@dan:
I’ve set it before. Jeff’s MO is the google expert MO (he calls it just-in-time learning). It may be fine if you’re just trying to solve this or that problem and get on with your work. But if you’re gonna talk about something, you had better do the research. And Jeff seldom does.
Obviously Jeff puts in considerable time in writing his blog posts. I appreciate that. Is it that hard to spend more minutes for researching them?
Or here’s an idea! Don’t talk about things that you clearly DON’T know about. Reading Wikipedia does not make one a domain expert, and is definitely not enough to start explaining this to others.
Every single time Jeff talks about something I know about, he make many small but not insignificant errors, betraying his ignorance on the subjects. Sometimes Jeff makes gross errors. The kind of errors that anyone who has a little bit of knowledge in that area would know.
It makes me wonder how much of what Jeff says about stuff I don’t know about, is a mistake.
Also, trivializing the work of hundreds of computer scientists is extremely condescending. I actually avoided calling it what it is, in my previous post.
How can Jeff, with his 30 minutes of reading Wikipedia, claim that no one can define what makes a problem NP-complete?
And calling something ‘fancy computer science jargon shorthand for incredibly hard’ is not only condescending, it’s down right insulting, when it comes from someone who very obviously don’t know what their talking about.
My point? Such articles (read back a bit, this is not an isoladed incident) are superficial and shallow, poorly researched pieces.
I don’t think it was Jeff’s intention, but they promote and ENCOURAGE the notion that programmers don’t need to study CS at all, that it’s just a bunch of B.S.
I mean, why study intractable problems when we can cheat?
And like I said, it’s insulting. I don’t insult Jeff’s work as a web programmer. I know NOTHING about web programming. I don’t write about web programming in such manner.
Dan, We don’t have an a priori way to tell which problems are going to be NP Complete, though we can recognize when a specific problem is
That’s a great sentence. Very clear. But that’s totally not what Jeff said. Again, I encourage you to read back through the archives, on posts dealing with subjects bordering on CS. Jeff is often wrong on the basic details, and you can read the comments and see him being corrected time and again.