71–80 of 170 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I agree with samth - it's not the academia, but the industry who needs to open up. Especially Google has a reputation of being very secretive.
Google patents a lot of cool stuff, actually. But the ideas tend to not get noticed in academia; when was the last time you saw a patent in a bibliography?
I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Cornell University has many departments that are good, but when I look at the agriculture and vet school they are beyond anybody else. Ag schools do research which is relevant to the technological and business problems of their industry. They do plenty of work on genetic engineering, chemistry an…
Please don't make unsubstantive, divisive generalizations like this in HN comments. They make the threads worse, including your otherwise fine comment.
Matt, I was intrigued by your throwaway "not another multi hop routing protocol" comment. As far as I can tell, the field is very slow-moving. The state of the art, Babel, is at least 5 years old and is an incremental improvement on protocols that are at least 20 years old. Some very promising research was done into DHT-based routing with Scalable Source Routing, but this work is now from more than 10 years ago, and…
I think he is largely correct in identifying the flaws of 'academic research', but he does not spend enough time discussing the whys. Academics are in an insanely competitive environment, where what is rewarded is bringing in grants/high impact publications. There are a very select few academics that are so brilliant and have such sterling reputations they can afford to not play this game (like Matt Welsh's former ad…
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.
I think he is largely correct in identifying the flaws of 'academic research', but he does not spend enough time discussing the whys. Academics are in an insanely competitive environment, where what is rewarded is bringing in grants/high impact publications. There are a very select few academics that are so brilliant and have such sterling reputations they can afford to not play this game (like Matt Welsh's former ad…
I agree with your points, in my case it was this hypercompetitiveness at the expense of meaningful contribution that drove me away from an academic career, post-PhD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it's a big deal if a bunch of academics are spending time working on the wrong things At the risk of sounding a little prickly with my comment - isn't it a little presumptuous to write off a certain amount of research as "wrong"? There are plenty of examples of research that didn't have a clear purpose leading to breakthroughs - safety glass, microwave ovens, and Teflon all spring to mind. Also, focusing on efficien…
That's a fair point. I'm trying to draw a distinction between "speculative" research (which might pan out long term) and "industry-focused" research (which tries to solve problems we have today). My concern is not with speculative research -- that's great -- but rather flawed industry-focused research: making incorrect assumptions, failing to deal with the general case, not considering real-world constraints.
If it was easy to know when you make incorrect assumptions, nobody would.
I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Cornell University has many departments that are good, but when I look at the agriculture and vet school they are beyond anybody else. Ag schools do research which is relevant to the technological and business problems of their industry. They do plenty of work on genetic engineering, chemistry an…
> I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Please don't make unsubstantive, divisive generalizations like this in HN comments. They make the threads worse, including your otherwise fine comment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know you Silicon Valley people think that farmers are a bunch of hicks and an easy target to be disrupted. No f-ing way. Please don't make unsubstantive, divisive generalizations like this in HN comments. They make the threads worse, including your otherwise fine comment.
Honestly it is a joke. It drives me nuts though to see how HN people don't get it that better rural broadband would mean they make more money.