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>Computing has become so banal. We used to be working on important problems. 1. Blockchains/smart contracts, 2. Garbled circuits/Snarks/MPC (Multi-Party Compu

>Computing has become so banal. We used to be working on important problems. 1. Blockchains/smart contracts, 2. Garbled circuits/Snarks/MPC (Multi-Party Computation) 3. IO/VBB Program obfuscation, 4. FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption), 5. Machine Learning/Vision, 6. Global/Solar-scale performant and secure routing protocols, 7. TEE (Trusted Execution Environments), 8. Advanced P2P systems like IPFS, 9. Bioinfomatiks. ...

slavik81 9y ago
It's hard to be excited about that list when so much of it seems like technology that will be used against me. For example, by businesses to further reduce the freedoms we have when using proprietary software.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- skadamat 9y ago
  I'd look at research efforts that have been focusing on revising the heart & original spirit of computing. YC's HARC especially - harc.ycr.org Bret's talk about their group's vision for computing - https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289 - really helps people who think computing is "done" and all the interesting stuff is figured out.
amelius 9y ago
Most people here are simply users of these technologies, not creators. The actual programming is still banal.
- flatline 9y ago
  Like with all the sciences, the role of the individual has been diminished. Interesting technology may be seeded by some individual genius but it takes a huge number of people coordinating to build something like a self-driving car, a breakthrough AI, the LHC. And it takes a lot of really smart people spending most of their time doing relatively banal tasks to pull these off. I think the bar for innovation is just so much higher than it used to be, there is so much knowledge required across so many fields that you either end up a generalist, who rarely gets a chance to dive deep into any one thing, or a specialist who is forever stuck in their one area of expertise.
hueving 9y ago
Who is working on better routing protocols? Displacing BGP seems like a monumental task so it seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get. Would love to be proved wrong though.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  >Who is working on better routing protocols? Scion is a clean slate internet architecture research design (including routing)[0]. >It seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get. I was author on a paper [1] that reduced some of the downsides to the RPKI (the PKI BGPSEC relies on). There is also interesting work on getting most of the security from BGPSEC without complete BGPSEC deployment [2]. In a different direction, as we build the internet of the inner solar system we will need protocols with different properties than those we needed for terrestrial networks. [0]: https://www.scion-architecture.net/ https://www.scion-architecture.net/ [1]: "From the Consent of the Routed: Improving the Transparency of the RPKI" http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/sigRPKI_full.pdf http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/sigRPKI_full.pdf [2]: "Jumpstarting BGP Security with Path-End Validation" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2934883&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=773220959&CFTOKEN=80733804 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2934883&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...
  - hueving 9y ago
    I've seen scion before but IMO "clean slate" protocols are DOA when it comes to displacing BGP. Just look at the mailing list. A protocol with an integration model of forming an overlay has no integration model. ETHZ and Co have been marketing that at all kinds of academic conferences and it's seen approximately 0 uptake outside of organizations that volunteer to run it as an experiment. Sorry about the rant, but I get the impression that the authors of replacement protocols like these are more interested in becoming academically famous for being the inventor of the Internet (i.e. The next Vincent Cerf) rather than proposing solutions to existing systems. I would be interested in new protocols for super high latency networks (i.e. The solar system model). The RPKI work and path end validation work is interesting and I haven't seen those papers before (been disconnected from publications recently). Thanks for the links.
saurik 9y ago
I don't understand what you are trying to say with your answer, as the person said "we used to be working on important problems" and you responded with a list of random technologies. Technologies can sometimes be "problems", and sadly often are :/, but that means that they were failed solutions. A list of hard problems we could be tackling: 1) the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, 2) we are destroying the human ecosystem by global warming, 3) there exists a very large amount of inequality between the upper and lower class in our society and the gap is only increasing, 4) we have more and more humans of whom society demands "work" to get "pay" in order to survive even as we come up with ways of replacing more and more "jobs" with "automation", 5) there are many subsets of our population divided by axes such as race and sexuality which are discriminated against by others in both direct and indirect systematic ways, 6) we have a limited number of antibiotics that are generally safe for widespread usage and pathogens are adapting, 7) for numerous and potentially diverse reasons an increasingly large fraction of our society is being turned off of science and has stopped believing in basic things like the benefits of even our oldest and most trusted vaccinations, 8) humans continue to die from diseases like cancer, 9) governments and companies have begun to usher in a dystopian era of surveillance under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and spam and serving us advertisements. A couple of these problems can be addressed with the technologies you listed, but even in the core of some of these communities that want to address problems 5, 7, and 9 you honestly just end up finding a lot of people who are exacerbating problems 2, 3, 4, and (annoyingly) 9. I despise the cloud :(. It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. We are to the point where arguing that I "own" the device on which I am typing this message almost doesn't make sense: I am borrowing it from Apple and I can only hope that they don't screw me too hard :(.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  Many of those are problems, not technologies. Saying Blockchains is just a technology is like saying Operating Systems or Compilers are just a technology. They are an active area of computer science research. Many of the problems you listed are likely only solvable by large scale social movements. Solutions to important technology problems change the landscape over which progress is made but they are not social movements themselves. >It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. The cloud is the new word for mainframe. The PC pushed things away from mainframes then the internet/cloud pushed back. Blockchains are interesting space between these extremes.
collyw 9y ago
Bioinformatics is very often pretty basic counting and basic statistics applied to moderately large datasets and no concept of best practices.
- gmarx 9y ago
  yes...and important problems that we have barely begun to solve
JDiculous 9y ago
How many people are working on these problems? The sad reality is that most software engineers want to work on these problems, but instead have to work on pumping out CRUD apps and proprietary APIs of questionable social value to pay the bills.

