nsainsbury's comments

If anyone is interested in following a self-study curriculum but with more of an emphasis on pure vs applied math, you may find my experience and recommendations useful:

https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner

Reading this reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favourite essays "On the Wildness of Children" by Carol Black - http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children

It's definitely influenced how we raise our kids - boys in general really seem to need to be active, exploring, and heavily engaged in physical activity otherwise they turn that energy towards destructive activities.

I'm a native app developer too (iOS and Android) and I've got some experience with Flutter.

I agree with most of your comment, but the only thing I'd add is that from what I've seen if your concern is the quality of apps then Flutter definitely is not where you'll go to find that. If anything, Flutter developers seem to care even less about the end-user experience and instead simply focus on their own productivity. The end results are often horrible with a ton of jank, UI weirdness, etc.

From what I've seen and has been confirmed quite a few times now Flutter definitely does not deliver on producing mobile apps that are "super responsive and...indistinguishable from the native experience"

You can even find the director of engineering for Flutter confirming that's not the case on a thread on Reddit along with numerous devs reporting being burned by Flutter and swearing off using it ever again: https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/llmkd4/ios_jank...

I'm nowhere near as smart as Colin but I'll also share here a little personal story which relates to the topic.

I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.

What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.

I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart

Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.

I would argue the problem is it's not a one-time cost. You pay the cost almost every time you want to change jobs, because leetcode/algorithmic interview questions are so fundamentally different to what we actually do day-to-day as developers.

It is very easy to completely forget all about graph algorithms in, say, 3 - 5 years during which time you've been a productive, valuable member of a software development team that...you know...actually builds things customers care about.

I think a key phrase here is "he was dismissed for publicly challenging a colleague’s silence".

In other words, he publicly harassed a colleague who (for what could be any number of perfectly valid reasons) preferred not to publicly state their beliefs. That would seem to me to be an eminently reasonable reason to fire someone. If you go around publicly harassing your colleagues to publicly state their political opinions, you deserve to be fired.

I've been long frustrated about how technical interviewing takes place in our industry (and I've written about it quite a bit as well eg. https://www.neilwithdata.com/developer-hiring)

I think many companies through the hiring process completely lose sight of what they are actually looking for. They forget that the barriers they erected (whether they be whiteboard problems, take-home coding tests, algorithmic dance on your head textbook problems, etc.) are simply signals about the actual person and their capabilities...and usually, they're _exceedingly poor signals_. That's why you end up with situations where extremely accomplished and talented developers don't pass many technical interviews at companies where they would have otherwise gone on to be outstanding employees.

And it keeps happening, and happening, and happening.

Interviewing for a developer role should be far, far, far more holistic than it is today - rather than throwing away my entire history of accomplishments and creations and just assessing me on the spot in a 2hr winner-takes-all high-stakes game of whiteboard/technical trivia.

For example:

* If I have a strong GitHub portfolio of projects I can prove I worked on, that should 100% take priority as a signal as to my capability and how I think about committing regularly, writing clear commit messages, etc.

* If I've built products I can prove I alone built and I can walk you through my code, that should 100% take priority as a signal as to how I write code, my proficiency with a particular language, etc.

* If I communicate clearly over email, have a blog with my writing demonstrating my ability to clearly communicate technical topics, that should 100% take priority as a signal as to how well I communicate.

etc, etc.

Sadly, today, I'd say ~90% of technical interviews completely and utterly ignore all the above and want you to do the technical monkey dance...because clearly, what makes a developer great is grinding leetcode for 3 months and then pretending you haven't seen the problems before during the interview.

That's absurd. What he has built literally demonstrates he has the ability that the role requires - which is entirely what the entire interview loop is trying to ascertain. If you can ascertain that a person has a skillset without that loop, it is completely unnecessary.

I wrote about my journey learning mathematics for the last ~6 years quite recently actually! Might be of interest to you as well: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner

The article is a follow-up to a previous post which I linked to in the leading sentence.

