How to Insult a Computer Scientist

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.criticize.html

by BudVVeezer • 15 years ago

264 93 15 years ago

cs.purdue.edu

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

Another insult against a theorist:

"Interesting, I'm from industry and this appears very applicable to some of the work we're doing right now."

bpodgursky• 15 years ago

Har har har.

Extreme theorists don't hate applications, they just don't especially care if they exist.

_delirium2• 15 years ago

At schools with separate "pure" and "applied" math departments, there's sort of a running joke in the pure-math departments that they feel offended if someone has accidentally managed to find their work useful, because it means they've, quite to their chagrin, advanced the agenda of the rival applied-math department (or at least, that they weren't "pure" enough). But of course that's a self-deprecating joke more than a statement of what theoreticians really think.

6ren• 15 years ago

That people working in the area of compilers are experimentalists explains a lot about compiler theory.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

Please remember to always compile with -O3

nickolai2• 15 years ago

Doesnt this set up an oversimplified theoretical separation over the admittedly simple but continuous spectrum of research and corresponding insults??

VladRussian• 15 years ago

Are you trying to insult him following the insult rules for theorists?

nickolai2• 15 years ago

Tried a shot at both simultaneously actually. saying his theory is oversimplified(theorist) and that his insult system is missing a critical element (discrete approach is invalid - experimental faliure).

Anyone has interesting ideas to create a simplest possible insult that would work for both properties ? (yeah ok, i'm no theorist)

joebadmo• 15 years ago

Yeah, everything in the essay was so obvious, I could've written it.

larrykubin• 15 years ago

Easier ways:

1) When he/she says they are a computer scientist, say "oh so you're like an IT guy? Because I recently got this virus..."

2) Call him a mouse jockey

stewiecat• 15 years ago

I worked for a guy that called us all "button pushers".

FiZ• 15 years ago

3) "Can you fix my printer?"

tdfx• 15 years ago

Recommended steps: power cycle, kick, replace

paydro• 15 years ago

What does "PC LOAD LETTER" mean?!

Luyt• 15 years ago

It means your TPS Report cover sheet has jammed the printer.

Stormbringer2• 15 years ago

It means MS Word screwed you over again, this time by switching from A4 to Letter while you weren't looking. Damn Americans and their Imperialist defaults! :D

CallMeV• 15 years ago

Ask him if that means that he can write games for the XBox or Nintendo consoles.

endtime• 15 years ago

I once got, from a finance guy, in all seriousness: "So, you're the CTO...I guess you must have a lot of gadgets at home...?"

My response was along the lines of "Actually, when I was in grad school I spent most of my time on theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence." A little obnoxious, sure, but he deserved it.

ohashi• 15 years ago

Have you tried turning it on and off again?

arethuza• 15 years ago

When I worked in CS research the sure fire way of making the Prof I worked for incandescent with rage was for someone from industry to start a comment with "In the real world...".

jedsmith3• 15 years ago

For some context (odd that it's not included in the essay itself), this is an essay by Douglas Comer from January 2009 -- according to the HTTP header, at least, which I'm inclined to trust given the system. If that name's familiar but you're not sure why, he wrote Internetworking with TCP/IP.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

I know it's older than this, since it was up when I was at Purdue almost 10 years ago.

As a side note, Comer is the type that once he's decided you aren't worth talking to, he will do whatever necessary to ensure conversations with you are short, including applying the contents of this essay in spectacular fashion.

billswift2• 15 years ago

I prefer Spider Robinson's advice. No one who you totally and completely ignore will keep pestering you for long. Some people take insults as validation, or are like kids who just want attention, but no one will keep bugging you if you don't even recognize their existence.

RiderOfGiraffes7• 15 years ago

Cue one highly ranked HN news item with no news, nothing about startups, nothing specific to hacking, no real information, and nothing that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Yup - I'm "that guy" and today I'm a grumpy old man. This item is just noise.

ADDED IN EDIT: And yes, I expected to be downvoted, because anything that smacks of criticism of the community gets downvoted. People don't like to be told that they're doing something wrong, especially people who are so damned sure they're right, or clever, or talented, or hardworking.

Yes, the very nature of an entrepreneur is to follow things through in the face of adversity, but when you're criticised you need to stop and see if there's some truth - to see if there's something you should learn.

Before you downvote this comment, ask yourself why? Does this submission as a whole really add value to the site? If it does, then my criticism doesn't, and rightly should be downvoted.

But if this item adds no real value to the site then my criticism is valid and should at least make you pause before looking for an arrow to click.

