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I actually posted this in the lab an drew a red line bell curve over it that was labelled "usefulness".

Honestly, it seems like people on HN so often assess things based on their raw usefulness. It makes sense, given that HN is read by many people who think like engineers, but in another recent thread on /r/math, people are talking about how the reason mathematicians study mathematics is not because it is useful, but because it possesses an inherent beauty/logic/whatever that makes the people who study it want to keep studying it. I'm doubling in math and CS and I have to say that the reason I am studying math is not because of any potential applicability to work I might do in software later in life, but because it has an allure for me that is unmatched by almost anything else.

hehe I unoffically doubled in math/chemistry, and I gave up on math because precisely due to its inapplicability, I was competing with people who were learning calculus at age nine. Chemistry was a better choice, because most sane parent do not allow their sixteen year old children to tinker around with carcinogens and explosives.

In retrospect, I should have been a coder. Although all my coding adventures post high-school have basically been autodidactic, I jumped in the deep end and took a high-level undergrad/grad CS class and coded my own web server... I was the only person whose server didn't allow the user to drill through the directory structure and hack the server because at the time I didn't know the posix file functions and actually wrote my own string parser/handler.

With the bell peak between Physics and Mathematics right? :P

uh, no, between biology and chemistry.

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