Hacker News Reader

Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

As much as the cult of genius is often overwhelming and contributing people have been written out of histories of discovery I still feel uneasy when I see a Prof and a PhD student listed as discovering something as you never know what the Prof contributed with the current state of the academy. It can always be a collaboration yes, so I am not passing judgment on this case, but there seem to be many cases where it is not a collaboration but a payment of dues to seniority. Then again, at my faculty in another discipline we have so little support or contact with the Profs it's embarrassing: so I suppose having any kind of working relationship as peers would be better than what goes on in some places.

View on HN

On the other hand, I did some research assistant work for my prof one summer, and he put my name on the paper the came out of it (as second author). But I didn't even understand half of what the paper said! I was a first year undergrad, and he was presumably hoping to help me "build a resume" and "get my name out there". It's an awesome gesture, and I think it happens a lot.

Furthermore, "Einstein and Noname grad student's method for solving X" sounds a lot better than "Noname's method for X". People will read it more and it will disseminate faster. The student will ultimately be better off.

I still feel uneasy when I see a Prof and a PhD student listed as discovering something as you never know what the Prof contributed with the current state of the academy

On the other hand, quite frequently the whole thing is the professor's idea, and the grad student does the drudge work of coding it up and verifying it and writing the paper, and they co-publish.

Of course if you're going to lament "the current state of the academy" you should be aware that the current state of the academy is far more likely than any previous state to give credit to the junior researchers. And in Europe this kind of thing still goes on, with professors butting in to take primary authorship on papers where their students have done 90% of the work.

As a recent CMU Alum, I can say that in this case you needn't be suspect.

Do you mean, "you need not just suspect, I can confirm that in my experience at CMU the professor is over-credited", or "you need not be suspect, in my experience at CMU the credit is properly allocated"?

I interpreted Qz's comment as "this professor is deserving of the allocated credit." As a recent CMU CS grad (and student of Professor Miller) I would agree and say that this is also generally the case.

I was leaning towards that positive interpretation, given CMU's positive reputation.

But given the thread root, and not knowing any more about Qz -- indeed being unable to trivially associate that handle with a real name/project via the profile page -- a cynical comment from a disgruntled grad couldn't be ruled out.

Apologies for the lack of clarity -- my original wording was possibly more ambiguous than the one I posted and I thought I had fixed that, but I guess I failed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com