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I find it odd that test-case reduction is billed as a “research skill”. To me, this is a basic debugging skill for anyone who works with code. Maybe it’s more

• derdi 2y ago
  As the article says, right at the top: "The plan is to demonstrate techniques that “everyone knows” because everyone, in fact, does not already know them."
  • mistercow 2y ago
    This is actually something I find hard to resist in myself as an aging software engineer on HN. When I was young, articles would describe “obvious” things in excruciating detail, and I’d be grateful, because they were often things I didn’t know. Now when I see articles about things I find obvious on the front page — particularly if they’re topics I’ve seen hit the front page before (which, mind you, means “any time in the last 15 years or so”) — I have to resist an annoyed gut reaction. The fact that knowledge and skills seem obvious and boring once internalized is a kind of terrible quirk of the human condition.
    • tialaramex 2y ago
      For whatever it's worth, I enjoy explaining things to others so each time a topic recurs I can do that where it seems appropriate. And hey I can pass on things I didn't know about and then learned here, for example that's why I tell people about WUFFS, can you do all the bounds checking at compile time? Sure, for a price. And that price (generality) might be easily affordable in which case using Rust, never mind C++ is very silly because WUFFS was offering you better performance and total safety if you can do without generality.
    • HideousKojima 2y ago
      My issue isn't with articles describing "obvious" things, it's with articles acting like this obvious thing is an amazing new discovery. This is especially funny when you see it in articles about relational database stuff, since most of the fundamentals have been discovered since the 70's.
      • j16sdiz 2y ago
        Yes, but they were lost. We stored those discoveries in mongodb. Apparently it had failed in a web scale way and nobody has figured out how to restore from backup.
• Certhas 2y ago
  I don't understand your point. Debugging is research almost by definition, no?
  • DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
    No; I think in this context, "research skills" specifically means "skills in the service of conducting publishable research", not "skills that involve some quantity of exploration" or something like that. (To be clear, I don't agree with the sentiment of the comment to which you were replying, but I also don't think debugging "is research by definition".)
    • Certhas 2y ago
      It's not scientific research with the aim of publishing, but it is research as defined in the dictionary [1], and uses some of the same skills. Honestly, I am a scientist first. I am not aware of any activity outside of academia that is more research than debugging. You start with an observed phenomenon (the bug). Then you search for the cause of it. Along the way you formulate and test hypothesis, conduct experiments, gather evidence, check the literature. What's more: these activities are the bulk of what you do, especially in difficult cases. They are not incidental to debugging, they are the essence of the work. Much of what is published is the outcome of processes that look a lot less like research. [1] (E.g. I do research to win online argguments, or for a school essay, or a reporter does research for a story, or an engineer does research on how to implement some idea. None of these cases of research are academic/scientific research)
• tom306 2y ago
  Maybe. But test case reduction for compiler bugs is absolutely not a basic debugging skill for just "anyone".