And if you do downvote, then a reasoned response would add value. But maybe you really are just looking for cheap entertainment. Replying - adding value to the site - would be, you know, like, work.

jedsmith3• 15 years ago

Fight noise with noise?

RiderOfGiraffes7• 15 years ago

Well, I was just hoping to make people stop, think, and not contribute to this content-free crap. I used to come to HN and read pretty much everything. Now there's less and less that's got actual content, and more and more "entertaining" articles, or items of purely general interest with no focus. Some hard-of-thinking wannabee hitman, how to insult computer scientists, completely obvious comments about outsourcing, letters from Fukushima workers, any items of real value have to compete for space.

Even the really good stuff feels familiar. I wonder if I've just seen all there is to see and everything's looking familiar, in the same way that as you get older, everyone reminds you of someone else.

Maybe it's time to move on. Maybe this is a time to get the sense of the community and use that to help guide my decision. They do say - listen to your users. My contributions here on HN mean that you are, in a sense, my users.

jpwagner3• 15 years ago

I couldn't disagree with you more. This is not a posting of a lolcat, it is relatively witty.

Sure it's no Silence Dogood essay, but you're way too harsh here.

num15• 15 years ago

According to the official FAQ (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) on-topic is defined as: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Now I personally am a hacker (we'll leave the good for others to argue) and I find this interesting, if not rather humorous. This post currently has 51 points, meaning at least 50 other people also considered it interesting. If that's not strong evidence that this link belongs here please explain what is.

RiderOfGiraffes7• 15 years ago

Do you really think it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." ??

Honestly??

I think it's a cheap joke with no intellectual value. Some people find it funny, and they will upvote it. I'll happily believe that 50, 100, possibly 1000 people here find it funny to think about how to insult computer scientists.

After you've read it - what have you really learned?

Upvotes do not of themselves mean an item meets the guidelines.

bhousel2• 15 years ago

RiderOfGiraffes doesn't need you to tell him how Hacker News works.

lukeschlather• 15 years ago

I think this post is timely. My brother is presently working and studying at a university (The University of Cincinnati) where the computer science department has been axed in its entirety because of politics.

They still, however, have the more applied computer engineering department. I think this post speaks volumes about the attitudes of faculty at Purdue, both in CS and outside. There's a lot of stuff this post doesn't explore because of the format, but I'm glad this showed up. Maybe you're removed from academia, or maybe the academic environment in the UK doesn't have these sorts of issues separating applied and theoretical CS, and even with applications-focused universities killing CS entirely.

In short, this is not fluff, it succinctly illustrates a significant divide in the field.

hyperbovine• 15 years ago

In the future, I recommend not clicking.

DanielBMarkham2• 15 years ago

That was an especially fine job of grumpy old man. Kudos and congratulations.

If you haven't noticed, the site is going to hell in a handbasket. Looking at the front page, we have more quadracopter porn (love it!), three stories along the lines of "guess who's quit/joining X" story, more Color trashing (can we say who cares?), a story that promises to teach me to accomplish anything, and, yet again, "Is C++ dead?"

I say if C++ has jumped the shark, it is only a shark iterator, and the sequence is infinite.

That's not even mentioning the new jokey/snide-remark level in commenting...

Sorry. Didn't mean to horn in on your grumpy old guy glory.

alnayyir• 15 years ago

It's okay, I'll tromp all over your next "Glorious Defender of .NET" grumpy guy routine.

joeld42• 15 years ago

Q. What's the difference between 'theory' and 'practice'?

A. In theory, there is no difference.

jpwagner3• 15 years ago

In practice, there is.

sophacles• 15 years ago

That is the obvious symmetry. Anyone could have written it.

dkersten• 15 years ago

"The difference between theory and practice is bigger in practice than it is in theory"

billswift2• 15 years ago

The most practical thing in the world is a good theory. Helmholtz

NY_USA_Hacker2• 15 years ago

I can see that your work contains much that is new and good however the new is not good and the good, not new.

A paper on this work would be illuminating if ignited.

Congratulations: You have now once again successfully solved one of the one star exercises in Knuth's TACP.

In this work, is your coauthor a professor, post-doc, Ph.D. student, Master's student, undergraduate, or a visitor from a middle school?

So, your new programming language is Turing Machine equivalent. Okay. Beyond that its main feature is that it 'encourages a programming style' you prefer. Just why is that 'style' more significant than, say, style in the rag trade?

Your work has used some theorems from math but has it added any theorems to math?

aperiodic• 15 years ago

> Congratulations: You have now once again successfully solved one of the one star exercises in Knuth's TACP.

