tangentspace

I interviewed at Palantir last month, and the process is still very similar to what you've described. However, regarding the last point, after the product demo they did directly address the potential for misuse of the product.

They described a culture that encourages asking hard questions, and doing the right thing in ethically complex situations, even if that meant turning down a business opportunity. It came across as frank and sincere, and I didn't get any sense they were grooming for a cult, more that they were looking for people who were smart and passionate.

Thanks for the link. The author is an editor of the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics, which also contains very high quality writing and a book I recommend to anyone interested in mathematics and engineering.

I agree that this is a flawed article: the ads are irritating, the grammar is flawed, and calling boolean algebra an algorithm is inaccurate.

But looking past the flaws, I wouldn't describe it as vapid. I see it as more of a very high level survey of some truly important algorithms targeted at general population and students. This kind of writing can be an incredibly important source of inspiration for young people.

I agree with splitting up CF stacks this way. It reduces the the blast radius, that saved me on a number of occasions when stack updates went sideways.

The problem introduced by that approach is how to manage a large number of CF stacks. First I used a homegrown Python library to manage them, then switched to having Terraform manage CF.

At first Terraform on CF was just intended to be an expedient measure to facilitate migrating everything to Terraform, and eventually we did migrate to pure Terraform. But then we started hitting all the rough edges in Terraform. In hindsight, the hybrid approach had actually been more stable and manageable than using either tool in isolation.

That's not how I'd interpret this sentence: "We have skin and other barriers that protect the cells." It sounds to me like the author claims that humans have skin, which is true, and that skin forms a barrier that protects internal cells, which is extremely plausible.

I wonder, how many people downvoted this without following the link to the comic? It's relevant, intelligent, and funny.

I always liked how Feynman dealt with complex numbers in 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter'.

He focuses on the intuitive concept of a particle having a spinny arrow attached, the arrow rotates as the particle flies through space. He only casually mentions that this is in fact a complex number, whereas the bulk of the text focuses on developing intuition around arrows.

I read that book in high school, and it certainly influenced the direction I took in university. It helped to understand that the physical universe often appears to behave in extremely non-intuitive ways, but using mathematics we can develop a model that transforms the phenomenon into something that actually does make intuitive sense.

I think some of the harder concepts in math are difficult because they act like stepping stones into aspects of our world that just don't make sense based on day-to-day experiences. But modern technology depends on this! Pedagogy is improving, but it still lags advances in technology.

Many people have recognized the need for improvement in mathematics education, and I think it really is evolving in positive directions. I worked at DreamBox Learning for a few years, they produce an adaptive math learning program for elementary schools (and gradually reaching higher levels) which as been very popular with children.

The kind of math that was traditionally taught in schools is still relevant and important, but I think we can leverage modern visual and interactive media to help children develop a broader class of mathematical reasoning skills, which includes much, much more than a bunch of rules, symbols, and rote procedures.

I can't think of any examples of mathematical objects being renamed, do you have any?

There may be some amount of drift over time, but you can go to the research library of any university math department and find books from pre-WWII that are still totally readable because although style has shifted somewhat, the basic nomenclature hasn't.