Under-Investigated Fields • Hacker News Board

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#11

Post by TheAsprngHacker » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

Palomides wrote: post #7

I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.

Agreed, and Scratch is hardly the pinnacle of programming language theory.

I was talking to professor Shriram Krishnamurthi a week ago about a block-based, educational ML dialect I was making, and he told me that he believed that once a language had a type system as sophisticated as mine, its target audience should be using text, not blocks. So, perhaps Scratch-style languages are a dead-end, or infeasible beyond a certain level.

My personal hope for the "next level" of programming languages is those that use typed holes to interactively help the programmer construct the program.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#12

Post by antiquark » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

> Computer Science: Existential risks posed by technical debt

The term "technical debt" has always rubbed me the wrong way.

Most technical decisions were sound... at the time!

I agree, people from 1999 didn't predict what would be happening in 2019. But why is that considered to be some sort of debt?

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#13

Post by exabrial » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

What makes a language "more productive"? I feel like this term first appeared in the age of Ruby on Rails, but I've yet to see any sort of study. Now when i see the term, it immediately raises suspicions and has the opposite effect that the writer intended. Obviously the best tool for the job is the one you know how to use proficiently, but is there a magical computer language that can turn average programmers into high-performing ones?

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#14

Post by sddfd » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

antiquark wrote: post #12

> Computer Science: Existential risks posed by technical debt The term "technical debt" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Most technical decisions were sound... at the time! I agree, people from 1999 didn't predict what would be happening in 2019. But why is that considered to be some sort of debt?

That is not the only way technical debt gets introduced.

Often, teams cut corners to release a feature earlier/on time, and only make it work for the MVP use case without restructuring the codebase to fully accommodate the change. In this setting the term debt is pretty fitting.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#15

Post by throwawayjava » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #5

Der_Einzige wrote: post #2

Transfer learning is no longer under-investigated. Just look at how the NLP and CV communities get state of the art results

Transfer learning is absolutely under-investigated. The current results in CV are awesome but they only pertain to CV. There’s little underlying theory that helps you apply it to other areas. Mine, for instance, which is robotics manipulation.

There's a huge difference between "under-investigated" and "doesn't live up to the initial hope/hype".

It's possible for something to be over-investigated and also not produce results. See also: the build up to AI winters.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#16

Post by sgt101 » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

antiquark wrote: post #12

> Computer Science: Existential risks posed by technical debt The term "technical debt" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Most technical decisions were sound... at the time! I agree, people from 1999 didn't predict what would be happening in 2019. But why is that considered to be some sort of debt?

Long term systems evolution and management might be a better way to think about it. Lehman at Imperial looked into it in the 90's (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220902836_On_Eviden...) but no one has done much since, and yet we are increasingly dependent on platforms and 20+ year systems.

No one knows how to run and manage these systems, yet we do it all the time!

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#17

Post by dnautics » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:33 PM UTC

antiquark wrote: post #12

> Computer Science: Existential risks posed by technical debt The term "technical debt" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Most technical decisions were sound... at the time! I agree, people from 1999 didn't predict what would be happening in 2019. But why is that considered to be some sort of debt?

Debt is not always bad.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#18

Post by throwawayjava » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

wendyshu wrote: post #6

Usually things are be under-investigated because they're hard.

or useless.

or naive.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#19

Post by lumost » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

antiquark wrote: post #12

> Computer Science: Existential risks posed by technical debt The term "technical debt" has always rubbed me the wrong way. Most technical decisions were sound... at the time! I agree, people from 1999 didn't predict what would be happening in 2019. But why is that considered to be some sort of debt?

true tech debt occurs when a business under-invests in their core technology over a long period of time, or deal with concept drift in its business. I know of multiple fortune 500's that are reliant on bespoke emulation of hardware and operating systems that haven't existed in decades, even worse the source code for the software they're running may no longer exist in any usable form.

In many modern web companies a given project has a useful life of ~3-5 years, if its still running by year 8 with a team that's been on KTLO a few things are probably true.

A: No one knows how to productively add features.

B: The business need for the project was much larger than the KTLO funding would imply.

Odds are at this point there are a long list of user complaints, year+ old feature requests, and excuses being made to the board for why some initiative is facing yet another delay.

Perhaps we should be talking about software depreciation rather than tech debt?

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#20

Post by semi-extrinsic » Sat, Oct 05, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

Palomides wrote: post #7

I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.

> makes me question his conclusions about other fields

I think this list makes no sense unless it is made into a wiki of some sort with community contributions from hundreds of people.

Under "Physics", he has a sub-heading "Increasing Iteration Speed of Experimental Physics". This section mentions one random startup. Yet CERN has hundreds of people actively working on this topic for decades.

They invented, built and implemented the world's first capacitive touch screen control system in the period 1972-1976 specifically to answer this need. That's just one example off the top of my head.