> The author does not mention his experience interviewing or hiring people

From the previous article: "I've been a software developer now for around 15 years. In that time, I've been a day-to-day developer, run my own successful software business, was co-founder at a VC funded startup, and I've had to hire and manage developers."

> I'd love to hear what OP suggests to replace the coding tests with - a chat about past projects, then make an offer?

From the article: "Why can't you look at a developer's portfolio, education, projects they've built, GitHub repo, talk with past employers, check references...and from that make an informed hiring decision?"

To be clear, I don't at all advocate that people work through all the Calculus books. Likewise for the Linear Algebra books. My aim was to provide alternative options (which are easier, cheaper, etc.)

Yep, this has been the story of my learning experience. I've studied mathematics pretty much entirely on my own, but it's not because I wouldn't love to have company!

Having said that, I think it probably would be sufficient to find _just one_ other person who is at the same level of mathematical maturity and has the same degree of commitment to change the entire learning experience for the better. You don't need a big group.

Heh, nice to find someone who walked a similar path! :-)

Ah Spivak...yes, I absolutely agree it's one of the best books to build up that mathematical maturity everyone talks about.

For me Spivak took about 6 months and I managed to do almost all of the starred exercises - Gifted? No. Brutally determined: yes. And I was quite fortunate to be in a place in life where I could put serious hours in to it at the time.

After that, I learned to relax a bit more as I realised I had pushed myself way too hard and was close to burning out. I still love looking back at that damn book though. There's just something that's so special about it...the way the exercises build upon each other and connect together. It's really unique.

Not a book, but if you're looking to learn modern SQL in a hands-on way, I created Mastery with SQL (masterywithsql.com) specifically because I was frustrated with traditional SQL (and PostgreSQL) content that's lacking in high quality and challenging exercises.

Mastery with SQL has over 150 exercises, ranging from easy to very difficult, where you're primarily working with a single database and trying to answer interesting questions about a business (which months saw the highest revenue, best sales employee, most watched movie, find missing records, etc.).

I spent an enormous amount of time working on the exercises for this course (more than the actual content itself) and people who take the course consistently tell me working through the problems helped them learn SQL more deeply than they've learned anywhere else.

What's interesting about this as well is that participating in this economy of beefs makes people deeply unhappy right to the core, and yet they can't seem to step away.

Take any Twitter user with over 20k followers, and almost to a T they appear to be extremely unhappy, depressed, and anxious wrecks who use Twitter to put on a happy face and pretend they're not.

Bingo. I've made this comment several times on Hacker News in the past as well and in my opinion it's the number one reason I've seen ML projects fail to have impact at companies it's deployed: the operators (typically higher level Math/CS types) simply don't understand the domains well enough and so frequently end up making absurd recommendations/suggestions (often to the detriment of other business areas).

The successful application of ML requires a deep understanding of the domain it's being applied in.

It's a bit of a harsh heuristic, but after working now on several projects involving ML/AI and reading and watching about the experience of others in the industry too, I've come to associate most claims of ML as snake oil.

In industry today, I believe very few businesses are reaping much benefit from ML as compared to trivial statistical/analytical tools (linear regression, most popular recommenders, common sense improvements/optimizations, etc.). The only real benefit I would argue ML has brought for businesses has been in marketing to the general lay audience and misleading investors.

The main reason for this in my opinion is you can't really just come in and make recommendations/improvements to a given problem domain without deeply understanding that domain back to front - and that's an understanding that academic types that get hired to build ML systems almost never have. You can't stand at an arms length from real business problems and just throw maths at them and expect to make good (or even sensible) recommendations.

I'm working on a new chapter for my course Mastery with SQL (https://www.masterywithsql.com) covering query performance and indexing with PostgreSQL.

I want to really allow everyone to see first-hand the impact of re-writing queries to be more performant and adding the right indexes so I've been spending a lot of time to create great exercises where you get to optimise poorly performing queries over some very large and interesting data sets.

I launched the course on HN a bit over a week ago and had a really great response (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260292) so has been great motivation to continue working hard! Really enjoying myself at the moment.

Yep, there is! It's just the promo videos on the landing page that don't have this.