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How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

cs.purdue.edu

71–80 of 104 posts

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#71

> In fact, this is merely an extension of a ploy used by children on a playground: "Oh yeah? I could have done that if I wanted to." Or by adult professionals on Hacker News.

What a lame comment. I could have written one better If I had the time!

What a great comment! I wrote a similar one on Reddit.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#72

This is pretty awful, as in mean. Why would you deliberately want to insult someone who hasn't done anything to you? If it's getting them back sure, but as sport? Just cruel. Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss something? (This is an especially good ploy if you observe others struggling to understand the talk because they will not wa…

The article is supposed to be a joke.

If the author did not intend for it to be a joke, you can make the conclusion that the author has psychopathic tendencies.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#73
post #44

> In fact, this is merely an extension of a ploy used by children on a playground: "Oh yeah? I could have done that if I wanted to." Or by adult professionals on Hacker News.

I had an insufferable coworker who doubled down on that attitude. If he hadn't thought of something, instead of just saying he could have done it, he'd start rambling about why it was a bad idea, and that he was smart for choosing not to do it. His whole attitude was "I know everything, and if I don't know it, it's because it's not worth knowing". Worst part was the non-technical management ate it up because he was s…

This describes an uncomfortably high fraction of CS people.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#74
The goal of the typical developer is to add as much complexity as possible while ensuring that the system works correctly 99.999999% of the time such that failure will not be detected for a few years - Just long enough for the project to be scrapped and rewritten by the next generation of developers.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#75
post #64
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an insufferable coworker who doubled down on that attitude. If he hadn't thought of something, instead of just saying he could have done it, he'd start rambling about why it was a bad idea, and that he was smart for choosing not to do it. His whole attitude was "I know everything, and if I don't know it, it's because it's not worth knowing". Worst part was the non-technical management ate it up because he was s…

So how do you productively deal with this? There’s got to be a way, I just don’t know what it is. The worse form of this is when they: 1) make poor choices faster than you can catch up 2) have a less senior team (in ability, not title) that can’t see more than a couple commits ahead to keep the damage in check.

> So how do you productively deal with this?

Explain it in your exit interview.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#76
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Rust a while ago (I do mainly Python) but not for long enough to get my head around it (the borrow checker). Is it now past the peak hype cycle, or do people still love it?

I learned it a while back during some huge hype and put it down for a while after slow, minor, painful success. I recently came back and it feels much improved, and my troubles with the borrow checker seem to finally be something I have overcome. I think it will continue to be loved.

There was a real improvement to the borrow checker to make it use non-lexical-lifetimes. The practical implications were the borrow checker being much better at reasoning about mutually exclusive borrows between branches.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you browse r/MachineLearning, you will see many people complaining about unnecessarily convoluted mathematics that are literally there to appease reviewers and don't actually say anything useful.

In my understanding this comes from the fact that many ML is more engineering than science but wants to be seen (or is reviewed as) theoretical research. So it fits the situation in the article even better.

I think many ML isn’t even engineering. Speeding up the implementation of an algorithm is, but the algorithms themselves mostly are of the “something like this seemed to work for problem P, so for problem Q, I tried this variation” type.

Yes, there may be solid math behind it that says “if your problem is of type T, this algorithm will get within Foo of the optimal solution in O(n log n) time”, but the problem is that nobody can tell whether a given real-world problem is of type T. Yet, people happily run the algorithm and if it works, it works.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah man, Rust has overplayed its hand and has been turned into a meme. We need a new Rust that's exactly like the old Rust before it was cool.

Yeah, come on, write it in Nim or don't write it at all.

Nim is too simple and lacks complex mathematics.
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