7 ms·

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.

by js8 11y ago

pklausler 11y ago
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?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Academia patents tons of stuff. They just put that in patent applications and technology portfolios instead of bibliographies.
  - jldugger 11y ago
    The point is that patents don't appear to contribute to the sum total knowledge that academics build on top of. They're by and large intellectual dead ends, if profitable ones.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      Oh I mostly agree. Some organizations will only fund you if they get IP out of it. Many significant tech in that area. But it's mostly an after the fact make money thing. Or just bullshit altogether.
mdwelsh 11y ago
See my reply above - I'm all for industry opening up where possible, and a lot of stuff gets open sourced these days (hell, didn't Facebook even open source its data center designs?). Opening up technology doesn't necessarily mean academics will focus on the right problems, though.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up. And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The point is supported by a number of academics that incorporate real-world information and constraints into their work to produce deliverables that advance state-of-the-art and are useful. Examples that come to mind are: Haskell/Ocaml/Racket languages, CompCert C compiler, Microsoft's SLAM for drivers, SWIFT auto-partitioning for web apps, Sector/Sphere filesystem, the old SASD storage project (principles became EMC), old Beowulf clusters, ABC HW synthesis, RISC-V work, and so on. So many examples of academics keeping their head in the real-world instead of the clouds to making a name for themselves with awesome stuff with immediate and long-lasting benefits. I'm not Matt but I'm guessing he'd rather see more examples like this than, say, a TCP/IP improvement that breaks compatibility with all existing Tier 1-3 stacks and whose goal is to improve overall Web experience. Yes, there are people working on those. ;)
- gluggymug 11y ago
  I don't think the RISC-V work is a good example. It suffers from some of the problems that mdwelsh is worried about. It's aimed at a real world problem but their solution is not good. A couple of days ago, someone asked where the verification infrastructure was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 . So I took another look around and found it was pretty much unchanged from when I looked last time. There is almost nothing there. It is not up to industry standards, to put it lightly. It's not just the verification aspect that is weak either. On the design side, they only have docs on the ISA. For SOC work, you are essentially given no docs. Then in another slap in the face, the alternative is to look for code to read but the code is in Scala. Basically only helping those who went to Berkley or something. It is something that seems relevant but if you were to try using it most engineers would have a pretty hard time.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago

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.

by js8 11y ago

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.

pklausler 11y ago

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?

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Academia patents tons of stuff. They just put that in patent applications and technology portfolios instead of bibliographies.
- jldugger 11y ago
  The point is that patents don't appear to contribute to the sum total knowledge that academics build on top of. They're by and large intellectual dead ends, if profitable ones.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Oh I mostly agree. Some organizations will only fund you if they get IP out of it. Many significant tech in that area. But it's mostly an after the fact make money thing. Or just bullshit altogether.

mdwelsh 11y ago

See my reply above - I'm all for industry opening up where possible, and a lot of stuff gets open sourced these days (hell, didn't Facebook even open source its data center designs?). Opening up technology doesn't necessarily mean academics will focus on the right problems, though.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up. And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The point is supported by a number of academics that incorporate real-world information and constraints into their work to produce deliverables that advance state-of-the-art and are useful. Examples that come to mind are: Haskell/Ocaml/Racket languages, CompCert C compiler, Microsoft's SLAM for drivers, SWIFT auto-partitioning for web apps, Sector/Sphere filesystem, the old SASD storage project (principles became EMC), old Beowulf clusters, ABC HW synthesis, RISC-V work, and so on. So many examples of academics keeping their head in the real-world instead of the clouds to making a name for themselves with awesome stuff with immediate and long-lasting benefits. I'm not Matt but I'm guessing he'd rather see more examples like this than, say, a TCP/IP improvement that breaks compatibility with all existing Tier 1-3 stacks and whose goal is to improve overall Web experience. Yes, there are people working on those. ;)

gluggymug 11y ago
I don't think the RISC-V work is a good example. It suffers from some of the problems that mdwelsh is worried about. It's aimed at a real world problem but their solution is not good. A couple of days ago, someone asked where the verification infrastructure was on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831601 . So I took another look around and found it was pretty much unchanged from when I looked last time. There is almost nothing there. It is not up to industry standards, to put it lightly. It's not just the verification aspect that is weak either. On the design side, they only have docs on the ISA. For SOC work, you are essentially given no docs. Then in another slap in the face, the alternative is to look for code to read but the code is in Scala. Basically only helping those who went to Berkley or something. It is something that seems relevant but if you were to try using it most engineers would have a pretty hard time.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago