What was John Nash like as a professor? | Hacker News Reader

What was John Nash like as a professor?

quora.com

85 pointsl0nwlf13 comments

This is gold:

Appropriate to today, Gerard, The space futurist, asked John and Freeman about what computers will mean to us in the next 50 years. Freeman said "everyone would have one or more to do many tasks so that humans could spend time doing more important things".

John paused for about a minute and said "Freeman that is ridiculous, computers will be used to calculate better chances to date the pretty girl next door that does not notice you".

The best comment, in my opinion, is the one that had this nugget. Sadly, it isn't the top rated comment. Here's the link:

http://www.quora.com/What-was-John-Nash-like-as-a-professor/...

I resented a lot of my lecturers at uni for nakedly scorning their roles as teachers in favor of their research. What is the point of me paying the (rapidly increasing) university fees if the people I am paying to teach me cannot bring themselves to deign to teach? It was, and is, insulting.

So, given the number of times a post from Quora has made the front page now--have any doubters changed their mind about Quora's value?

No. I'm not a 'doubter' I just don't care. I don't have a horse in the "whose Q&A site is teh bestzors" race.

Show me a reason to care. All I know is that expertsexchange needs to die in a fire. I don't care who pushes them into the bonfire. :D

What I've learned about Quora from this link is that the highest voted answer (currently) is historical hearsay, when an answer with half the points is based on actual, first-hand experience.

This happens on every moderated forum all the time, including HN. I've learned to get over the idea that the most correct answer will be moderated highest. One reason is that the righter answer might have been posted later. Another is that a less right answer might have been written in a more entertaining or attention-grabbing way.

If you want a HN example, take my post on "Google's Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337340

It was moderated 8, and contains the precise answer to the issue/controversy (it quotes the exception from Linux's COPYING file that both LWN and Linus himself cited later to refute the alleged "copyright issue")

The highest-voted comment on the article (38) does not mention this exception, and is full of inaccuracies like "Unless these programs are actually copying parts of the kernel into their source, they are not derived works."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337054

I use Quora for fun.

This post, about John Nash, validates my case.

I use StackOverflow for work. Real work. The thing where you get paid.

Put me in the "no" camp. All due respect to the HN front page, but how does that speak to their ability to becoming either a high traffic site or their ability to monetize the traffic they have?

How valuable is Ask Metafilter by this rubric?

In my personal experience, somewhere between 'very little' and 'lol'. I'm sure there is quality somewhere on that site but between the hard to look at design and the piles of low quality answers it's difficult to find.

Taking what other posters saying are saying a little bit farther: stack overflow is for work, quora is for fun, metafilter is for nothing.

Stack Overflow actually solves my real world problems.

Quora only entertains me.

In my view, it's some sort of wikipedia Q&A. I don't value it really highly.

It is interesting, but only because of the people on it. It's sort of like the Ask HN section here but slightly broader audience and scope.

The site itself has some impressive features but also some bewildering layout issues. One problem is - how much bigger can the site get before the quality of the participants is diluted too much?

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