. As we work with a well defined schema. we can create tools that work for all implementations.

e.g. see this CLI tool for managing proto.actor systems live: [https://asciinema.org/a/a1b18jiv703e6eog1o2b7domi](https://asciinema.org/a/a1b18jiv703e6eog1o2b7domi)

You will be able to send messages to actors, connect to remote nodes etc.

There are also very fine-grained interception points allowing us to plug in things like zipkin.io w/o altering how the user writes their code.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not sure why it should be trusted more than Akka or Akka.Net. Akka is much much more than just "actors".

<comment><USER12> Founder of both Akka.NET and Proto.Actor here. Right now, Proto.Actor-dotnet should not be trusted more than Akka.NET.

Akka.NET is production ready and has a huge community. has commercial support etc. There are however a fair number of design issues that I dislike personally which led me to start Proto.Actor

The .NET implementation of proto.actor is in alpha version right now. We are building and stabilizing the Go version first, which already is used in major production systems.

<comment><USER14> Roger, lurker on Akka.NET and about to start an Akka.NET PoC at work - proto.actor looks interesting - Can you elaborate on the design issues you have with Akka.NET?

<comment><USER12> Sure.

Serialization and the concept of the ActorRef. They both go hand in hand.

in Akka/NET, ActorRefs are contextual, they belong to a given ActorSystem.

This means that when they are serialized, the serializer needs to be able to know how to transfer and rebind this context on serialization and deserialization. To make it more complex, ActorRefs can be embedded in other messages. There are a few other primitives also that are contextual and serialized. This limits the options you have in terms of serializers. It also puts a massive tax on the framework in terms of maintenance.

ActorRefs are also "resolved" when deserialized, so the deserializing system has to figure out which actor is targeted. This lookup is slow due to parsing and scanning of actors and their children.

This makes network communication speed suffer _a lot_.

The configuration DSL HOCON is also tightly integrated with the entire infrastructure, making it hard to reason about what is going on and what parts of the config the current piece of code actually sees. Akka/NET also lacks good interception points, its hard to hook into actors and monitor them.

There are just too many moving parts for my own liking. I did blog about some of the problem areas in my POV about a year ago: [https://rogerjohansson.blog/2016/03/13/random-things- learned...](https://rogerjohansson.blog/2016/03/13/random-things-learned- building-akka-net-part-1/)

So the issues are really both on a performance level and at a maintenance level.

The mindset in Akka.NET have been more "lets build everything ourselves from scratch to match the JVM" and in proto.actor "lets re-use proven tech and glue them together, with minimal code"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most of my non trivial goroutines are organized like this:

      func actor_foo(things) error {

        set_up_stuff()
        defer clean_up_stuff()

        for {
          select {
          case msg := <-messages:
             switch msg.(type) {
             case *Bla:
             }
          case <- other_messages:
          case <- errors:
          case <- signals:
            return nil
          }
        }

      }

I recognize there is more to the actor model than just message loops, but I found that an explicit for-select-switch results in better overall readability.

<comment><USER16> Is signals your "done" channel?

<comment><USER15> I was just trying to convey an example. I usually "signal" that the parent wants to stop this "actor" for some reason (e.g graceful shutdown).

If parent need a "done" channel, it passes it in and "actor" closes it on its way out.

Cleanup usually "signals" children and waits for them to be "done".

Sometimes "done" is just signalled by the goroutine returning and it is wrapped in parent somehow.

But every time I try to formalize it into some "framework" my abstraction fails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm getting a "Page not Found" from this link.</comment>


Show HN: I made a p5.js simulation that shows how masks reduce Covid spread - <AUTHOR> http://JustWearIt.fyi <comment><USER2> This is incredible! Gosh, if only people were smart enough to actually wear masks and not invoke their "constitutional rights", we probably won't be in the shitshow that we are in today. Kudos to you for making this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much Steven! Hopefully visualizations like this can drive home how wearing a mask protects your entire community, not just yourself.

<comment><USER2> 100%! People need to realize it's not their own wellbeing that they're protecting, but others' as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Foxpass (YC S15) Announces VPN AMI w/ Google Apps Directory Integration and 2FA - <AUTHOR> http://blog.foxpass.com/announcing-a-simple-vpn-for-aws-users/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN -- Foxpass founder here. We built this to make it really simple to set up a VPN in your AWS infrastructure with the best security practices (directory integration and two-factor auth) built right in. Would love your feedback and pull requests! ([https://github.com/foxpass/foxpass-ipsec- vpn](https://github.com/foxpass/foxpass-ipsec-vpn))</comment>


The Geek hierarchy - <AUTHOR> http://www.brunching.com/images/geekchartbig.gif

<comment><USER2> Why is "thirteen year old gamer" one of the geekiest groups… 90% of the 13 year old population is on par with "trekkies who get married in Klingon garb?"

<comment><USER3> I was a gamer, but most 13 year old boys I knew weren't. In fact, once when a couple of my friends from my basketball team were over at my place they absolutely marveled at the cup full of various sided dice in my basement. They asked, "What's a dice with twenty sides _for_?"

Oh, and I'd have to say that the gamers I knew pretty much were on par with "trekkies who get married in Klingon garb". And so was I.

<comment><USER4> Ka'Plah!</comment></comment></comment>


An open letter to Notch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@numair/hi-markus-d06d0ee0645e

<comment><USER2> While Numair might have good intentions, this letter is like slogging through a pseudo-intellectual rant by a liberal arts student.

It's not necessarily the sentiment that I disagree with, but the way it's presented. While yes, it's good to find happiness and belonging through personal one-on-one interactions, it doesn't make the people who seek the same though work, or material possessions wrong.

I find it funny that he would go on about how he dislikes the people in tech, and how the entire industry is uncreative, only to post it to Hacker News, a site on the ycombinator domain.

Ultimately Markus and the team at Mojang made something that people wanted, and cared about. I've spent countless hours on Minecraft and I still love the game, along with millions of other people.

Markus should, and will, make his own way.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess the open letter is in reference to recent press coverage like:

"""The whining billionaire who says being rich is sheer hell: Inside the life that Minecraft founder Markus Persson says has been ruined by too much money

Swede who created online sensation Minecraft made £1.2bn selling it on

He splurged on Beverley Hills mansion and enjoys lavish Vegas weekends

But has taken to Twitter to bemoan his riches which have made him lonely

His marriage lasted just a year and he now pays £4,000 every month in child support

"""

\- Daily Mail.

He should probably do what most tech guys made rich do and plow the money into funding and mentoring starups.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3220333/The- whining-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3220333/The-whining- billionaire-says-rich-sheer-hell-Inside-life-Minecraft-founder-Markus-Persson- says-ruined-money.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Look, Numair, you're right.

"Basically, global capitalism is broken, dude." He won the indie video game lottery, which is as pretentious as it sounds. I do not think he's able to see the ideological problems manifesting around him. If he could, he wouldn't be melting down constantly. I applaud your efforts because you "get it." He doesn't "get it" yet, and I don't think he'll "get it" after reading your great letter.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very deep. Some of that stuff sounds pretty Tyler Durden-ish to me. Down with the system, man.

</comment><comment><USER6> So noblesse oblige is back in style again eh?</comment>


How often Apple, Google, others, handed over data when the US government asked - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/619859/virtual-reality-could-be-a-solution-to-sexism-in-tech/ <comment><USER2> I'm being linked to the article "Virtual reality could be a solution to sexism in tech", is this the intended article?</comment>