[deleted]
I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
61–70 of 281 posts
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#62This reminds me of revisiting Bash after a period of absence
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#63TLDR: The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome. I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. This guy's basically in the position of a fairly new developer who's just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time. All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel sm…
I started taking readability very seriously once I started going back to extend old code and finding I couldn't immediately understand what it was doing. Now, if I have that problem, it's now two problems. The original problem, and the readability problem. The readability problem is solved first, and the original problem can only be solved afterward. I don't see comments helping me, I could spend the time better by m…
> I don't see comments helping me...
I don't know why people say this type of thing, as if there's some choice you have to make between good names and comments. You can have both, and there are absolutely times when comments are necessary. Too many comments may be a "smell", but code that doesn't require any comments at all is very unlikely.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. If it only happened on mathematical papers... It is all over the place, in books, classes, etc. Few professors tell you what are they doing and why; they just throw formulas, theorems and symbols at you. Intuition is not given its necessary importance, first because it's hard to grasp some con…
In Germany you get to your advanced courses for the last two years of High school. I picked Math and Physics. We did a bunch of linear regression(with maple?) i believe. And some manual differential equations. I was one of the best in that class, but when I asked what we need this stuff for the other people in the class looked at me and said the following: "if you ask this question you're in the wrong class" I went o…
> Why can't we just provide a simple real life example first and then go on explaining the details?
This. People learn differently, in my case, if I can't get the 'Why' first, I'm not that excited to learn it. I guess making 'simple' real life examples in many cases is hard.
I also tend to learn things much better if they came from a real problem/need I have. There was a good discussion about a 'project based university' here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989341
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started taking readability very seriously once I started going back to extend old code and finding I couldn't immediately understand what it was doing. Now, if I have that problem, it's now two problems. The original problem, and the readability problem. The readability problem is solved first, and the original problem can only be solved afterward. I don't see comments helping me, I could spend the time better by m…
> I don't see comments helping me... I don't know why people say this type of thing, as if there's some choice you have to make between good names and comments. You can have both, and there are absolutely times when comments are necessary . Too many comments may be a "smell", but code that doesn't require any comments at all is very unlikely.
> there are absolutely times when comments are necessary.
I'll have to take your word for it, because I've yet to run into that situation.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#66It takes about three months before a paper we ship becomes the best reference we have on the subject, exceeding our own recollection.
Our brains can only hold so much, especially tiny details.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany you get to your advanced courses for the last two years of High school. I picked Math and Physics. We did a bunch of linear regression(with maple?) i believe. And some manual differential equations. I was one of the best in that class, but when I asked what we need this stuff for the other people in the class looked at me and said the following: "if you ask this question you're in the wrong class" I went o…
> Why can't we just provide a simple real life example first and then go on explaining the details? This. People learn differently, in my case, if I can't get the 'Why' first, I'm not that excited to learn it. I guess making 'simple' real life examples in many cases is hard. I also tend to learn things much better if they came from a real problem/need I have. There was a good discussion about a 'project based univers…
I actually think you're in the norm. The "why" helps create a belief; a belief is something that ignites action. Without it, someone's belief as to why they should learn [X] is too often defined as "to get a good grade."
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#68The dissemination of knowledge is at least as important as its discovery. Accessibility (i.e. clarity of exposition, availability to the public, etc.) needs to become a cardinal virtue in research.
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#69TLDR: The author independently re-discovered what you may know as Old Code Syndrome. I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. This guy's basically in the position of a fairly new developer who's just been asked to do non-trivial update of his own code for the first time. All those clever one-liners he put into his code made him feel sm…
> I think that's because mathematical papers place too much value on terseness and abstraction over exposition and intuition. If it only happened on mathematical papers... It is all over the place, in books, classes, etc. Few professors tell you what are they doing and why; they just throw formulas, theorems and symbols at you. Intuition is not given its necessary importance, first because it's hard to grasp some con…
I don't know... I'm taking a theory of computability class right now and I'm sure glad that the pumping lemma for regular languages is called "the pumping lemma for regular languages"
Re: I no longer understand my PhD dissertation
#70This does not surprise me in the least. Math was always extremely easy for me growing up. Up through my first differential equations class I found almost everything trivial to learn (the one exception is that I always found proving things difficult). I made the mistake of minoring in math and that slowly killed my enjoyment of it. Once I got to differential geometry and advanced matrix theory it all just became too a…
I can totally relate and to this day I describe one of my greatest failures as a manager as analogous to how "easy" math was to me. Until Calc II I really found nothing about math challenging at all. The result of this was that everyone wanted me to tutor them in math. The problem was that I didn't solve math problems like other people did, in fact I had no idea how I did what I did. I just did it. As a result when I tried to teach someone else it was an unmitigated disaster.
Fast forward to the real world, one of my biggest challenges is helping people figure out how to get from A-Z. A is obvious to me. Z is obvious to me (although I'm probably wrong as much as I'm right), but getting someone to understand my reasoning is almost impossible.