The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience • Hacker News Board

Re: The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience

#51

Post by zkmon » Fri, Nov 07, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #13

zkmon wrote: post #2

Science Research doesn't happen for its own sake. Every effort needs to be a part of the pipeline of demand and supply. Otherwise it's just a tune that you sing in the shower.

> Every effort needs to be a part of the pipeline of demand and supply It's almost unthinkable the amount of technology and innovations we would have never gotten if this was actually true in practice. So many inventions happened because two people happen to be in the same place for no particular reason, or someone noticed something strange/interesting and started going down the rabbit-hole for curiosities sake, with…

You need to take it with current context, not with the nostalgic past when pure research happened out of curiosity. World is more purpose-driven now. Scientists are employees of some establishment with goals that are driven by the funding. If you are funded for doing Fourier-like research that must be for patents which are fully commercial-goal driven.

Everyone is connected to financial strings like puppets. If you are doing research without financial connection, you must be very rich, having a personal lab, having lots of free time, or not having family duties and worldly goals. Those are rare people, just like how wealthy countries had more scientists in the past centuries.

Re: The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience

#52

Post by Mars008 » Fri, Nov 07, 2025, 11:03 PM UTC

Strilanc wrote: post #40

mmooss wrote: post #34

For the audience here, the opposite side of the coin is more relevant: Why don't you read software research? Based on this and other articles (and on experience), it's an especially underutilized resource. By reading it, you would gain an advantage over competition. Why aren't you using this advantage that is there for the taking? And why don't we see papers posted to HN?

Well, for example, consider this recent study that claimed developers using AI tools take 19% longer to finish tasks [1]. This was their methodology: > we recruited 16 experienced developers from large open-source repositories (averaging 22k+ stars and 1M+ lines of code) that they’ve contributed to for multiple years. Developers provide lists of real issues (246 total) that would be valuable to the repository—bug fix…

> I don't want to be too harsh on the study authors

Well, I'll do it for you. There is much of attention grabbing bull*it. For example I've seen on LinkedIn study claiming 60% of Indians daily using AI in their jobs, and only 10% of Japanese. You can guess who did it, very patriotic, but far from the reality.

Re: The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience

#53

Post by spit2wind » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 7:48 AM UTC

m0rc wrote: post #33

So far, the best reference for software engineering research appears to be R. Glass et al.'s 2002 work, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering. I haven't found a better or more comprehensive reference. It would be great to see an updated edition. Do you know a better source of information?

Glass is great!

The only others who compare are his contemporaries, Steve McConnell, Timothy Lister, Tom DeMarco, and Barry Boehm.

Unfortunately, they're all basically retired. It feels like this kind of interest in software development, at least the publishing, ended around the mid-2000s.

My guess is the shift to blogs from books, adoption of Agile (in whatever form), and a shift in industry focus to getting rich rather than getting good ended the efforts to come up with resources like Glass put together.

Re: The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience

#54

Post by pajamasam » Fri, Nov 14, 2025, 11:47 AM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #15

pajamasam wrote: post #11

Personally, I much prefer “software research” from engineers working in the industry. I’m sceptical of software research being done at universities.

I feel much of the knowledge and experience in the industry is simply lost because it isn't widely documented and studied. There needs to be detailed histories of major software development projects from the industry, in book form for people to learn from, in the same way as histories of military campaigns and railway projects. It not widely done, and we end up with mere "Software Archeology", where we have artefacts…

Agreed. I really appreciate the documentaries by CultRepo and the "Architecture of Open Source Applications" books, but there's still a ton of info that hasn't been documented. Some of the FAANG blog posts also help, but they're usually very scant on details.