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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

It's cute that quants think what they do is advanced, isn't it?

The word "advanced" is relative to the intended audience and it's obvious how he meant that word to be applied. The author wrote:

", chances are if you are considering studying advanced mathematics you will already have formal qualifications in the basics, particularly the mathematics learnt in junior and senior highschool (GCSE and A-Level for those of us in the UK!). "

The author is not a Fields Medalist writing to other PhD mathematics graduate students. In such a case, the adjective "advanced" would have a different meaning.

It's cute that the article is littered with Amazon referral links to textbooks.

I'm curious why people care about articles with referral links. It's not like you're paying more if you end up buying something, is it?

It is always good to know when someone is profiting financially from a recommendation they're giving you.

Sure, I'll buy that in principle. But wouldn't you agree that it mostly matters if someone is recommending some shady financial product or otherwise high-ticket item? What's the worse that could happen when someone makes (text)book recommendations?

Affiliate links are also a good way to compensate people for curating valuable information. So the sort of "it goes without saying affiliate links are bad" attitude is kind of a mystery to me.

I don't know any successful quants that claim what they do is "advanced" in any fashion.

A year or so ago a chum asked me to take a look at a paper that some of her quants were basing their work on. When I dug through it and pulled out all the plagiarism in it (and I do mean that; it had literally been hacked together out of other papers by some chancer in a middle-eastern university) it turned out to be a Crank–Nicolson method, and then when I saw what they were doing with it, I reckoned they could have just used a crayon and drawn over the graph they were interested in to get their smoothed graph. I do know that soon after that she got a job somewhere else. You can find hacks and chancers in every walk of life.

[1] In the above text, "hack" and "hacker" is used in the pejorative sense, similar to a "hack journalist".

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