Hacker News Reader

Comment by rory_isAdonk | Hacker News Reader

Yeah beyond the cringe of thinking a Ph.D really means anything, its just highlights the pure lack of Lucene knowledge.

A Ph.D means a lot for many people. It's years of work to make the science progress a tiny little bit on a topic you enjoy (supposedly). I think it's a lot harder and meaningful than writing scalable and reliable code as a team in a software company, just to give one example to compare with.

But a phd in HCI has very little relevance to information retrieval or computational linguistics.

Exactly this. I have a PHD in CS and am a world class expert in multi-omic data integration and analysis. I'm happy to throw my weight around in that area, but I'd never point to my PhD to pontificate on Neural nets or systems or queuing theory or 99 percent of CS. If getting a PhD doesn't teach you how much you don't know and how hard it is to develop real expertise in any area, I think you wasted your PhD. Note, my PhD isn't on the value of PhDs so take it as you will.

I think I am pretty qualified to make my declaration, since it is about user experience.

I also do know a lot about IR, because I taught Information Retrieval class for 3 years when I was teaching in university, I read research papers, and I just come up with a new search algorithm.

It's just that some people cannot accept that there are people who can cross fields with ease, make contributions quickly, and move on to the next field that pit their interests.

Yes, I am one of those people. In addition to HCI, I also published in the following areas: VR, DB, NLP, IR and Psychology. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but it is what it is. Accept it and move on.

That's not a new search algorithm. It's about the second one people have come up with. First version: all documents containing all search terms. Second version: counting frequency in document. Since you taught IR for three years, I'm surprised there's no mention of other relevant heuristics, or measuring against benchmarks.

Again, you miss the novelty of the algorithm due to your smugness. I have updated the article to point out explicitly where the novelty is at. You completely ignored that. In fact, I believe you didn't even read that far before your jumping out to write this dismissal.

I wrote a blog post for lay people to read. I am under no obligation to do an extensive literature review, I only need to mention the essentials.

You just cannot seem to swallow the fact that someone who does not have a Ph.D in IR or computational linguistics can come in to contribute quickly then move on to something else. It hurts your feelings deeply, does it? Heed my advice, just get over it, don't take your degree or your specialization too seriously. It does not matter.

Of course it doesn't and the author doesn't try to make that claim. The author jokes that their HCI PhD is only good enough to give them the authority to make obvious statementd about what a "good" search experience should be for a user.

What did I miss?

It does have relevance to user experience, which is under discussion.

Well yeah, but it shouldn't make you smug. A Ph.D, while not the beginning, is definitely not the end, and the people we look up to as Really Smart never sat on their laurels and quit learning, never considered themselves above others.

It's fascinating seeing what hacker news thinks is smug. There are plenty of actually smug comments that go without being called out but for some reason this guy does.

The PhD flex in jest by the blog post's author is a bit awkward but I don't know that I would characterize it as smug.

Any insight into why the author is perceived as smug would be appreciated.

Let me offer my arguably biased insight: racism.

I am obviously a Chinese.

In the eyes of racists, Chinese Americans are supposed to be timid and does not make any noises, but I do make noises, so I am perceived as a smug today because I said I am a Ph.D, something else next time I said something else.

It's not complicated.

Wow, I was with you until this. I, for one, never even suspected your origin or nationality reading the blog post.

OK, re-reading it, there are a few hints (a Chinese proverb, your nickname, etc.). But nothing "obvious".

Probably not the explanation we are looking for here.

Not my nickname, my name.

It's good for you that you are not a racist (it's sad that such a normal thing has to be a compliment, but it is a compliment. Good for you.), but racists do look for these cues and make their judgement based on these.

It's an unfortunate current state of affairs that we have to live with. Ignoring it does not make it going away though. If you don't like it, you got to call it out whenever you see it, which I hope you do, instead of being taken back by it, as you seems to be.

BTW, you were with me? Where?

Why do you have to use a throwaway account to say this, I am curious.

Agreed. The wink right after it, I would have thought, dulled any smugness.

I could see calling it audacious. But, our industry advances on audacity.

Well it’s certainly more meaningful to the person who has one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com