Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 179 posts

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#21

Post by thanatosmin »

mariushn wrote: post #15
xwdv wrote: post #8

If you want to help software related AI research, start compiling massive high quality training data sets and giving it away for free. Easier said than done though. No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. In general the easiest way for an individual to accelerate general research is through generous funding. But even then it’s not like a slider in a game where you provide mor…

> I suggest talking to actual researchers and asking them what they really need, and give them that. Will start to do that, thanks! > No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. That would be ok for the next 3 years.

I’d second this. Many labs, including ours, are happy to discuss challenges and opportunities with serious outside parties. If you emailed a few labs near you with a detailed explanation I’d expect you would get multiple responses.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#22

Post by lettergram »

gvggf wrote: post #16

This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…

> science abilities are approximately zero

I’d say it really depends on your program and what you mean by science. I minored in BioEngineering, I also double majored in math. At least one of my CS final projects has a citation (which I recently discovered after looking at Google scholar).

My point is, what makes “science” skills may not match your expectations, but I’d argue many people have said skill set.

> Only an attitude of “no financial return” helps science.

I also take issue with this. Arguably all financial investments are a way of directing research. All research needs funds. How do we get most of the drugs we have today? It’s typical some research is done publicly, but the last “mile” so to speak, is done by private companies.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#23

Post by haxiomic »

I think there's lot of room to improve tools in bioinformatics. In practice bioinformatics pipelines tend to be bundles of loosely organised python scripts and I've heard files on the order of a few GB described as Big Data because the processing times are so slow (days for stuff that could take milliseconds)

It would help to pair up with practicing scientists and explore what parts of their workflow can be improved

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#24

Post by danielecook »

haxiomic wrote: post #23

I think there's lot of room to improve tools in bioinformatics. In practice bioinformatics pipelines tend to be bundles of loosely organised python scripts and I've heard files on the order of a few GB described as Big Data because the processing times are so slow (days for stuff that could take milliseconds) It would help to pair up with practicing scientists and explore what parts of their workflow can be improved

Definitely. A lot of work is done in R or python and could be sped up in a compiled language.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#26

Post by claudius »

Provide funding for permanent positions. I'm currently in the last few months of my first postdoc in condensed matter physics (think superconductors, quantum computers etc.) but will move into industry next year for lack of perspectives towards a permanent position in a reasonable place. As far as I can tell, my research so far was not substandard and the software I wrote has enabled quite a few projects which otherwise would have not been possible or taken much longer. Most people I talk to (both inside and outside academia) express some degree of disappointment over people like me leaving (after 4 years PhD + 2 years Post-doc) but none of them put their money where their mouth is.

To be clear, I can understand that a PhD candidacy justifies a temporary contract and I'm not even asking for a permanent position directly after a PhD (as would be standard in industry), I'm only asking for a reasonably safe perspective towards a permanent position reasonably soon after graduating. Can't exactly start a family if you don't have any kind of job security beyond the next couple months.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#27

Post by andreygrehov »

xwdv wrote: post #19
mariushn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suggest talking to actual researchers and asking them what they really need, and give them that. Will start to do that, thanks! > No immediate financial return? I hope you can accept no financial return, period. That would be ok for the next 3 years.

> That would be ok for the next 3 years. No, I don’t mean no returns for three years, I mean no returns ever . You must go into this with both eyes open, don’t find yourself crippled later because you gave all your time and money away and have nothing to show for it.

What if he would sell models? A marketplace for trained models.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#28

Post by tntn »

lettergram wrote: post #22
gvggf wrote: post #16

This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…

> science abilities are approximately zero I’d say it really depends on your program and what you mean by science. I minored in BioEngineering, I also double majored in math. At least one of my CS final projects has a citation (which I recently discovered after looking at Google scholar). My point is, what makes “science” skills may not match your expectations, but I’d argue many people have said skill set. > Only an…

> generic programmers

I would argue that most would agree that a "generic programmer" does not have a degree in math or a minor in bioengineering. There are a lot of programmers who never studied any STEM outside of a CS curriculum, which usually has ~no science and rarely requires advanced math (i.e. requires only linear algebra).

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#29

Post by keldaris »

mariushn wrote: post #17
gvggf wrote: post #16

This will sound harsh, but it isn’t meant to be. Scientists code better then you do science. This is simply a consequence Of a weeding out mechanism for those that have no coding skills. The only ppl who get away with no coding skills are important professor with grad students to do the coding. This isn’t to say that our skills are great, but a generic programmers (I.e. CS majors) science abilities are approximately…

Thanks, it makes sense. > focus on making the programming tools scientists use better, easier to use and GPL That sounds the most natural path to take going forward. Besides looking at existing GPL software and how that can be improved, would you have a recommendation on where to find scientists/researchers open to discussing their needs that could be solved by software? I'll release the software under GPL, but need…

As a computational physicist (meaning I do science, but most of my time is spent programming), I agree with everything the parent said, but perhaps I can add some more specifics. The matplotlib example is a very good one in the sense that it's a piece of vital infrastructure almost everyone has used at some point. It works well enough for performance insensitive (meaning non-realtime and small-ish datasets) 2D visualization, has a lot of features and is easy to use. Other niches are less fortunate - for instance, for general purpose performant 3D visualization there's the bloated monstrosity that is VTK and little else, so I mostly just write OpenGL code by hand. That's annoying, but I haven't found anything that isn't outright terrible.

Other scientists, depending on their interests, will readily give you similar examples of obvious general purpose libraries that are lacking or non-existent, but there's a simple reason for this - it's hard, unrewarding work that's very hard to commercialize. Most of the large scale projects that exist have grown out of academic grants and often struggle for funding or are abandoned entirely. If you are really considering this as a career move that's eventually supposed to put food on the table, you need to have a pretty good idea of how your project is realistically going to earn money, because the correlation between funding and general usefulness is very weak in this space. Since academic funding isn't on the table for you, the common alternative involves things like biotech startups and venture capital.

Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?

#30

Post by mxcrossb »

abcxx99 wrote: post #4

Regarding the last point: try applying libraries like Quantum espresso [1] or CP2K [2] to real world problems and apply machine learning with the solutions they provide to a given problem. There's a tremendous amount of academic research being done in this direction but try and take these libraries and make them useful for real world applications. [1] https://github.com/QEF/q-e [2] https://github.com/cp2k/cp2k

As someone working in this field, I disagree. The state of these codes is that if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Without a strong theoretical background, you’re generating junk. Of course, if he’s willing to spend several years developing his knowledge of the field, there is for sure room to help. If not in your suggested machine learning area, instead perhaps in improving the quality and usability of the code.

But instead I would recommend he start from something like the NOMAD database, where the calculations have already been run by more knowledgeable people. Then he can focus on the analysis side.

Post reply on HN