Comment by fightthehypo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fightthehypo | Hacker News Reader

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I took a Distributed Systems class with Prof. Cheriton in 2007 for my Masters degree. In the first few classes, I remember being awed by the wealth and legacy of the man, and wanting to glean everything I could from him. It quickly became apparent though that he hadn't updated his course materials or lectures in over a decade, e.g. the pros and cons of distributed shared memory vs COBOL RPC. The core topics were there, it was just presented in such a dry manner.

Worse though, was that he would needlessly inject his very conservative politics as total non-sequiturs. Test questions like "Hillary Clinton wants to build [obviously unscalable system], explain why it won't work. I found it very unprofessional.

Stanford records a video of every lecture, and enrolled students can then watch them whenever. I remember sitting in my dorm room, watching one of his 75 minute lectures where there was literally 3 students in a 150 person auditorium. It just floored me that this was how a billionaire was spending his time. I do genuinely like the man, you could just tell he was capable of so much more.

I've heard Stanford described as a venture capital group with a vestigial university attached. Unfortunately, course plans being updated this decade is something that falls by the wayside when your professors basically have full-time jobs elsewhere.

That wasn't my experience of Stanford's EE or CS profs at all. They sometimes take a sabbatical for a year to work on a startup, but when they're on campus it always felt like they're fully engaged, and presenting up-to-date material.

Cheriton in particular is more of an academic purist than anything. He probably just believes that the old material is the right way to learn distributed systems, and all these new things are "just a fad".

I was part of Kealia as a chip designer, and I remember having a fight with Cheriton over buying a waveform viewer for RTL simulation. It's a basic tool that any chip person needs, but he felt it was just some fluffy GUI thing that real engineers wouldn't need.

That argument was a bit nuts, but I came to really like him and appreciate the purity of his perspective, even when I disagreed with it.

Stanford is actually making a concerted effort to start a VC fund now officially, so they're admitting to the world that thus far their actions have been amateurish.

If I were a 61 year old billionaire academic with modest needs, I'd spend half my money to fund fundamental scientific research -- physics, biology, medicine; all the big ones. If this guy keeps investing his money without spending it, he's going to die a billionaires and his kids are going to go crazy with it.

> and his kids are going to go crazy with it

That's assuming that he leaves them any. Isn't Bill Gates the famous example of an uber-rich not leaving their kids much (%-wise)?

wow, thanks for the realistic perspective. it is as if some journalists don't do any actual work while complaining that blogs are killing newspapers. it's great that I know he built his own wooden structure when he was young, but the fact he hasn't updated lectures in a decade or is poking fun of Hillary in class material is no ones business.*

EDIT: *Something we should have been told about by the article as it's a key part of character

It sounded like you started off by agreeing and ended in disagreeing, but I can't tell where the switch was, or if your opening line was just sarcasm... Surely those facts about him are the business of anyone who would potentially enroll in his classes.

I was being sarcastic at the end. I think the article was very uninformative and painted a completely incomplete picture there.

>It sounded like you started off by agreeing and ended in disagreeing, but I can't tell where the switch was

It makes sense if you read the last sentence as describing (and sarcastically mocking) the opinion of the author of the Forbes article as to what is newsworthy.

I think Demiurge is just misusing the phrase "is no ones business". He probably meant "is behavior that doesn't belong in a professional academic environment".

I had taken a course designed by him at stanford: object oriented programming from a modeling and simulation perspective. I also have the lecture notes for the follow-up course. It was mentioned that the course was based on his real world experience doing c++ programming in academia and startup that he sold to Cisco. It was very clear from the beginning that the course was radically different from any programming course I had seen. Highly opinionated in almost every page. There was rarely anything that he repeated from any standard c++ books. I enjoyed the course, though only about 5% still remains with me. I have worked in teams using c++ extensively to manage $Billion+ products, and can attest that the course definitely had some value. Also, I had interviewed with a C++ team in Cisco 4K catalyst group and they mentioned they were still building on the c++ platform laid by Cheriton's group ( a decade later).

Talking about any disadvantages, I can say that you need someone of Cheriton's ability to really guide you during the initial build-up of the project. His ideas of having the compiler do a lot of checking to avoid bugs in the code later are really cool. But the learning curve is pretty steep. Newer paradigms (since the course was originally designed) like STL, BOOST, and tips in Effective C++/STL etc can replace some of the concepts he espouses. But he is pretty clear that some of them are really inferior. It might be true for some cases, but I have usually used them in production just fine..

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