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Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

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Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#41

Post by sklogic »

jmagoon wrote: post #39
sklogic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, if you're doing things the wrong way, you can create any amount of complexity out of nothing. I'm not considering this case. Why would anyone care about the amount of "technologies, protocols, tools and leaky abstractions" when the smart thing to do is to avoid them altogether and just pick the lowest common denominator?

And what would that be for web development? Or are you just saying "don't develop for the web"? I've seen people who are great at diving deeply into a narrow field struggle greatly with the broad, changing knowledge needed for web dev, especially at scale. It's not clear to me that one is intellectually more challenging than the other. They often seem like different types of intelligence.

Same as with any other crappy set of APIs and standards - hide the complexity underneath a thin layer of DSLs.

I do not consider any area where this is possible to do (i.e., any area where complexity is artificial, not inherent) to be really complex and challenging, unlike the domains where complexity cannot be eliminated by simply removing the stupidity.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#42

Post by jmagoon »

sklogic wrote: post #41
jmagoon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what would that be for web development? Or are you just saying "don't develop for the web"? I've seen people who are great at diving deeply into a narrow field struggle greatly with the broad, changing knowledge needed for web dev, especially at scale. It's not clear to me that one is intellectually more challenging than the other. They often seem like different types of intelligence.

Same as with any other crappy set of APIs and standards - hide the complexity underneath a thin layer of DSLs. I do not consider any area where this is possible to do (i.e., any area where complexity is artificial, not inherent) to be really complex and challenging, unlike the domains where complexity cannot be eliminated by simply removing the stupidity.

Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#43

Post by lmm »

sklogic wrote: post #38
lmm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then I'd say there's not a lot of difference - you naturally adjust your defect rate to what you're working on (even within a single codebase). I mean sure, when doing something like CPU design it's easy to feel like you're not using your full intellectual capacity the way you would in web frontend development, but you just need to step it up a level - the safety requirements justify putting a fair amount of tim…

Well, formal verification is exactly what I find the most intellectually challenging and enjoyable. There is no way you can apply any advanced math in something like frontend development, and you're very unlikely to be able to do anything anywhere near any formal methods outside of the hardware design.

You absolutely can. PureScript is one of the most interesting things going on in programming at the moment. In web dev the cost of confirming things empirically is orders of magnitude lower than in hardware, but the complexity of what you're working on can eat that margin up surprisingly quickly; on large codebases a bit of formality is well worth it.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#44

Post by sklogic »

jmagoon wrote: post #42
sklogic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as with any other crappy set of APIs and standards - hide the complexity underneath a thin layer of DSLs. I do not consider any area where this is possible to do (i.e., any area where complexity is artificial, not inherent) to be really complex and challenging, unlike the domains where complexity cannot be eliminated by simply removing the stupidity.

Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design.

And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) - of course it should have created tiers upon tiers of ill designed frameworks, ladders of leaky abstractions and a broken culture of tolerance towards all this shit.

The only sane way to deal with this kind of crap is to shield from it entirely, introduce a simple and clean design which should interact with a broken system, without allowing any of the underlying abstractions to leak to your level. It always works, with all kinds of broken APIs, and I cannot see why web should be any different.

Btw., it's amusing that web devs got so offended by quite an obvious fact that their work is nowhere near in complexity with the hardcore realtime stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#46

Post by jmagoon »

sklogic wrote: post #44
jmagoon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design. And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) -…

It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism.

I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief and prop up belief as truth while protecting the ego.

Personally, I enjoy working on hardware and working on distrubted systems. I also like building things that look beautiful. But to each their own, I guess.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#47

Post by aeharding »

sklogic wrote: post #31
sanderjd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious when I see comments like this: have you done both things professionally at scale, or are you guessing based on how things seem to you from the outside?

I have to admit that I did not do any web development, but I have a pretty good idea of what kind of complexity and challenges it does involve. I also know about it from interaction with the frontend developers themselves and from toying around it. I know what kind of tools are available, I know how dead easy debugging is. There is nothing nearly comparable in complexity with a hardware design.

It seems like you're being a little biased.

Writing the architecture for a new Intel CPU is much more difficult than writing a calculator on an FPGA or designing a circuit board.

Similarly, designing and maintaining the UX of Amazon.com is a lot more difficult than a personal website.

Is Physics 'harder' than Psychology just because it's 'more hardcore' or 'more pure'?

Apples to oranges. You cannot really make comparisons like that.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#48

Post by ZeroFries »

mseebach wrote: post #4

What do you want to optimise around? Stable job, 9-17, decent salary? Lost of money, caution to the wind? Be something [for one or more of several values of 'something'] to a lot of people? Fiddle with deeply intellectual CS problems, shielded from pedestrian worries about revenue and users? I personally enjoy the knowledge of having solved a real (business) problem for real people, and being appreciated both financi…

Is it possible to go the "work on deeply intellectual problems while shielded from pedestrian worries about revenue and users" route without academia? I suppose just do it on the side until you invent something which is valuable to industry.

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#49

Post by olalonde »

jmagoon wrote: post #46
sklogic wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design. And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) -…

It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief an…

There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...

Re: Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?

#50

Post by jmagoon »

olalonde wrote: post #49
jmagoon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief an…

There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...

Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different":

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles."

https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...

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