mathrat · HackerTrans

12 years agodiscuss

So if I recall, you were supposed to have to do a lot of investigative work to bypass stuff. There were several different "levels" that got progressively harder to crack. But there was nothing that stopped you from moving the program counter directly to the code that signals success. Which is what we did. Every level, exactly the same: fire it up, move program counter, send the success notice, finished!

mathrat

12 years agodiscuss

Haha, if that's the one I remember you could completely trivialize that lab by fiddling with the program counter in gdb (skipping the line that sets off the bomb). Don't know if they were able to fix that in later versions of the lab. Good times, thanks for reminding me.

mathrat

12 years agodiscuss

Ah, I think we are responding to two separate issues. I was referring to Rudin as a mathematical treatment of calculus, in the definition-theorem-proof style, to be contrasted with the more popular and easy heuristic approach. I contend that the Rudin style is a qualitatively better way to learn mathematics. It is also undoubtedly harder to read--but that is because it treats the material in a rigorous, correct way, which is inherently more difficult than heuristics.

Your argument is that Rudin is hard for incidental reasons: he skips steps in his proofs. I personally did not feel this way when I read the book. But I am open to the idea that Rudin is imperfect. I personally admire Rudin's concision, but that may just be my personal aesthetic preference.

My point, and perhaps I did not convey it well, is simply that some subjects (in particular mathematics!) are inherently difficult. And if you want to learn them well, you have to face that difficult head on: you have to read hard books. Euclid's old saying comes to mind: "there is no royal road to mathematics!"

mathrat

12 years agodiscuss

In mathematics, my experience falls emphatically on this explanation: "Hard texts are that much better than anything else." Books like Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis are mathematics; their more accessible counterparts are more "about mathematics." As to why successful people don't read more difficult books, well, being a great mathematician just isn't that important to success. Reading Rudin sets you on the path to being very good at mathematics, but that isn't most people's goal. If your goal is material success then yes, hard books are probably overrated.

The programmers here may appreciate this analogy: reading Rudin is like reading the source code, whereas more gentle texts read more like documentation or UML. That's not to say good doc can't be enlightening, but in the end only the source code matters. The doc can be wrong, or misleading, or incomplete. If you want to really understand what's going on, you need to read the source. It's the same way in mathematics.

mathrat

13 years agodiscuss

Financial economics literature is quite heavy on stochastic processes. This requires a sophisticated treatment of probability, which in turn necessitates familiarity with measure theory. Throw some stochastic differential equations into the mix and you're probably also going to need some background in functional analysis. Not so familiar with the rest of the econ literature, but even basic econometrics requires familiarity with point set topology.

mathrat

13 years agodiscuss

Agreed it's totally organization dependent. Basically fishtoaster said what I wanted to say more clearly than I did. It requires thoughtful management to get right. But I think the same is true of any office environment, open plan or no. I think the article is a bit unfair and essentially saying "badly managed open plan offices are bad."

mathrat

13 years agodiscuss

I used to think this. And then I went to work in an open plan office... and discovered I love it! The office is surprisingly quiet, considering there's about 50 people in the open plan. When conversation does spring up, it's often really interesting and worth listening in on. When it's not, I find I have no trouble tuning it out. Other people seem to more trouble, and they bring noise-canceling headphones.

Not saying that this can work for everyone at every organization. But I for one was pleasantly surprised. Fwiw I'm a pretty introverted guy who deeply values his privacy.

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