Live data from Hacker News

How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

cs.purdue.edu

101–104 of 104 posts

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So how do you productively deal with this? Explain it in your exit interview.

I know you're joking, but it's considered impolite to explain things in exit interviews.

I'm not- in every exit interview I offer polite, constructive feedback.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Missing confidence intervals" is my (IMO) legit pet peeve. People fit frighteningly complicated models with millions-to-billions of parameters. They throw in hairy regularization schemes justified by fancy math. When it comes time to evaluate the output, however: "Our model is better because this one number is bigger than their number [once, on this one test set]."

Confidence intervals aren't even that informative. Like using boxplots when you could inform the viewer so much more with sina plots [1]. Why not show me the whole posterior probability distribution (perhaps helpfully marking the 95% highest density region [2])? Or if you don't have a distribution, show me the 95%, 97.5% and 99.5% intervals. [1] https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/boxplots-violins.html [2] https://www.sci…

Sure, there are better ways to actually do it; I was just riffing off the bit in the article.

It is super weird that an field devoted to doing inference somehow just...doesn't when it comes to evaluating their/our own work.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#103
post #2

As an engineer supporting researchers I ran into a peculiar problem. If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. So I had to lead them to come roun…

I really think this misses the mark. Grad students don't treat their prof as infallible - at least good labs. In most labs, the grad students are the ones actually doing the work and research. The prof is just the marketing man. And a good prof in CS will understand they're the clueless marketing man. It's not really feasible for them to keep up with writing code and the whole grant writing (and networking with compa…

what's worse is when the architect says; "that's an antipattern".

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#104
post #2

As an engineer supporting researchers I ran into a peculiar problem. If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. So I had to lead them to come roun…

> If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. That's what authorship is for. What's the point in supporting academia if you can't get authorship?

I got authorship. The problem is that if I came up with the idea I'd have to be listed as the lead author, and that didn't seem to go over well. If I just contributed to their ideas they were fine with that. It varied per prof, some were happy to work on ideas from anyone because they saw the development of an idea as the important part, some were very strict about not accepting primary concepts that they or their grad students didn't come up with. Some listed a lead author, some put authors in alphabetical order. In one case I discovered the cause, we'd been brainstorming about new ideas for a while and I suggested a combination of several of those ideas that seemed interesting. They all got flustered and pushed the idea aside. I learned quite a while later (after we'd actually built that system) they had filed a patent a few days before for almost the identical idea and decided to leave me out of it. It made building the system awkward because they were continually coming up with alternate explanations for why this wasn't the same as the idea I had presented (and they had already also had and patented). I didn't work with them much longer.
Post reply on HN