My CS professor has published papers that are solutions to exercises in The Art of Computer Programming. It's sort of a fact of life for computer scientists that whatever you're doing has probably already been done by Knuth.

zbanks2• 15 years ago

Knuth has a large range of problems in his text. He scales them all by difficulty on a log scale from 0 to 50. Things rated 00-05 might be a basic facts or arithmetic (What is 6! ?).

A set of problems in the 20s would be a good chunk of work, each taking about 20-30 minutes. By the time you get to 40's, you're dealing with problems that you could write a paper on. In the introduction, he demands proof of Fermat's Last Theorem as an example for 50.

rweba• 15 years ago

This paper fills a much needed gap in the literature.

NY_USA_Hacker2• 15 years ago

Sorry I omitted that one!

olalonde• 15 years ago

> You can try to attack both parts simultaneously:

> I note that the systems aspect of this project seems quite complex. Do you think the cause of the convoluted implementation can be attributed to the more-or-less ``simplistic'' mathematical analysis you used?"

This has to be my favorite one :)

Jun8• 15 years ago

Purdue's CS Department is legendary in its archaic theoreticalness (if there's such a word, but would be a nice insult, I think). So much so, it seems, to produce a lot of funny commentary. For another popular example from proggit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gcgv8/all_hope_...

bhousel2• 15 years ago

Wow, from 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436058

The comments back then were.. different somehow.

RiderOfGiraffes7• 15 years ago

Interesting comparison - good find - thanks.

jrwoodruff• 15 years ago

They almost feel younger, somehow, less color possibly? Interesting comparison. You can tell it was a smaller closer community then. I enjoyed it then and I still do, likely because of it's evolution.

endlessvoid94• 15 years ago

If I write code that needs to be performant, and I do it by using an efficient algorithm, analyzing it's complexity and use Big-O notation, I'm automatically a theorist?

That's hilarious.

d2• 15 years ago

Comebacks:

Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss something?

Yes.

----

Isn't this just a straightforward extension of an old result by Hartmanis?

Which one?

----

Am I missing something here? Can you identify any deep mathematical content in this work?

Yes you are. Next question.

----

Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC?

No, only several of the underlying technologies. Can you identify which?

----

Have you tested this on the chip Intel got running last week in their lab?

No, but I'm sure it will work because I helped design it.

----

Am I missing something? Isn't it obvious that there's a bottleneck in the system that prevents scaling to arbitrary size?

Did you miss that function isDebugOn(){ return false; } is O(1)?

_delirium2• 15 years ago

The insult-backfiring section reminds me of some interesting experiences as an AI researcher, with a slight secret penchant (as many of us have) for robot domination. When a humanities or social-science researcher starts talking about "technological determinism", "machinic tyranny", "sapping of human agency by machine", the "instrumental society", and similar, the AI researcher sits, trying hard to suppress a smile, thinking, "yes, yes, PLEASE do go on!".

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

So you work in IT? - works on me just fine.

wisty• 15 years ago

It seems that the author is a theorist, not a practitioner, as his theorist insults ("Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss something?") are much better than his experimentalist insults ("Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC?")

If you want to insult an experimentalist, it's there's a much more cutting one - "Didn't Microsoft do something similar when they were working on CORBA?".

nl• 15 years ago

Didn't Microsoft do something similar when they were working on CORBA?

To which you'd get a puzzled look while they condescendingly informed you that Microsoft never worked on CORBA - that was the OMG, and Microsoft had COM/DCOM.

Xerox PARC is good, because they probably did work on whatever is being discussed.

Other options include "Didn't Englebert include that in the Mother of All Demos?" and "Didn't Taligent have that running?"

jamesmiller52• 15 years ago

I just finished a class with Prof. Comer. He is hands down the best instructor I've ever had. He has a very down to earth method of teaching & personality for that matter.

shriphani• 15 years ago

CS250 ?

jamesmiller52• 15 years ago

Yep. I take it you did as well :)

gregfjohnson• 15 years ago

Comment by a French computer scientist: "Well, of course it will work in practice, but will it work in theory?"

Mafana0• 15 years ago

Related: Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.htm...

There are some interesting points in that list, some can be used against theorists, others can be used against experimentalists.

(I'm not sure if that article has been ever submitted to HN)

liedra• 15 years ago

My boyfriend just graduated with a PhD in computer science, and his mother sent a congratulatory email to him (with me in CC) saying "Congratulations on your PhD in IT!"

Much good-natured jibing was had after that. :)

How to Insult a Computer Scientist

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