slavik81 9y ago

It's hard to be excited about that list when so much of it seems like technology that will be used against me. For example, by businesses to further reduce the freedoms we have when using proprietary software.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
skadamat 9y ago
I'd look at research efforts that have been focusing on revising the heart & original spirit of computing. YC's HARC especially - harc.ycr.org Bret's talk about their group's vision for computing - https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289 - really helps people who think computing is "done" and all the interesting stuff is figured out.

amelius 9y ago

Most people here are simply users of these technologies, not creators. The actual programming is still banal.

flatline 9y ago
Like with all the sciences, the role of the individual has been diminished. Interesting technology may be seeded by some individual genius but it takes a huge number of people coordinating to build something like a self-driving car, a breakthrough AI, the LHC. And it takes a lot of really smart people spending most of their time doing relatively banal tasks to pull these off. I think the bar for innovation is just so much higher than it used to be, there is so much knowledge required across so many fields that you either end up a generalist, who rarely gets a chance to dive deep into any one thing, or a specialist who is forever stuck in their one area of expertise.

hueving 9y ago

Who is working on better routing protocols? Displacing BGP seems like a monumental task so it seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get. Would love to be proved wrong though.

EthanHeilman 9y ago
>Who is working on better routing protocols? Scion is a clean slate internet architecture research design (including routing)[0]. >It seems like bgpsec is about as good as we are going to get. I was author on a paper [1] that reduced some of the downsides to the RPKI (the PKI BGPSEC relies on). There is also interesting work on getting most of the security from BGPSEC without complete BGPSEC deployment [2]. In a different direction, as we build the internet of the inner solar system we will need protocols with different properties than those we needed for terrestrial networks. [0]: https://www.scion-architecture.net/ https://www.scion-architecture.net/ [1]: "From the Consent of the Routed: Improving the Transparency of the RPKI" http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/sigRPKI_full.pdf http://cs-people.bu.edu/heilman/sigRPKI_full.pdf [2]: "Jumpstarting BGP Security with Path-End Validation" http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2934883&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=773220959&CFTOKEN=80733804 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2934883&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFI...
- hueving 9y ago
  I've seen scion before but IMO "clean slate" protocols are DOA when it comes to displacing BGP. Just look at the mailing list. A protocol with an integration model of forming an overlay has no integration model. ETHZ and Co have been marketing that at all kinds of academic conferences and it's seen approximately 0 uptake outside of organizations that volunteer to run it as an experiment. Sorry about the rant, but I get the impression that the authors of replacement protocols like these are more interested in becoming academically famous for being the inventor of the Internet (i.e. The next Vincent Cerf) rather than proposing solutions to existing systems. I would be interested in new protocols for super high latency networks (i.e. The solar system model). The RPKI work and path end validation work is interesting and I haven't seen those papers before (been disconnected from publications recently). Thanks for the links.

saurik 9y ago

I don't understand what you are trying to say with your answer, as the person said "we used to be working on important problems" and you responded with a list of random technologies. Technologies can sometimes be "problems", and sadly often are :/, but that means that they were failed solutions. A list of hard problems we could be tackling: 1) the world is going to run out of fossil fuels, 2) we are destroying the human ecosystem by global warming, 3) there exists a very large amount of inequality between the upper and lower class in our society and the gap is only increasing, 4) we have more and more humans of whom society demands "work" to get "pay" in order to survive even as we come up with ways of replacing more and more "jobs" with "automation", 5) there are many subsets of our population divided by axes such as race and sexuality which are discriminated against by others in both direct and indirect systematic ways, 6) we have a limited number of antibiotics that are generally safe for widespread usage and pathogens are adapting, 7) for numerous and potentially diverse reasons an increasingly large fraction of our society is being turned off of science and has stopped believing in basic things like the benefits of even our oldest and most trusted vaccinations, 8) humans continue to die from diseases like cancer, 9) governments and companies have begun to usher in a dystopian era of surveillance under the guise of protecting us from terrorists and spam and serving us advertisements. A couple of these problems can be addressed with the technologies you listed, but even in the core of some of these communities that want to address problems 5, 7, and 9 you honestly just end up finding a lot of people who are exacerbating problems 2, 3, 4, and (annoyingly) 9. I despise the cloud :(. It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. We are to the point where arguing that I "own" the device on which I am typing this message almost doesn't make sense: I am borrowing it from Apple and I can only hope that they don't screw me too hard :(.

EthanHeilman 9y ago
Many of those are problems, not technologies. Saying Blockchains is just a technology is like saying Operating Systems or Compilers are just a technology. They are an active area of computer science research. Many of the problems you listed are likely only solvable by large scale social movements. Solutions to important technology problems change the landscape over which progress is made but they are not social movements themselves. >It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. The cloud is the new word for mainframe. The PC pushed things away from mainframes then the internet/cloud pushed back. Blockchains are interesting space between these extremes.

collyw 9y ago

Bioinformatics is very often pretty basic counting and basic statistics applied to moderately large datasets and no concept of best practices.

gmarx 9y ago
yes...and important problems that we have barely begun to solve

JDiculous 9y ago

How many people are working on these problems? The sad reality is that most software engineers want to work on these problems, but instead have to work on pumping out CRUD apps and proprietary APIs of questionable social value to pay the bills.