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Comment by turing | Hacker News Reader

Wow. With Hinton at Google and LeCun at Facebook, industry has definitely been pulling some big names away from academia.

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I beg to differ. They still publish papers and big names in academia are often consultants or receiving grants from private industry. And according to LeCun he will remain as professor at NYU and run his research lab from NYU. He will serve as director and lead researcher.

Oh man that guy was my machine learning professor at NYU :) Sparked my interested in Lisp, but now I seem to recall that he wrote all the problem examples in his own language.... Lush. Even so, all my knowledge of Lisp syntax and neural nets stems from his bad-ass lectures

I started taking that class but had to drop it -- tried it way too early in my CS career. Having to use his language definitely didn't help! But you're right, I absolutely loved the lectures, even if a bunch of it went over my head.

i had the good fortune of just auditing ;) i was there for music DSP, not CS

Forcing folks to learn his own language is a pretty big conceit. You think he'll be able to get away with that at Fbook?

It's just a lisp variant with a procedural/matrix mathy bend. It's super easy to pick up if you've written any lisp.

yeh it was rough at the time but looking back, if i'd known lisp at all beforehand it wouldnt have been so bad. it was directly listed by many as a turn-off though and is a big part of why a lot of people from my dep't just audited

ahh - got it. My dept was very heavy on Scheme. Reasonable to have a LISP-variant for AI.

He switched it up to torch last year (framework built on top of lua).

I don't think the Neural Net library was quiet what it was in Lush, but it was getting there.

I beg to differ.

How many people are they teaching in person these days?

He dropped the neural networks class he was slated to teach in the spring, as far as I know.

I wouldn't be surprised if, at this point, his work split 90% FB, 9% NYU Center for Data Science, 1% NYU CS.

You are mistaken.

LeCun is now running a high profile lab for a $100B company. He's got the personal attention of the founder. He's only going to be at NYU as a talent conduit. It's not the same as Hinton's arrangement at all.

I am not mistaken. Clearly I never said he would be teaching all the time. He even said he was going to remain as professor on a part time basis.

Pulling someone to industry doesn't stop one from contributing back to the field. This is what they do, what people actually care about. In fact, if you are a big player in a field, you spend most of your time conducting your research and running a lab, not teaching classes. This is the norm and half of the famous professors I had barely ever come to lecture, only the TA would show up (some schools are strict on this though, like MIT). And I often tell people if you want real good solid education, especially for an undergraduate, don't attend big player's lecture. Your TA or your average not-so-well-known professor can be more helpful.

Really changes the phrase 'those who can't do teach'.

That sassy phrase (Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.) is irritating to me. Now I'm not casting judgement on anybody who _does_ find it entertaining, or useful, but for what it's worth, the _original_ phrase is:

Those who know, do; those who understand, teach.

-Aristotle.

"Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, teach gym.” - Woody Allen

Obviously it's an iterating/evolving meme.

How do you feel about this?[1] I scoured the internet looking for something to the contrary, but couldn't find anything that positively attributed your quote to Aristotle, or even anything that suggests it predated Shaw's.

[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100823190727AA...

Interesting, I didn't know that's where it originated from which I suppose is your point.

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