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How to Insult a Computer Scientist
- kenjackson 16y agoAnother 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 16y agoHar har har. Extreme theorists don't hate applications, they just don't especially care if they exist.
- _delirium 16y agoAt 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.
- num1 16y agoHeh. If anybody ever found a use it could mean their math wasn't complex enough!
- vacri 16y ago"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." I've lost count of the number of times a theorist has told me that result -foo- shouldn't be possible during application :)
- Xurinos 16y agoI have said that quote a lot in jest. :) But I always remind myself that it is based on the problem that there is actually very little theory going on -- that the developer is doing a lot of random fuddling around with little understanding, little theory, until some piece of code produces a desired behavior. The developer may decorate his muddling with tests and wordy comments, but it is still muddling around. If the developer understood his system, then the little mysteries that break theory would not be so magical anymore, and he can move on to keeping his theory on par with his practice. Countless times over the years I have seen areas where Academia is decades ahead of us so-called industry experts. What is "new", "shiny", and posted all over the place online today is built of theory produced 20+ years ago. In practice, we have gotten our tasks done without some of this knowledge, but theoretically, we have, over time in our ignorance, cost our employers millions of dollars in hours dedicated to bug-fixing and features that could not meet deadlines. It is a hard pill to swallow. The silver lining is that we can recognize this and work to grow, to learn that missed theory, rather than fall into the trap of complacency. Today's fad is functional programming. In the coming years, we will relearn the weaknesses of functional programming, why OOP was the next stage of evolution. Hopefully we will have learned not to fall into extremist camps again (the notion of a "functional vs OOP" conflict still strikes me as hilarious misunderstanding).
- nightski 16y agoOut of curiosity, could you share these weaknesses of functional programming and how OOP solves them? Or at least point me to some material that discusses them? I would be very interested. I have programmed in OOP for over a decade and just picked up functional programming in the last 2 years so do not have enough experience with FP to make any definite conclusions yet (although I am really liking what I see so far). Thanks.
- GrooveStomp 16y agoThe way of the theorist is to tell any non-theorist that the non-theorist is wrong, then leave without any explanation. Or, simply hand-wave the explanation away, claiming it as "too complex" too fully understand without years of rigorous training. Of course I jest. :)
- 6ren 16y agoThat people working in the area of compilers are experimentalists explains a lot about compiler theory.
- sukuriant 16y agoPlease remember to always compile with -O3
- nickolai 16y agoDoesnt this set up an oversimplified theoretical separation over the admittedly simple but continuous spectrum of research and corresponding insults??
- VladRussian 16y agoAre you trying to insult him following the insult rules for theorists?
- nickolai 16y agoTried 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 16y agoYeah, everything in the essay was so obvious, I could've written it.
- larrykubin 16y agoEasier 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 16y agoI worked for a guy that called us all "button pushers".
- FiZ 16y ago3) "Can you fix my printer?"
- tdfx 16y agoRecommended steps: power cycle, kick, replace
- zbanks 16y agoTo the human or the printer?
- Stormbringer 16y agoYes
- Maakuth 16y ago"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p85xwZ_OLX0
- paydro 16y agoWhat does "PC LOAD LETTER" mean?!
- Luyt 16y agoIt means your TPS Report cover sheet has jammed the printer.
- arethuza 16y agoWhen 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...".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jedsmith 16y agoFor 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 16y agoI 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.
- billswift 16y agoI 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.
- gaius 16y agoYou have to be pretty cunning to execute that strategy. Otherwise you might find that that PHB ignores you at funding time...
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoCue 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.
- jedsmith 16y agoFight noise with noise?
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoWell, 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.
- joeld42 16y agoQ. What's the difference between 'theory' and 'practice'? A. In theory, there is no difference.
- NY_USA_Hacker 16y agoI 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 16y 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.
- zbanks 16y agoKnuth 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 16y agoThis paper fills a much needed gap in the literature.
- NY_USA_Hacker 16y agoSorry I omitted that one!
- olalonde 16y 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 16y agoPurdue'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_abandon_ye_who_enter_here/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gcgv8/all_hope_...
- bhousel 16y agoWow, from 2 years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436058 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436058 The comments back then were.. different somehow.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoInteresting comparison - good find - thanks.
- jrwoodruff 16y agoThey 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 16y agoIf 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.
- iuytghyjuyh 16y agoAnyone care to explain how a subject that is either applied maths or engineering claims to be a science? Not meant to be disparaging - science involves a theory, prediction, experiment to verify the theory - repeat. On a bad day debugging could be an experimental science but I don't see how "theoretical computer science" is one. PS generally tacking "... Science" onto the end of your subject is defacto proof that it isn't one!
- d2 16y agoComebacks: 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)?
- _delirium 16y agoThe 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 16y agoSo you work in IT? - works on me just fine.
- wisty 16y agoIt 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 16y agoDidn'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?"
- jamesmiller5 16y agoI 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 16y agoCS250 ?
- jamesmiller5 16y agoYep. I take it you did as well :)
- gregfjohnson 16y agoComment by a French computer scientist: "Well, of course it will work in practice, but will it work in theory?"
- Mafana0 16y agoRelated: Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.html 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 16y agoMy 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. :)
- losethos 16y agoI like to say "LoseThos memory management will fragment in theory, but not in practice." How about, "Reboot before each application." It's the old Russian space pencil verses NASA space pen. God says... coursing Here perceiving defending hark abundantly looking