mungoid

Nah, not rude =-)

I consider the math I do at work to be somewhat advanced. Statics, dynamics, a touch of thermo dynamics, etc. But if you are talking like quantum mechanics or NASA JPL level math, then yeah I totally agree those topics would definitely be better learned in a proper environment.

Yeah it becomes increasingly difficult as you get older. I really wish I would have gotten into it sooner. DIY math is great, but it taught me to be more of a loner than I'd like.

I agree 100% with you and, most of my situation was because I lean a bit too far in the "against the grain" category. Because of that, I definitely made it more difficult for myself and would regularly lose drive to continue because I felt "I'm not getting it, I suck. Why can't I learn this the normal way?"

>Being self taught can easily lead the learner to some critical mistakes. ...

I really glad you brought that up. There have been countless times that I was working on some formula which looked good to me, and even had correct results (some of the time), only to find that it was completely backwards when someone else looked at. Its essentially like learning to program versus learning to program correctly. I cant tell you how many times I pronounce words incorrectly because I have only read it and never heard someone talk about it. Also embarrassing.

I have actually read that same thing about your [2] foot note and I wanna say I saw it here on HN but cannot remember when. It was pretty interesting and I can totally see how not learning math the proper way can cause a lot of issues related to research. In my case doing physics for simulations, its not as pronounced, because its a small user base but in a larger scale, I would be terrified of publishing my work for this exact reason.

And I by no means intend on convincing others to learn this on their own. I would actually suggest doing it the standard way because it was much more difficult and time consuming trying to learn this stuff by your own. Especially since I had no real person to talk to about it. I kinda wish I could have gone back and changed majors.

Thank you! I will admit that it was by no means quick or easy and there were many, many times I wish I could have had an actual person with me to explain it. Not to mention the frequent of wanting to give up when something wasn't 'clicking' and i felt i couldn't do it.

I really hope this doesn't come across as brash. I don't mean it to, but I must disagree with your assertions (In my case at least). Learning advanced mathematics without university is completely possible. Because it is at your own learning pace. Not one of a University.

I graduated several years ago with a BS in Computer Science, with a Focus on Networking. And during that time, I held 3 part time jobs while also being a math tutor. Almost none of the math I use today as a physics developer was learned from schools. I also never had that piece of mind you mentioned, because I was constantly juggling several things at once while going to school. My knowledge of advanced mathematics at the time of my graduation was pretty non existent. I think the most advanced math I had was Algebra 2 or something like that, and the Professors just basically read verbatim from the book.

A few years after Uni, I started teaching myself Calc, Trig, Vector maths, Diff Eq and Physics strictly from what I have found on various sites, software and books. Because of that, I ended up getting a physics simulation developer position at a software company. Because in my companies view, being able to teach yourself all that math is much more impressive than being taught from a University.

I hated math during High School and College, but since then, I have found that I absolutely love math, and I will never stop trying to learn or do new things. My degree was two small lines on my CV, while about 50% of what I had on my CV was all learned on my free time, by myself.

So learning math without a College or University is totally possible, and in my situation, worked way better. Sites like Khan Academy, Wolfram, Youtube, etc. all give you the resources and leave it up to you to progress at your own pace, for free.

This generalized labelling is about the only way the US government can sway opinion because they flood television with these phrases. And because most of the US believe anything they see on TV without question, the government gets some semblance of control. The same thing happened with bitcoin, tor, Marijuana, etc. Basically anything that hasn't or can't be heavily monetized and taxed without upsetting some other company.

I bet if some large corporation came out with it, the government would have no problems. Because they could probably convince that company to let them monitor everything

Yeah I have been doing software for a long time and a couple years ago I started getting into embedded software and loving it. I have found some embedded developer positions I could get into without an EE degree but would have to take a cut in pay. If that's something you can afford to do, that's probably your best bet. I can't afford to take the cut but some people are better with savings than me lol

Good answer. Although I'm actually kind of in the opposite boat.

I've been doing software dev for a little over 10 years now and recently I have been leaning more towards electrical engineering. Partly because I loved electronics before I knew how to code, but the main reason is that I have yet to find a software company that can make thought out decisions on languages, frameworks, listen to their devs, etc. Most companies I've worked at usually just pick the most common stuff and go with it because they either don't care or aren't actually the right fit for their position, only to realize waay too late that the software wasn't the best choice. And usually us devs get the blame because we are the magic people that can "make anything work".

The other part to this is that we always voice our concerns early on, but they fall on deaf ears because it is too much of a hassle for our decision makers to make more decisions, weigh pros and cons, etc. It gets really frustrating knowing a project is going to have issues down the road but nobody listens until it happens. If you were to look back on our slack chats at the beginning of most projects you would see many devs predicting the issues with almost perfect accuracy.

Where as, (imo without real world experience mind you), EE is fairly straight forward because there are only schematics and circuits and tangible progress. No hours long meetings on which of the hundreds of frameworks will guarantee success, PMs that don't really know much about proper project management, owners that think of themselves as the next google even though us dev grunts know that isn't true, etc.

I'm probably letting my frustrations guide this reply a little too much, but what i think im trying to say is that the grass always seems to be greener on the other side even if it's not.

I think it depends on what companies agree to not send you emails if you opt out. I'm betting if a company agrees to the dma opt out then they will stop and you will get a little less. But I think most advertisers don't care if you opt out or not. It's in their best interest to not care

I haven't read all 400-some comments, but in the several pages worth i read I haven't seen a single person mention looking out for their own welfare and keeping their future in their own hands. Just because a line of work has been around for decades doesnt mean it is always going to be a safe bet.

I've worked hard for the past 10 years to get to my middling-middle class income. Enough with my wife's to support our family. I could just be content with that and staying right here for the rest of my life, never wanting to do any more with myself, but I know things will change and i want to be prepared for it.

