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giancarlostorotoday at 12:28 PM5 repliesview on HN

I didn't really know who he was, so I went and found his wikipedia, which is written like either he wrote it himself to stroke his ego, or someone who likes him wrote it to stroke his ego:

> He is the Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He served as Chief AI Scientist at Meta Platforms before leaving to work on his own startup company.

That entire sentence before the remarks about him service at Meta could have been axed, its weird to me when people compare themselves to someone else who is well known. It's the most Kanye West thing you can do. Mind you the more I read about him, the more I discovered he is in fact egotistical. Good luck having a serious engineering team with someone who is egotistical.


Replies

pamatoday at 12:35 PM

You underestimate academia. Any academic that reads these two sentences only focuses on the first one: He has a named chair at Courant. In Germany, being a a Prof is added to your ID card/passport and becomes part of your official name, like knighthood in other countries.

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timrtoday at 12:34 PM

It's not comparing him to anyone. He has an endowed professorship. This is standard in academia, and you give the name because a) it's prestigious for the recipient and b) it strokes the ego of the donor.

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lairvtoday at 1:00 PM

https://cims.nyu.edu/dynamic/news/1441/

This is just the official name of a chair at NYU. I'm not even sure Jacob T. Schwartz is more well known than Yann LeCun

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bobwaycotttoday at 12:37 PM

That’s not a comparison to another person. That’s his job title. It is not uncommon for universities to have distinguished chairs within departments named after a notable person—in this case, the founder of NYU’s Department of Computer Science.

g947otoday at 1:16 PM

Eh, that paragraph reads perfectly normal to me.

Either you have not read enough Wikipedia pages, or you have too much to complain about. (Or both.)