Ken Jennings takes AMA questions on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Ken Jennings takes AMA questions on Reddit

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207 pointsjimmyjim32 comments

Lots of people think it's a Jeopardy reference, but actually I was thinking of that time Watson and I were cellmates in prison, and it kept raping me.

After I read that response I scrolled right back up and checked his proof that it's him. I knew Ken Jennings has a sense of humor, but I clearly underestimated him.

The retort wasn't bad either:

How bad can a 3½-inch floppy be?

See also: "Bruce Vilanch is hiding under my desk right now. Unfortunately he's not writing jokes for me, if you know what I mean."

He said further down that he likes to turn the assumption of boring mormons on it's head.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fwpzj/iama_74time_jeop...

How edgy.

What better way to clear up mormon stereotypes than by making prison rape jokes....

I was a little jarred that he explicitly mentioned rape. Don't get me wrong, nothing is off-limits for a joke, provided it is funny enough, but this joke is just as funny without the last clause. Including it is just redundant, not to mention it pulls the punchline slightly. To me it reads like he's trying to be offensive.

I guess this version of the punchline could hit through a language barrier though?

Ehhh, it depends on your expectations (or how you "mentally deliver" it, for a text joke). To me just a prison rape reference is kind of tired, so spelling it out contradicted my expectations and was much funnier.

Ah, I hadn't considered that reading of it. For what it's worth, I'd want a full stop period or even line break before the second punchline before I'd read it that way. In that way the joke is perhaps much more funny to people who read it that way and only slightly less funny to others.

My favorite answer:

"My Sunday school teacher, when I was a Mormon teen, once memorably advised us that "There's nothing more overrated than sex, and nothing more underrated than a good bowel movement." It totally worked...I don't remember a single other sermon from when I was a kid, but I think about this guy exactly once a day, and then again once a week."

Q: "What is one epiphany/something that was said to you that made you realize 'I can maintain my fame and not be remembered as just the guy who once won big at Jeopardy!'?"

A: Screw that, I don't want to be famous. I keep getting asked who my publicist is. Why would I have a publicist?!? I'm just a guy on a game show. I got mine. I need a privacist.

His Tuesday Trivia messages are always entertaining, but they aren't usually this funny.

So apparently Ken Jennings is about 9000x more hilarious than I expected him to be. Good to know.

He's a lot better than I expected jeopardy-win-streak-guy to be. I first saw him play on the Watson special, and was impressed that he chose his charity pretty rationally (VillageReach, top charity at www.givewell.org ).

I fully expected it, having read the question/answer session he did for the Washington Post two weeks ago. Utterly hillarious, especially the bit about Watson's voice.

http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html

Look past the "we're turning into reddit" HN angst: the IAmA reddit really can be very interesting.

There's much of reddit that is still interesting and useful, and there's plenty of good discussion to be had - it just has a much worse signal to noise ratio since its exploded in popularity. If you're willing to unsubscribe from some of the bigger subreddits and take the time to "roll-your-own" so to speak, there is a lot of value to be had.

Right, there's really nothing fundamentally different about HN and reddit other than the audience. At their core they are both vote-based commenting communities - and the generally high quality of comments makes me wish more sites (like Gawker, Engadget, etc) would use the same mechanism. Yes there is a lot of herd behavior but it's leagues better than the "First post!" cruft you see everywhere else.

>Right, there's really nothing fundamentally different about HN and reddit other than the audience.

Yeah. It just has an incredibly more functional UI and working RSS feeds.

Not sure what you mean by this, but in my opinion differing UI and RSS feeds are pretty much the opposite of "fundamental differences".

Got some suggestions for good subreddits?

I'd strongly suggest joining your state's subreddit.

Well, there are subreddits for any particular political persuasion you may have - most of them have better discussion than the general /r/politics. There's /r/programming, but its a little light on content sometimes so I prefer:

/r/systems

/r/machinelearning

/r/netsec

/r/compscipapers

/r/coding

/r/compsci

/r/linux

/r/opensource

/r/csbooks

for the hacker part of me. There are also all sorts of other ones for any interests you might have - hard sciences, soft sciences, food, photography, sports, fantasy sports anything you'd like. Heres a spreadsheet with some other subreddits - its not nearly comprehensive, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?hl=en&key=ttpCnxB3rD...

TrueReddit is pretty awesome: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/ . It's explicitly for "...thought-provoking articles, reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on the topics."

In addition to what others have said, I'll add r/depthhub. It's similar to r/bestof, but it serves to collect all of the interesting and deep discussions that happen on Reddit. r/theagora is also great if you have a philosophical bent. It's an attempt to recreate the dialectic of the Socratics. Emphasis is placed on focussed rhetoric and honest argument, and to avoid logical fallacies.

/r/tldr is a nice digest, and a good way (for me) to find interesting stuff on reddit

Entertaining perhaps, but I thought the interview with the IBM guy was a lot more interesting. There's not much on here except personal information and jokes.

Still no thanks to the quality of the comments posted, though, and that's the main problem with the site.

Jennings is fortunately able to be hilarious in all his answers, no matter how poignant the questions are.

Have you seen the level of commentary around the 'Net? I agree that Reddit's fallen down a bit, but it's way better than any other free and generalist site on the web. Heck, it's better than most soft-specialist sites. Reddit is in the same class of website as Digg, major newspapers, and YouTube - have you been to those sites and read their comments sections? Don't, if you want to keep any faith in humanity. By contrast, Reddit is almost reasonable. It's below HackerNews/Groklaw quality, and probably even below ArsTechnica quality, but it's still above average overall, especially among non-specializing and free sites.

I read reddit way more than HN these days. But I guess I also don't go to startup networking events in lieu of chilling on the beach in Thailand...

The key to reddit is creating an account and subscribing to the right subreddits (programming, science, compsci, ...). Equally importantly, unsubscribe from the main "reddit.com" reddit, pics, wtf, etc. Suddenly reddit becomes an informative, useful site.

The most interesting bit is that he thinks trivia-game ability is genetic.

(Well, that and how he handles being a mormon.)

The admission he's a Dan Bejar fan blew me away.

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