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Comment by finyeates | Hacker News Reader

I somewhat disagree. If someone has the passion that they'd rather code than study: They're most likely doing the wrong thing.

There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process.

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Haven't ever had any teacher telling you to do something you didn't like to do, and then once you've done it, you realize how much better you've become at a given subject ?

That's also a part of learning, and a part of the advantage of having a teacher. Sometimes, you need to do things you don't like in the short term, that will prove to be an excellent thing in the long term.

Now i'm not saying someone shouldn't code in their spare time. Just don't trash your exams for it. Keep a balance. Maybe in a few years you'll realize you'll want to become a doctor and save lives rather than create video games. Keep the doors open.

>Haven't ever had any teacher telling you to do something you didn't like to do,

This is an important point. Let's face it, kids are socially stupid and inexperienced. They don't know what they want, what they need, what's good for them or even what's out there. Their worlds are small. 15 year old me would eat pizza every meal if it were my choice.

Allowing for the freedom of exploration is important, but so is a little bit of steering.

>There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process.

I am reminded of the following story I experienced in my first year chemistry class. The class was being taught by the head of undergraduate studies for science and he asked us (a room of 500 students) how many people wanted to become chemists and maybe 20 or so people put up their hand. How many people want to become physicists? Maybe 30 or so put up their hand. How many people want to become doctors? A good 400 people put up their hand. He then said "only 20 of you will make it to med school, I hope you have a back-up plan."

The problem is that we only hear about the success stories not the vast amount of people who fail. That isn't to say don't follow your dreams, but be realistic about them and have other options available when things don't go your way.

>I somewhat disagree. If someone has the passion that they'd rather code than study

The problem is everybody thinks they have the "passion" (and the "good idea").

(where by "everybody" I mean, a hell of a lot of people who should be studying instead, not literally everybody).

TL;DR: imho there should be a balance between catching your passionate goals and broadening your knowledge pool by getting 'normal' education. Many success stories are marginal cases and can be compared to winning a lottery ticket.

Well I should agree with both of you.

Many success stories must be taken with a grain of salt. Some of them are truly like winning a lottery. Also making idols out of college/school dropouts is not very healthy for society over all.

I agree that today you can make descent money by making web/mobile applications, but do not think that you will be a millionaire or be hired by google/facebook/apple/etc within a year.

But if you are passionate about something you should (or even must) pursue it. IMHO marginal cases should not be idolised. I have seen too many people who believe that every one can code, though ignoring that software development requires great knowledge and education (formal or informal).

Being a programmer without good knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, etc. is going to suck. Even if you don't need it for your current project.

Linear Algebra is almost worthless to most programmers. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise. Of course it has use in specific industry. So what?

There's a lot of thinking that math is a fundamental part of software development. That was true when the problems were coming up with abstractions that required specific solutions. That hasn't been the focus of development, for decades. Welcome to the world of data processing and presentation (the vast majority of time and effort is in UI).

Most business and web programmers would find it useless, perhaps, but if you're wanting to go into video games, simulation, physics, aerospace, robotics/internet of things (i.e. sensors), or the about to explode virtual reality field, you will most likely benefit quite a bit from linear algebra.

I've found it much more useful than my calculus classes, personally (although calculus is also useful to know for most of these industries).

Yes, those are specific industries, but that's quite a few specific industries. There's probably others that could benefit from it as well.

That's more because math is important to those fields though. If you're making e.g. a video game math is a very small part of the overall work. It's cool as a hobby if you can go "I know math and I know programming, therefor I can make this game like thing". But if you wanna work as a game programmer your better off focusing on that and figuring out whatever math you need along the way.

> I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.

graphics, machine learning, cryptography, data compression, optimization, physics, simulations, genetics, traffic flow analysis, economics, audio processing, control systems, vision...

Yes, but for math to be really important few of those are a developer doing e.g. cryptography, it's a cryptographer doing programming. I worked in one of those fields and it would be at least ten times the developers to people "doing math" and they where highly educated in that field.

Cryptographers are computer scientists/developers, though. If you want to do something "real," other than make pretty buttons, that is, you're going to have to do some math.

That's a list of concepts. None of that approaches proof.

Serious question: Why?

My school does not require any math for the CS program, aside from very basic discrete math (very very basic). While I wish we did more math, the people that graduate get jobs and seem to do just fine without the math background.

I mean, they're not working at Google, Facebook, or the NSA (though a lot go work for the CIA for some reason), but it doesn't seem like it sucks for them.

Same for my school, though our discrete might be a bit less basic. I talked to the department head about it, specifically about calculus, and his answer was that in 30+ years of industry experience, getting a CS PhD (from an engineering university), etc. he had never used calculus in programming except as a type of problem to solve. He suggested people looking to go into fields that might require it to do a math or physics minor, but he saw no need to have everyone do it to get the major.

I find calculus to be a very useful set of mental models for framing problems, even if I'm not doing actual calculations with it. Understanding things like continuity, convergence, boundary conditions, gradients, etc... Almost everything you learn in a calculus course is a general problem-solving technique. (I'll say the same thing about Topology.)

Linear algebra is incredibly useful and, when you know how to spot its shape, is just about everywhere.

A (long) while ago, one of my coworkers spent months putting together an enormous framework for processing some data. It was really well done - simple API, good error messages, verification at various steps, and reliable results. It was a little slow though. It was pushing 1 hour to complete a cycle, which was bumping up against other processes. A senior guy had a look at it, noticed that we could encode the data as a vector and apply some linear transformations to it, then decode afterwards. Thanks to lucky cache hits and BLAS, it took about 25 seconds to run.

I see. I think you hit an interesting point with that story: You may not need math to write an application, but it helps a lot when making it efficient and knowing which abstractions to use.

Personally, I'm going to spend some time after graduation teaching myself math. I think it can be incredibly helpful, even if it's just to improve my thinking.

I can highly recommend Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra course, available as video lecture series [1]

[1] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-...

Studying and coding aren't mutually exclusive. Most people who program for a living did so by studying and exams. It's not sexy but then real life mostly isn't.

There are plenty of people "chasing their dreams" but a lot (most?) of them will have to settle for less because of the way the world works.

you can chase all the dreams you want. It doesn't change the fact that chances this happening to someone else is almost 0. He's not the only person with a passion. Many superb software engineers to be won't get the opportunity he got.

Following your dreams is a tax on people who are bad at statistics.

>There needs to be more people chasing their dreams rather then being cranked through the academia process. That's really bad advice. Going through a formal learning process is going to help you to understand not only technology but also processes. And you are also going to meet there a lot of people with similar interests. Not studying when you want a job in the industry is taking an extremely hard path (that's why is news that some on achieves it) for the sake of it.

And you always can do both. I know a lot of people that goes to University and develop software in their spare time.

Passion doesn't save you from your own lack of talent.

But what are those people going to do when they fail?

Chasing your dreams is great. Doing so at the expense of schooling, especially when it's possible to do both, is a gamble at best.

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