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

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

#152

Post by mike_ivanov »

devit wrote: post #25

Find any way to make a lot of money, gain a lot of political power or gain influence over those who have money or power and use it to fund research and make it more appealing culturally.

No, the most significant advances in science were done on a shoestring budget (or no budget at all) - just by THINKING. It doesn't require lots of money to support people who do that kind of work, and they are easy to find, especially in theoretical physics and mathematics.

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

#153

Post by iceIX »

randomsearch wrote: post #106

The biggest problem scientists in academia face is that they can’t do actual research. They spend most of their time doing stuff that doesn’t matter. So probably the biggest leverage you have is to reduce the time they spend doing stuff that doesn’t matter. The most effective way to do that is to establish an alternative form of institution that focuses only on research (and teaching if you like - teaching is not the…

> - build a free conference organising / review tool that works. EasyChair is popular and utter garbage.

This is what we're doing at OpenReview.net. Obviously we still have a lot of work to do, but we're making progress and are actively looking for more developers that want to help make researchers' lives easier.

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

#154

Post by mariushn »

cosmodisk wrote: post #114
fghtr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For research papers, there's also this open access initiative which is gaining support: https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

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

#155

Post by mariushn »

maxander wrote: post #145

Slightly smaller-scale than most suggestions here, but for the average nonscientific HNer, the best way to help scientists is to improve their programming tools. In the Python ecosystem, for instance; numpy/scipy, scikit-learn, and matplotlib are widely used across dozens of disciplines, and are open-source projects relatively welcoming of new contributors. Julia is a whole new language for scientific computing, wher…

Thanks!

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

mariushn wrote: post #154
cosmodisk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For research papers, there's also this open access initiative which is gaining support: https://www.coalition-s.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by fghtr »

basementcat wrote: post #138
fghtr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does this call for avionics software for the F-22 (and similar taxpayer funded software) to be open sourced?

There should be definitely some exceptions from this legislation as usually.

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

#158

Post by badpun »

peterhj wrote: post #149
badpun wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbolic computation libraries for Python are lacking - there's SymPy, but it can throw a "NotImplementedException" at you if you try processing some more hairy formulas... Would be great if SymPy was improved.

Have you looked into SageMath? (Technically it's "Python-based" rather than "just" Python.) I'm also curious if you're specifically looking for something in Python, or if doing symbolic computation/computer algebra in other languages would work for you, barring license costs.

I needed a Python function which computes a (symbolic) derivative of a certain known formula. I could've just computed the derivative in say Mathematica, and then write the Python function manually based on the derived formula, but the derivative function had hundreds of terms and there was no way I'd transpile it manually without introducing errors.

In the end, I used a hacky Mathematica script which converts a resulting Mathematica formula into a Python code (which I then pasted into my program). But, if SymPy was better, I could do all this in just Python.

BTW, according to Wikipedia, SageMath is just using SymPy for calculus.

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

#159

Post by blueboo »

khawkins wrote: post #137

One of the big challenges for university researchers is trying to find talent and dedication in the enormous pool of undergrads and masters students. Nearly every professor relies heavily on the recommendation system or grabbing from the pool of students in a class. The problem with this is that it's often hit or miss with a net-neutral return on investment. If I send a PhD student to spend a certain amount of time i…

I mean, you could pay them more than approximately nothing...

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

#160

Post by mindcrime »

Software tools to help with scientific discovery / hypothesis generation. I'm thinking specifically about Literature Based Discovery[1] (LBD), but there are probably other useful approaches in that domain.

I have a little project[2] related to LBD, which I'm working on here and there. There's still a long way to go, but I'm optimistic there's something to be accomplished in this space that could help.

And then you've got things like Robot Scientist[3] which is crazy interesting.

If AI, in the AGI sense, interests you, I might mention the possibility of contributing to / working with one of the popular "Cognitive Architecture" systems like ACT-R[4], SOAR[5], or OpenCog[6].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature-based_discovery

[2]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Valmont-F

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACT-R

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soar_(cognitive_architecture)

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCog

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