Software development: how to make realistic estimates, and deliver a solution on time.
Make a wild guess then multiply it by a number between 2 (10+ years of experience) and 4 (newbie). Works pretty well.
Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#52Software development: how to make realistic estimates, and deliver a solution on time.
Don't you want something simpler, like P=NP or the Riemann Hypothesis?
Just kidding. The problem with estimates in SwEng is complicated. The main problem is: every system is different from another.
Anything that's moderately complex will have a variable production time because the process keeps getting improved.
Now, you're not building 10 systems of the same type. Maybe if what you did all day was building, let's say, a blog with RoR you would be able to time it to the minute (but then again, that's not how software works, and once you built it once, it's just a matter of copying files).
In traditional "factories" the design takes some time, then putting together the production line, tools, then the production.
In SW, "real" design and production go together, and "paper sw design" is fragile.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#53Mathematics is the best field for this because a list of unsolved problems is kept, and many of them are relatively easy to explain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m... Chemistry/materials science: room-temperature superconductivity is probably the big one. There are a whole host of problems in the energy space which would benefit from improvement; while "electricity+CO2+water => fuel" is…
> electricity+CO2+water => fuel Considering fuel => electricity+CO2+water is financially viable today, the reverse can never be financially viable unless the prices of the inputs and outputs shift quite a bit...
This view ignores that energy can have a different cost in different locations, and that fuel is convenient due to its portable nature. Converting energy into fuel may be economically viable at a solar plant in the middle of a desert even if it wouldn't be so in the middle of a city.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#54Energy simulation: whether a convolution using kernel A on top of a thresholded convolution using kernel B can be represented using just one convolution using kernel C.
i.e. with H as Heaviside operator, T the threshold, and * the convolution operator, prove that the following can hold for some kernels A,B,C and signal D:
A * H[B * D-T] = C*D
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#55Software development: creating web CRUD interfaces quickly. Here's the orders table, here's the customers table, here's the products table. Join them, present them with a nice UI that scales down to basic smartphones, make some fields editable, some sortable, some filterable. Now take a subset of the result and make that its own table with a search form, and so on. Every solution I've tried is either too narrow (e.g.…
+1 to this. Code has been written tens of thousands of times to take data from a webform, put it in a database, and display it on a webpage. It's about time someone could just put that in a standard, simple, easy to use, yet extensive, library or service. Simple things like defining a field on the frontend, in the server API, in the data model, and again in the database schema should be a thing of the past.
Well, there's Wordpress, isn't there? You can make a basic web application pretty quickly with no code.
And there's also MVC platforms that auto generate a lot of code. In ASP.NET MVC (and many other platforms) you can just define the data fields and it will generate views, models, controllers and DB scripts automatically.
Which is well and good until you have to process business logic, at which point you need a developer.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#56Information Security: getting people to classify data properly. Everything ends up as the default classification or set to public so they can send privileged data over email.
Also, having some agreement on code scanning. Every time security settles on a code scanning tool, engineering gets a million findings. This results in arguing about whether potential risks are actually vulnerabilities rather than improving security.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#57Getting non-technical people to pay for software.
That's partially on the community for making so much free (as in beer, often also as in freedom) software. The expectation is now there. Though how to reverse it remains an unsolved problem.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#58Mathematics is the best field for this because a list of unsolved problems is kept, and many of them are relatively easy to explain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m... Chemistry/materials science: room-temperature superconductivity is probably the big one. There are a whole host of problems in the energy space which would benefit from improvement; while "electricity+CO2+water => fuel" is…
> electricity+CO2+water => fuel Considering fuel => electricity+CO2+water is financially viable today, the reverse can never be financially viable unless the prices of the inputs and outputs shift quite a bit...
Of course it can, it all depends on the actual proportions in each reaction.
Most notably of the share of CO2 in each, which aims to be drastically different.
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#59CS Education - Virtually everything is unsolved. How do we teach people how to code? What is the progression? Do we teach them how to "think" algorithmically first or just dive into a specific language? How do we assess their learning? Which skills are transferable?
I find it interesting that out of the massive field that is CS you focused solely on a single area.
Yes, isn't the question "What's an unsolved problem in your field?"
Re: Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?
#60In Python education: Getting new language learners to a functional local development environment as quickly and painlessly as possible. "Just use Anaconda/pipenv/the-Python-installer/Docker/etc" isn't a great answer, because they probably tried one of those six months ago, got into a weird state and can't remember what it did or where it put things. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1987/
I'm sure this will be an unpopular answer on HN but have you tried Azure notebooks? Microsoft's Eric Camplin has a series of edX courses[1] that do a great job getting total newbies up and programming with python as painlessly as possible.