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seanhunter commented on Sheafification – The optimal path to mathematical mastery: The fast track (2022)   sheafification.com/the-fa... · Posted by u/atomicnature
seanhunter · a day ago
There is no royal road to mathematics[1], and it's incredibly arrogant to think that any person can provide a single optimal path. For me for example the next steps are Axler, Abbott and Herstein[2]. That's where I am at the moment, and it's way earlier than the books listed here. It would be far from optimal for me to try to bang my head stubbornly on this list. Mathematics demands you put in the work to build a foundation - you cant just skip steps. For some people those books I listed are very rudimentary. For others they are definitely too advanced for where they are and they'll need something else.

Even more so is the idea that you can actually cover the material listed in that page in 3 years. If you were to blast through it in that time you would only be skimming the very surface of the topics. There's simply no way you could possibly do all of those subjects justice in that time.

[1] As Euclid is supposed to have said about geometry to the Pharoah Ptolemy when Ptolemy said he wanted to learn geometry but because of all the concerns of his kingdom he didn't have time to read the Elements.

[2] "Linear Algebra done Right" by Sheldon Axler

"Understanding Analysis" by Stephen Abbott

"Topics in Algebra" by Herstein. this is a lovely book and beautifully written but some of the notation is a bit dated. I have two more recent algebra books but they are a bit advanced for me until I work through Herstein. They are Aluffi "Algebra Chapter 0" which is a good modern algebra book which introduces category theory at the start and Hien I forget the title but it's a springer one that he claims is good for an introduction but it's definitely not. It assumes you know a lot. It's very good though.

seanhunter commented on Bourbaki – A Secret Society of Mathematicians   books.google.com/books/ab... · Posted by u/tzury
Guthur · 3 days ago
Potato -> Po Ta To
seanhunter · 2 days ago
There's a really huge difference. Membership of the group is not secret nor are the proceedings of their conferences etc. They have a twitter handle for goodness sake - that's not what you do if you actually want your society to be secret.

The thing they do is publish work by all members under a single pseudonym.

seanhunter commented on Bourbaki – A Secret Society of Mathematicians   books.google.com/books/ab... · Posted by u/tzury
wrp · 3 days ago
I read once that the general attitude of the group was that their publications were not meant to be widely read, but just to provide the foundation for better expository work.

I also heard that part of the bad reputation that Bourbaki got was due to their being used in graduate education, despite warnings that they weren't suitable. In the 1950s/60s, there was a lack of good graduate texts. Of course, then Serge Lang came along...

seanhunter · 2 days ago
Serge Lang, who happened to be a member of the Bourbaki group for some time coincidentally.
seanhunter commented on Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year   cnbc.com/2025/08/27/googl... · Posted by u/frays
seanhunter · 4 days ago
Honestly as an outsider this is the not the most important role for them to have eliminated. I have interacted with google a couple of times in the last few years and the company I work for are considered a priority account that they want to do more business with.

In every meeting, they put forward one engineer (who is usually quite capable) and 6 or 7 spreadsheet-trackers who all come from McKinsey or straight out of MBA school and seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room. Every meeting another one shows up and introduces themselves as being the person in charge of the relationship (this has become a running joke between me and the CTO).

At one stage I stopped going to one of the weekly meetings that these people put on my calendar so the guy called me up to ask why. I explained I got no value from the meeting as all the meeting was for was so he could read through a spreadsheet that everyone already had shared so if I was interested (which spoiler I wasn’t) I could just read it for myself and didn’t need a 45min meeting. He was most offended and disappeared soon after to be replaced by some other person who introduced themselves as the head of the relationship.

So in short if they get rid of everyone on the client-facing side who describes themselves as head of some relationship they would cut a lot more dead wood than TLMs.

seanhunter commented on 4chan launches legal action against Ofcom in US   bbc.com/news/articles/cly... · Posted by u/01-_-
stubish · 5 days ago
A US company located in the US protected by the US government and complying with US and only laws. Which would mean, when viewed in another country, they are exporting? And need to be paying their tariffs on all the ads they are exporting and views and clicks they are importing (I think we can assume the content is of zero value)?
seanhunter · 4 days ago
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case, the US has taken legal action against UK internet companies which were fully compliant with UK laws, specifically related to online gambling. So what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander also.[1]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5333850.stm (link changed to something where the story isn’t behind a paywall)

seanhunter commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me   boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass
sugarpimpdorsey · 7 days ago
There's some weird ones you'd never think of that originate an inordinate amount of bad traffic. Like Seychelles. A tiny little island nation in the middle of the ocean inhabited by... bots apparently? Cyprus is another one.

Re: China, their cloud services seem to stretch to Singapore and beyond. I had to blacklist all of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent and the ASNs stretched well beyond PRC borders.

seanhunter · 7 days ago
The Seychelles has a sweetheart tax deal with India such that a lot of corporations who have an India part and a non-India part will set up a Seychelles corp to funnel cash between the two entities. Through the magic of "Transfer Pricing"[1] they use this to reduce the amount of tax they need to pay.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is related somehow. Like maybe these are Indian corporations using a Seychelles offshore entity to do their scanning because then they can offset the costs against their tax or something. It may be that Cyprus has similar reasons. Istr that Cyprus was revealed to be important in providing a storefront to Russia and Putin-related companies and oligarchs.[2]

So Seychelles may be India-related bots and Cyprus Russia-related bots.

[1] https://taxjustice.net/faq/what-is-transfer-pricing/#:~:text...

[2] Yup. My memory originated in the "Panama Papers" leaks https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cypr...

seanhunter commented on The contrarian physics podcast subculture   timothynguyen.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/Emerson1
calf · 11 days ago
The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.

(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)

seanhunter · 11 days ago
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).

Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/

[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf

seanhunter commented on The value of hitting the HN front page   mooreds.com/wordpress/arc... · Posted by u/mooreds
seanhunter · 12 days ago
They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?
seanhunter commented on Monoid-Augmented FIFOs, Deamortised   pvk.ca/Blog/2025/08/19/mo... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
bern4444 · 13 days ago
> The identity element is zero

I think the identity element would be 1 for integers and multiplication, right?

0 would be the identity element for integers and addition.

seanhunter · 12 days ago
Yes. Sorry I edited my original to change the operation.
seanhunter commented on Monoid-Augmented FIFOs, Deamortised   pvk.ca/Blog/2025/08/19/mo... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
seanhunter · 13 days ago
For people who haven’t done abstract algebra, don’t be put off by the word “monoid”. A monoid in algebra is just a set with some associative binary operation and an identity element. Mathematicians in the 19th and 20th centuries realised you can study these types of structures and prove things which are true for all of them rather than having to do each one separately, and that led to “abstract algebra”.

So for example, if I have the integers and multiplication, this is a monoid[1]. The identity element is zero, which is an integer, and multiplication is an associative binary operation. It takes two integers and returns an integer.

Once you realise you have a monoid, if you do maths that only relies on the monoid properties then it applies to all monoids, so you could drop a different monoid in there and everything would still work. This ends up being very much like how typeclasses work in Haskell or traits in Rust.

[1] For the curious, it’s not a “group” because the integers don’t have multiplicative inverses. If I have x=2, there is no integer that I can multiply that by to get 1. Integers with addition on the other hand is a group, which is a monoid with the additional property that inverses are present.

u/seanhunter

KarmaCake day13315June 23, 2015View Original