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Comment by mrbungie | Hacker News Reader

Did you tell your teachers about your superpower?

But normally it depends on the subject and if the automation/machine solves the primary skill being teached or if its just a "secondary/tertiary" skill. Are you in a Calculus 101 class? Calculators like TI-89 are likely to be prohibited when examining for deriving analytical solutions for derivatives and integrals.

Statistics, Physics or any other subjects that needs applied maths? Such a calculator is probably a minimum requirement to take the course.

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My HP-49g+ was definitely load-bearing going through EE. I was never much good at memorizing big sheets of formulas but I was pretty good at memorizing a couple of simple differential equations (e.g. I(t) = C dv(t)/dt was easy, v(t) = v_s * e^(-t/RC) wouldn't stick). So I'd just... derive all of the "special case" formulas from scratch during the exam. Usually they were simple enough that I could just get them into the right form but I'd lean on my calculator doing the symbolic integration for me when they weren't.

The other thing it was awesome for was solving systems of linear equations. I could do the nodal or loop analysis just fine, I'd write down the matrix that represented the system of equations and then just punch that matrix in and invert it.

You did the capacitor DE in your head? The analytical solution requires a “trick” (integrating factor) usually taught in an intro DE class.

It became second nature pretty quickly! Dunno what to tell you, my brain's wired funny :D

The day when the relationship between s in a Laplace transform and d/dt finally clicked was also a really excellent day :D

I was on pretty good terms with my chemistry teacher, so...maybe? It's been a while, but I don't remember either showing it off or taking pains to keep it secret. To adults, that is; my nerdy friends and I delighted in showing off the cool stuff we did with our calculators.

I vaguely remember thinking that one likely reason shortcuts like mine were not prohibited was because no one in charge suspected that such things were even possible with current technology, or if they were, that a child would be able to exploit it. But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.

> But as long as I kept to the letter of the rules, I considered myself ethically in the clear.

Yeah, totally, just to be clear I'm not judging.

In fact, if you programmed it to handle those operations, one could argue you had already learned a big chunk of what was going to be measured in the exams.

Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.

> Kind of similar to the paradox of creating and using cheat sheets, is highly likely you're accidentally learning about the subject matter in the process of writing the sheet, sometimes up to a point where the cheat sheet is not necessary anymore.

The problem is (example from mathematics): even if you are capable of deriving some formula (you thus understood the topic well), it takes a lot of time in the exam. Looking at the cheat sheet is much faster - in particular when the time is somewhat precious in the exam.

A related personal story: During my statistics course in high school, we discovered that the TI-89 had some statistical functions that the TI-83 didn't have. So, the rule was that if we wanted to use the TI-89 ones, you had to write an application for the TI-83 one. It was a great way to really learn the algorithms.

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