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To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those di
by cperciva 5y ago
To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them practically useful.
In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately avoided doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.
Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!
- whiddershins 5y agoTo me, this is still very creative, just at a different layer of abstraction.
- hinkley 5y agoEven commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have to make millions of something per day instead of tens of thousands. You have to take material in one side of the factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and nobody can finish product. So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying. I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
- ahartmetz 5y agoThat descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read about. It is apparently very different from regular software development in similar ways.
- agumonkey 5y agoAre you still pursuing new discoveries ?
- gregwebs 5y agoIf I think of PG's accomplishments they could be characterized as "discovering things which are new" to him, but also characterized as taking ideas that were cutting edge, uncommon, or out of favor and bringing them to fruition (sounds more like engineering). I don't think of the YC structure as discovering anything inherently new but taking an approach that was not being done in the VC industry and trying to scientifically iterate on it. Bayesian spam filtering seemed a discovery to him, but it wasn't for science: someone else had already published a paper even. However, the results of previous attempts weren't good enough until PG focused on the problem and used a large enough corpus of data.
- iamcurious 5y agoI would enjoy reading more (with links!) about the spam filtering story.
- erichocean 5y ago[deleted]
- cperciva 5y agoIf an engineer designs a bridge and says "well, it seems to stay up, but I don't know why... go ask a scientist?" they'll lose their license pretty damn fast.
- mlboss 5y agoI guess the first bridge builders never asked a scientist. Science of bridge building came much later then bridges.
- webmaven 5y agoI think the point is that bridge building originated as a craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific explanations (often driven by trying to understand failed bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns extended outside of the context where they were valid).
- TeMPOraL 5y ago> You have cause and effect exactly backwards. Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that also means there is no first and last. A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat. There's no separating one from another - they run in lockstep.
- alecst 5y agoWhat about general relativity.
- goatlover 5y agoDidn't Maxwell come before Tesla and Edison? The insights of Relativity and QM came before lasers, electron microscopes, quantum computing, etc.
- purple_ferret 5y agoIt gets deeper in science. There is the debate about pursuing everettian quantum mechanics vs traditional quantum mechanics
- rossdavidh 5y agoThere is a lot of science which is "stamp collecting" or "puzzle solving", i.e. all the fiddly bits of fleshing out the new theory and its ramifications. There is also, in engineering, the occasional need to develop something really innovative and new. The thing is, no one outside of science notices all the non-discovery stuff, because it doesn't make it into the textbooks or histories of science. But, it's most of what goes on in science. Also, in engineering, much of the most innovative stuff requires too much prior knowledge to even understand what it is, so not many people find out about it.