The least/most you can do in this space is likely contribute actively in something you believe in.
Industry wide limitations are largely down to policy & regulations
Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
111–120 of 179 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if he would sell models? A marketplace for trained models.
Some of this already happens. But you also have to realize that that is not in the spirit of science.
Got it. It's not, agreed, but nobody should work for free. In fact, I believe that doing what OP wants to do is more harmful than building a business around his intentions.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#113Provide 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 otherw…
Your comment essentially echoes complaints from academia about the most capable ones leaving for private sector that often pays many times more compared to what they'd get,if lucky, by staying. Somewhat it has became a norm to bankroll grand buildings of little value instead of ensuring reasonably paying jobs that last more than just a year or so...
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the moment it's "available within collaborations". My former supervisor has had some bad experiences with people using his open-sourced software without acknowledgement etc., which is of course not quite ideal if you actually want to build a career in academia for yourself. Monetisation is not really an option. My toolkit is maybe a bit non-standard in that it has attracted a few external collaborators using it as…
This is a very sad state of affairs, therefore I would like to bring your attention to a petition towards open sourcing all scientific (and generally tax-paid) software: https://publiccode.eu
This is a great initiative.It should not be limited to software: research papers, databases and many other things that are currently either not available at all or are behind pay walls should be released.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#115Donating money toward researchers. All of the following situations below may or may not have a useful outcome but direct investment would be the easiest one and one you can leverage.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#116Start a business
If you can find a problem, and solve it, a business is a fantastic way to make an impact!
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#117This is a pipe dream of mine, but I would love a Wikipedia of null results: nullpedia! Nobody publishes null results bc they’re not exciting, but I think a lot of NSF money would be saved if “failed” experiments were aggregated somewhere in a searchable way. There’s lot of questions. How to organize it? How to encourage participation? How to maximize usefulness while at the same time minimizing volunteer effort? How…
In a similar vein, I'd love to see some form of reward for replication studies, which are also hard to publish, since they're not novel and exciting. However, due to this focus on novelty, we got plenty of unreproducible results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
In my ideal world, a scientific result would not be taken as meaningful until it's been replicated at least once.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#118I felt the same, and decided to learn how to do that. Followed this one guy i admired a lot. The way he is doing it is to merge software engineering practices into science (in this case AI and robotics), and reduce the cost to do iteration.
For us it means: 1. 1 click binary deployments 2. Safer iterations that allow for making mistakes, so that they can do 10s at the same time instead of 1 really safe one. 3. Logging visualization and whatnot on a unified infra.
We are not scientists, but we know damn well how to scale software and business. It applies everywhere. Think of tensorflow, before most people couldnt do ai themselves, now it is damn easy and more things will happen as a result.
This way they can concentrate on science while we concentrate on scaling it. We are betting on couple breakthroughs as a result of increased enthropy.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#119I have a request. Somebody needs to make matplotlib, but with a C API and lots of language bindings instead of only a python API. For example when I'm writing rust, my best option is to use a Python interop library that calls matplotlib...
Python is kind of the gold standard in many areas of research, no? Why would you use Rust, or even anything but Python?
I'd only touch Rust (or C/C++) when I need to implement some fast numerical computation that does not already exist in Numpy or Tensorflow, but still call it from Python.
Re: Ask HN: What can I do to accelerate scientific research?
#120Put yourself in survival conditions and use science to overcome it