Academics, we need to talk • Hacker News Board

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#151

Post by laughinghan » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 9:52 AM UTC

ageek123 wrote: post #150

hackbinary wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. This +1, er +1,000,000. I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society. The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so…

I think you and Matt are talking about different kinds of research. He's specifically talking about incremental research in computer systems . And he's 100% right that most of such work has zero impact, both over the short term and long term. I didn't read this essay as a condemnation of research in general, especially not of what he describes as "visionary, out-of-the-box, push-the-envelope research." It's talking a…

This is exactly what your grandparent (and parent to some extent) comments are arguing against.

There aren't 2 different kinds of research, kind A that is never gonna go anywhere and kind B that is visionary. The vast majority of the advancement of knowledge has been what academia has always valued: probably never gonna go anywhere, but might push the envelope by an inch or a millimeter. The whole reason you have to research a thing is you don't know whether it's gonna go anywhere.

Which isn't how we think in industry, not even in industry R&D. We have to know it'll probably to go somewhere, or at least have a small chance of going really far. That's the only way to get a profit in expectation.

But work that will probably go nowhere or even if it does go somewhere, won't get very far, like most of scientific progress? The point of systems like tenure is to foster that, since industry can't.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#152

Post by ido » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 9:55 AM UTC

aylmao wrote: post #143

s986s wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that makes more sense which is why PRIVATE industries should create schools inorder to foster educatin relevent to them. Having organized education that is relevent to the real world is an exellent idea. However, reforming schools is not the appropriate approach. We live in a capitalist society, if they dont like whats around, they should compete. Im confident people are more than willing to pay 20k a year…

This is also very dangerous. Having schools that don't teach for the sake of fostering knowledge and critical thinking but rather just train you to serve in a specific industry/company would be the final blow to higher education in the US.

Why? Vocational schools exist and always have. They are not supposed to replace universities, but complement them.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#153

Post by Scarblac » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 11:03 AM UTC

kevan wrote: post #64

sanderjd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more ways to "publish" work than in academic publications. I'm not sure to what extent it is unrealistic to expect academics to be keeping up with what is going on at industry conferences or on github or by talking to people at user groups or wherever, but the reality will always be that academic publications are not the only, or the most up-to-date, source of information.

Agreed, blog posts and open source projects can be just as helpful as journal-published articles. I didn't intend publications to mean only academic journals.

The problem is that many academics are not aware of anything outside the academic journals, and thus work on "unsolved" problems that already have well known solutions in industry.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#154

Post by gradstudent » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 2:44 PM UTC

mdwelsh wrote: post #133

gradstudent wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather flawed industry-focused research: making incorrect assumptions, failing to deal with the general case, not considering real-world constraints. I find this point rather condescending. What you term "incorrect assumptions" are often necessary simplifications that reveal the core of the problem at hand. The point is to try and understand what makes problems hard and to develop new ways of solving them; not…

No, I mean incorrect assumptions. It doesn't matter if we're talking research in industry or academia; doing research based on flawed (not simplifying) assumptions is bad science.

If you want to make a concrete point about bad science then do it. At the moment however you are not making that point. Your argument is that "the assumptions" (whatever those are; you provide no specifics) made by researchers don't match up with industry expectations; a wholly different point for which I have little sympathy.

In my opinion the scientific authors doing the work are in the best position to judge what assumptions are and are not appropriate for their work. If the science is bad we expect the community to pick up on that via peer review or in a subsequent publication.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#155

Post by samth » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105

samth wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you like Racket, but it's really not the case that what we need is to spend time in a Google product group to make Racket better.

Nobody said you did. He suggested several possibilities. One was working in industry to understand real-world development, deployment, or support needs. Another suggestion is considering real-world issues. That's main one as the other merely supports it. An example would be putting Racket to use on industrial scale projects with groups of programmers from different backgrounds. These would discover any pain points of…

I'm one of the core Racket developers, so I also think we're doing pretty well. :)

But what you're suggesting requires persuading a large group of developers to adopt a new language -- if you have a recipe for doing that, lots of people including me would love to learn it.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#156

Post by nickpsecurity » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

samth wrote: post #155

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said you did. He suggested several possibilities. One was working in industry to understand real-world development, deployment, or support needs. Another suggestion is considering real-world issues. That's main one as the other merely supports it. An example would be putting Racket to use on industrial scale projects with groups of programmers from different backgrounds. These would discover any pain points of…

I'm one of the core Racket developers, so I also think we're doing pretty well. :) But what you're suggesting requires persuading a large group of developers to adopt a new language -- if you have a recipe for doing that, lots of people including me would love to learn it.

