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Comment by frequentnapper | Hacker News Reader

I had the bad fortune of taking this guy's "computer science" class a long time ago as an undergrad. He spent the entire first week covering WW2 and other history. Then during the rest of the semester didn't teach anything.

The icing on the cake was when we were handed evaluation forms he said to the class "It doesn't matter what you fill out because I have tenure."

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What I meant was, say what you think, don't worry about getting me in trouble.

As for the course , you''re saying I didn't teach for the future. Guilty.

You didn't teach anything. Period. This was the opinion of all my classmates and others I knew who took your class. If you don't believe me, see for yourself: https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=48636

I clearly remember teaching the resolution proof method, adversarial graph search (games), the state of automatic language translation, Bayesian spam filtering ... maybe you weren't paying attention.

I got an easy A in your course. How would that happen if I weren't paying attention?

So, he taught topics.

Not really. I don't remember learning anything and I still got an A just like most of the other students. Teaching is more than just providing a syllabus and then lazing around in the classroom.

>I got an easy A in your course. How would that happen if I weren't paying attention?

This statement implies that something was taught, what else can help you get an A with your attention

Yes you caught me lying. "Something" was taught. How clever of you. /s

I didn’t find any valuable insight in this. Get help and build for the future... ok? Also, I felt his anecdotes barely got whatever point he was trying to make across. And half the post consisted of name drops of people I’d never heard of.

Butler Lampson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson L. Peter Deutsch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Peter_Deutsch

The point is, these two people are incredible Computer Scientists.

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