Maybe it's the brain wiring of a software developer, but I refuse to become complacent with where I am at. I already know I wouldn't last another 10 years if I don't regularly adapt, learn new technologies, stay current.

I think in a way, this isn't too much different than the housing bubble. Too many people thinking that everything is just going to keep going its steady pace forever and if anything bad does happen, someone will come to the rescue. I want to position myself so I don't need that rescuing.

Guh. I have about the same amount of years with gmail and thats why I havent felt like switching yet. Because I'm lazy. Which is a terrible reason.

With the amount of upvotes for this article, is it safe to assume people like (and trust!) FastMail? I didnt used to care about privacy, but I have been much more interested in it lately so I would like to switch.

I could swear you were talking about me. Good post!

Yeah I find it hilarious as a contract developer how just because it's government software that means you can charge like 200 times more for essentially the same software any other client could get for like 1 million at most.

I've been doing contract development for a little over 10 years now and even the most complex projects were never even remotely that expensive. And Im sure I've probably written at least 85% of the same functionality of whatever that software does. Hell, I'm sure there is probably open source software that does similar

I can't speak for most people, but I was young and ignorant enough to get talked into buying a home that I couldn't afford during the housing bubble. I managed to make it 5 years before having to foreclose. It was a terrible money pit and I'm in a much worse financial situation now than I was before I bought the house.

Before i bought the house everyone talked about how great of an investment homes were, but nobody talked about how expensive home ownership was and how much deeper in debt you need to get in order to fix a house up.

The funny thing is that I could buy a house but couldn't get credit or loans to fix the house up. Worst possible situation you can be in.

Even though the bank and realtor were liars and pushers, I don't blame anyone but myself for falling for it. I hope you take this in mind before you buy your first home

So I know Sage is quite a bit more hefty than the standard Jupyter kernel, but I wonder if this could work with the Sage kernel? I quickly attempted it with no luck but assume with the right setup it could. Maybe?

I totally agree and I have a life insurance policy through my work, plus an additional one I pay for. Not 1m dollar policy, but decent and cheap (i'm a smoker). However, my qualm with the article is that it talks about this as passing down wealth.

I dont consider life insurance 'wealth'. Its a safety net that nobody should look forward to, but unfortunately a lot of people do. My wife has a wealthy grandmother and every one of her children are all drooling at the moment she passes away. I can't stand all the end of life bickering that goes on and the way I read this article sounds like it would perpetuate that more.

From seeing how rabid her family gets about money, I would rather be poor than deal with all the greed involved with such large policies. I believe that a policy large enough to pay off the deceased's debt and leave some extra money to help support the family is fine, but way overshooting for too large of a policy is asking for trouble. Backstabbing, lawsuits, etc.

Sorry for the rant. I just regularly hear my wife talk about all the selfishness her aunts and uncles display constantly and I cant stand it.

Suuure, now this gets posted after I JUST found out about it yesterday in a comment about the JupyterLab link.. Go ahead, rub it in more.. Seriously though, I never thought to look for something like this so I'm happy more people are finding out about it too. Even if there may be better alternatives, more people now know to look.

Seriously? Life insurance is a great way to pass down wealth?? Depending on your situation, your life insurance will barely pay for the funeral. What, do you think everyone can afford million dollar policies for 'a few measly dollars a month'? Sorry to dissapoint, but teaching people to wait for their family to die is a horrible way to 'pass on wealth'.

Holy cow I never knew that existed! My life could have been so much different the past few months had I known.. I bet I even skimmed past it on HN without even looking.. Shame on me

Totally agree. My larger notebooks get pretty ugly and I have to spend a fair bit of time cleaning them up. But that's probably because I am not the most organized person ever.

Agreed, however there are a ton of companies with extremely outdated os/browser policies, that refuse to update for whatever reason. Been a contract developer for ~10 years and even this year we were told to support IE 8 on a specific project because some fortune 50 company needs us to (Seriously). There were plenty of modern tools that helped reduce issues but there was still a bit of headache.

You took the words right out of my mouth(fingers). Was just thinking the exact same thing

Sure, just have the user follow a step-by-step guide on deleting the last x items in their history every time ;-)

I have no real reason why I think it would work well, but I have always felt that voting on anything should only be allowed to the people that can show a half decent knowledge of that topic and not for people that just go with the first thing they hear. You might as well flip a coin at that point. If you want to vote, do your part as a citizen and learn about what it is you are voting on, how it will impact you and your country as a whole and if you don't want to do that, don't vote.

Democratic countries gave power to the people, but we basically give it right back because "its too hard", or "i dont have time", etc. so we only vote from our gut feeling and follow the loudest voice. Gut feeling is fine in a fight or flight sense, but not for policies that impact the whole country.

IMO I would think decisions like this and many others would benefit from something similar to the scientific method. Construct your proposal, share it with everyone, let them critique it, revise, share, etc. and then vote. Biggest thing is taking ego out of the equation.

Russia does not have America's best intrest in mind so if they did secretly do this to help Trump, that's more of a reason to NOT vote for him

Ah yeah my mistake. I worded that poorly and SMC is what I meant. Either way, great work and the rest of my comment still applies! :-)

This is why I love sagemath, and open source in general. I cloned the repo a few weeks ago after hearing him mention how he is mainly the sole developer. It's a huge undertaking and i know how draining something like that can be for motivation.

I may not have time to do a lot but i am gonna join in and help as much as possible. Documentation, bug fixes, whatever. This project deserves it imo

I use it all the time.. to sign into sites I don't feel like making an account for

Kinda cool, but how is this any better than just gpg signing? Is it because you could fake a timestamp with gpg but not with this?