I figured you might be. ;)

"But what you're suggesting requires persuading a large group of developers to adopt a new language -- if you have a recipe for doing that, lots of people including me would love to learn it."

What I'm suggesting is a group of people interested in trying something and reporting the results try something and report the results. You don't have to convince anyone of anything as you're responsible for you, not them. :)

All you'd have to do is make sure the tutorials/guides, tooling, core libraries, and distribution are in order. Optionally a little bit of evangelism for awareness. Random person on forum or HN: "Hey, I'd like to try to write some business code or some service in a new language. What should I use?" Drop a Racket link, guide, and something on macros & live updates (if racket has it). I remember loving those when I played with LISP back in the day. I wouldn't expect any more from the Racket team.

Now, I'll drop Racket references in these tangents if you're saying you all sat around in Plato's Cave with no exposure to real programming past its shadows in academic papers and just came up with everything in Racket on your own. Just seems like there's some feedback loops in there from useful projects that caused improvements that make it more useful in practice. If you say no, I'll concede I'm wrong given you're part of the core team. Then be mystified at its evolution.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#157

Post by nickpsecurity » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

gluggymug wrote: post #139

nickpsecurity wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There didn't seem to be a lot in there but I don't know Scala. I wish it was scripted in Lua or something with the Scala doing execution and analysis. Make it easier for others to follow. Doesn't seem nearly as thorough as what I've read in ASIC papers on verification. They did (co-simulation?), equivalence, gate-level testing, all kinds of stuff. Plus, you did it for a living so I take your word there. I do hope the…

Interesting paper. It sounds good until you look for the actual work. With a possibly limited amount of testing, you can't be sure of anything. In verification, you can never just trust the tools. With no code coverage numbers, how do I know how thorough the existing tests are? The tests themselves have no docs. The torture test page said it still needed support for floating point instructions. That kinda says, they…

Yeah, that all sounds familiar from my research. Especially floating point given some famous recalls. Disturbing if it's missing. I'll try to remember to get in contact with them. Overdue on doing that anyway.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#158

Post by mdwelsh » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

gradstudent wrote: post #154

mdwelsh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean incorrect assumptions. It doesn't matter if we're talking research in industry or academia; doing research based on flawed (not simplifying) assumptions is bad science.

If you want to make a concrete point about bad science then do it. At the moment however you are not making that point. Your argument is that "the assumptions" (whatever those are; you provide no specifics) made by researchers don't match up with industry expectations; a wholly different point for which I have little sympathy. In my opinion the scientific authors doing the work are in the best position to judge what…

I was originally going to list examples of bad industry-focused science in the original post, but decided against it, since I didn't want to offend anyone. Your username is "gradstudent", suggesting you have read a few papers. My bet is that you've read papers where you scratch your head and say, "is that really how things work?" I read lots and lots of those papers - usually they don't end up getting published.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#159

Post by dadkins » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

mdwelsh wrote: post #58

kenjackson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If industry could provide better platforms (up to date, not hand me downs or neutered versions of their real product) then I think you might see better forms of this research. For example, I'd love to improve search relevance, but w/o having access to Google's search engine to build on, it's pretty hard. That's my suggestion. :-)

While I agree in general that opening up opportunities for academic-industry collaboration is good, I don't think it's practical for academics to work on problems at true industry scale. Academics don't have access to the resources, personnel, or funding required to do that kind of work. An academic lab can do many things of relevance to industry -- but not everything. Google recently open sourced its TensorFlow plst…

It would be really nice if they would go ahead and release the Google version of MapReduce now that they've learned their lesson. It's not too late for everyone to learn from the original, and it's no longer a competitive advantage now that anyone can run a Hadoop job on AWS on demand.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#160

Post by mdwelsh » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

jonsterling wrote: post #118

Who gives a damn if academic research is relevant to industry? Almost anything that could possibly be relevant to industry is highly uninteresting. Imagine being someone who thinks that Capital could decide what is a good problem to work on...

This is so completely wrong. The most exciting work happening in systems, networking, programming languages, crypto, computer architecture, mobile, and many other subfields of computer science is highly relevant to industry and very interesting academically.