Doug Comer: How to Insult a Computer Scientist | Hacker News Reader

Doug Comer: How to Insult a Computer Scientist

cs.purdue.edu

81 pointsdedalus18 comments

I once witnessed a wily 40-something Master's student torturing one of the department's young star PhD candidates. The PhD student had caught one of his mistakes and was taking it back, as any honorable academic should. The Master's student continued on, pretending as if the PhD student was insisting on the correctness of his earlier assertion. You could see the urgency with which the PhD student was trying to roll over and expose his belly, and his perplexity at that not working.

Never have I seen someone so distressed at being told he was right.

I've read this comment about ten times now and I still can't quite understand who was doing what to who. Am I going crazy?

Edit: I think I see now. The master's student was the distressed one.

Nope. The PhD was the distressed one.

Please rephrase. It sounds like an interesting anecdote if it were understandable.

M = Master's student P = PhD candidate

M discovers P is wrong and says why.

P realizes his mistake and admits it like any honest academic would.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P relents again, embarassed, since sticking to his guns would be anathema to his being.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns.

P tries harder to make it clear that he's relenting.

M keeps on going on like P is sticking to his guns...

I wish I could remember what they were talking about. M kept the other guy going for quite awhile and got him pretty riled up.

In essence, it was Trolling, but in person. (There is a good chance that this thread is trolling of the more common online variety.)

Ah, okay. It was just the last sentence that threw me for a loop:

"Never have I seen someone so distressed at being told he was right."

From the anecdote I understood that the PhD candidate was being told he was wrong. Anyway, I promise I'm not a troll, at least not on purpose.

It's a bit subtler than that, even. The M doesn't tell P that he's wrong, he says why he's wrong. He never comes out and says P is wrong, he just lets everyone around "get it." P gets it too, and tries to back off. M keeps spinning the illusion that P is sticking to his guns.

I never realized how evil M was until I thought about it again.

I'm upmodding you because that was an incredibly clear and concise way to relay a conversation between two people in the third person.

Much better than: "And he was like 'blah blah' and then she was like 'bleh bleh' and then he replied 'blih blih.'"

I'm going to make an effort to use the 'assign letters to people' approach next time I try to say something like that.

Hmm... to my downmodders... I wasn't trolling... I actually appreciated the elegance of explaining a conversation that way.

Would a computer scientist be insulted if you suggested he had wrapped a small amount of useful functionality in multiple and unnecessary levels of abstraction?

What if you suggested the same of his essays?

Is referring to engineers as "experimentalists" part of the joke?

In any case it was a good, light read that I'll take to heart in the next version of my insulting library.

http://insults.rubyforge.org/

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

I think it was Kissinger who said that academic politics are so intense because the stakes are so small. These kinds of essays get old after a while.

Doug Comer seems to be quite disillusioned with academia - he has posted several similarly wry CS 'essays' on his website: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/

Either that, or he just has a sense of humor about it.

There's something unrewarding about getting a research paper accepted because three reviewers thought it was good and having it only read by a hundred people.

Comer is just a straight out character. He's one of the few people who can legitimatly point at the internet and say "I made that".

Yes, he knows where to point to be pointing at the internet.

With that kind of work behind him it's hard to do anything else as important, and it's hard for anyone to criticize him.

Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Dec 2000 21:15:34 GMT

Oh gee, you're right. It wasn't posted last week, so it must be irrelevant and worthless, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com