Hacker News: sno129

New comment by sno129 in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

sno129 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:56:29 +0000

Don't really know what point you're trying to make here. Maybe Garnett is more westernized, but that doesn't make it more readable. IMO Garnett's not great (at least for Anna Karenina, which is all I've read by her); from what I've read P&V is more readable than Garnett.

New comment by sno129 in "String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof"

sno129 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 05:11:40 +0000

I wouldn't consider the Hodge diamond the "crucial idea from string theory." It's a pretty basic/fundamental concept in geometry and really doesn't a priori have much to do with string theory. The decomposition they give on page 6 probably predates most of the development of string theory.

New comment by sno129 in "June Huh dropped out to become a poet, now he’s won a Fields Medal (2022)"

sno129 — Thu, 08 May 2025 01:49:30 +0000

My academic work was very close to June Huh's; my Ph.D. thesis was directly inspired by his Fields Medal winning work. His accomplishments have undoubtedly moved the field forward and connected various ostensibly disparate areas of math, not to mention he is one of the clearest writers and speakers in all of mathematics.

There are very few people in pure math that care about transformers; they have had practically zero impact on the sort of research mathematics that the Fields Medal is concerned with.

New comment by sno129 in "Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?"

sno129 — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 01:39:04 +0000

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNxvUrWQ_Q

New comment by sno129 in "Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees"

sno129 — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 02:19:05 +0000

I'm assuming you don't have a Ph.D. if it sounds generic to you. I think it's really impossible to explain to somebody who hasn't gone through it how much a Ph.D. changes the way you think.

Whether it's worth the time investment is another matter, however, which I'll leave alone.

New comment by sno129 in "How your morning coffee is changing the structure of your brain"

sno129 — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 23:54:20 +0000

On the other hand, the amount of people that consume excess amounts of caffeine also seems overrepresented among such people.

New comment by sno129 in "NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders"

sno129 — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:04:23 +0000

I have not been paid because my salary is funded by an NSF grant and they've shut down the payment system and cancelled payments. (It is still down.) I'm not in the social sciences, I'm in mathematics.

The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.

New comment by sno129 in "Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?"

sno129 — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 20:40:37 +0000

Write Vim instead. /s

New comment by sno129 in "Google Illuminate: Books and papers turned into audio"

sno129 — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 18:03:19 +0000

Plenty of mistakes in textbooks and research articles, it's possible the probability is already even lower.

New comment by sno129 in "Teaching general problem-solving skills is not a substitute for teaching math [pdf] (2010)"

sno129 — Sun, 07 Jul 2024 15:57:18 +0000

As a professional mathematician, I strongly disagree with the claim that "higher math" abandons worked examples. Any course or book that does not devote a significant amount of time to examples is a bad course or book.

Even Grothendieck, who was famously known for thinking very abstractly and avoiding examples, was motivated by concrete questions (e.g., the Weil conjectures) coming from concrete examples. To me, and most other mathematicians, the whole point of mathematics is to do examples, and theory building or any other abstract nonsense should be motivated by the desire to better understand or unify examples.