HN user

pokerface_86

18 karma
Posts0
Comments96
View on HN
No posts found.

the world would be an infinitely better place if those 170 million people were capable of that. unfortunately, i think, by virtue of consuming short form content in 2025, they are beyond help.

tornadoes and hail are actually a big driver of property insurance rates. they typically aren’t catastrophic but the frequency is increasing quickly and they do cause an aggregation of claims.

i doubt the adage is california specific, and likely came about before prop 13.

as an outsider, i think cali’s schooling system is beyond fucked, mostly due to the focus on the bottom 25% of students. the middle and high achieving students are being neglected and leaving. positive feedback loop.

it’s to make sure your kids go to the best school possible, and are surrounded by as many future successful people as possible. considering schools are funded based on tax revenue, it’s not the worst idea

i think that’s a characteristic of a lot of PhD’s though - they become so specialized they become inflexible. i’m more talking about applied math into industry types. in insurance, tech, etc, i always tend to find the mathy people are faster, come up with unique solutions, and are more self motivated.

i’ve always found that mathematical thinkers do better, no matter the role. it’s difficult to express how, it’s kind of intangible, but it’s just a mental process that helps break down tasks and come up with unique solutions.

that being said, my marketing pitch for math was always, nothing else is even close to as intellectually stimulating as math.

math is low on the list then they bitch that they’re unemployable with a soft skill degree doing middle school level work. i get this is ironic as a pure math student is also fairly unemployable without extraneous skills, but they also tend to shine the brightest once they make it in.

i never found foil stupid, but i also only have a bachelors in math. maybe this was because i had already been exposed to multiplying polynomial expressions, beyond just a 2 term * 2 term by the time i had learned it in school, but i never found it particularly complicated to grasp. foil was never taught to me as the only way to multiply polynomials, rather, an easy algorithm to apply in a certain case. the goal is for you to make the connection that oh, in a 3x2 case, u have to multiply each term in the 3 with each term in the 2, etc.

i think your problems with foil can be extended to the general way math is taught. at least for me, it was always full of tricks, little rules that can be broken sometimes, and i was constantly learning new things that made me realize my old teachers had taught us tricks to shortcut solutions.

?? i went to a montessori school and i learned how to read and write poetry, cursive, tie my shoes, use scissors, all 4 mathematical operations, how to read novels, hell, i used to read our encyclopedia for fun, did a project on the bernoulli principal, and more, all before 2nd grade. no one i have ever met had an identical experience

the inability the generalize the foil procedure to an expression with more than 2 variables speaks more to the non mathematically oriented population just sucking at generalizing things. i have found this to be a very “you have it or you don’t” type of thing, not really something that can be taught

i agree with you but you do realize what you’re saying right? the vast majority of people will never have 150k+ in liquid capital they can tap in to if they don’t like their job

well one is allowed in a corporate setting and the other isn’t. that’s the main practical difference. i have literally sat in meetings where women are complaining about “old white assholes” in the industry (im not white) while my white male colleagues just look around uncomfortably.

high food prices

not really my problem the general population is unable to comprehend second and third order effects of a global pandemic and the subsequent money printing that followed

high fuel costs

gas is 2.39 around me. major metro area with population > 8 million

record crime levels

where? last i checked crime levels are back to or below 2019

illegal aliens

yeah? they’re the same ones serving me at the convenience stores, the restaurants, and the ones performing the vast majority of the labor that produces our food. america runs on the labor of illegal aliens, like it or not

tax

my taxes are fairly low

i can’t imagine having sympathy for some foreign megacorp hellbent on controlling every way you interact with a game their employees made. fuck nintendo, maybe they shouldn’t release complex software exclusive to an underpowered piece of shit that can’t even run ps4 games at 1080p60 if they don’t want people to prefer a superior experience

you face the exact same problems with coding, arguably more so as the trial and error and debugging process is worse than any proof i’ve ever had to do. if you can’t figure out how to apply basic integration techniques without a teacher formally sitting you down and saying exactly what situations to use each formula in, you haven’t learned shit

when i was 12,13 i really enjoyed the algebraic manipulation parts of calculus without having to think too hard about setting up problems. just practicing integration, differentiation and limits was a good start

i didn’t even know i enjoyed math until i was fortunate enough to take multivariable calculus my senior year of HS, you don’t really get to do any cool shit in typical public schools so it’s hard to keep the interest