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Comment by mentat | Hacker News Reader

That's just it, those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. By not learning about it they will make poor day to day decisions which lead to the exact same mistakes decades later.

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It's true. Most of history is probably useless, though. So, you need to know which parts to learn. Most people getting into network engineering don't have 5-10+ years to figure that out on top of work, family, fun, etc. So, the most relevant parts of history of a subfield should be accessible in a way that doesn't require that level of effort. That's like making people studying mathematics, mechanical engineering, etc look through every ancient manuscript and writing to unearth the best principles and techniques for their field day-to-day and project-to-project. Makes no sense.

And this is coming from a guy whose gone to the extreme of studying everything in several sub-fields of IT: over 12,000 academic or professional papers in my archive on top of the books, etc. Skimmed most, fully read some, and re-read a tiny few (gold mine). Took a long time to get to that tiny few. No justification for that except that generation made little to no attempt to get that stuff to me in an accessible way. And now my generation is repeating the mistake for the next.

Or do you really think it's optimal that every learner have to spend 3-5 years per sub-topic digging through the whole of knowledge on it just to find the few things that might pay off?

It's not about spending 3-5 years learning about the history but actually believing and understanding that that history has value. It's the ability to regularly ask the question "is this a solved problem" and actually be willing to work to figure it out. This is what I feel is missing with a lot of the younger engineers I interact with.

"It's the ability to regularly ask the question "is this a solved problem" and actually be willing to work to figure it out. This is what I feel is missing with a lot of the younger engineers I interact with."

I agree with you on that. Many don't have that desirable trait. They'll miss out on greater things because of that. Another thing worth study and effort is figuring out how to teach that mindset to young engineers.

Once they have it, then they need the organized presentation of our fields that I'm arguing for. Both the will/mindset and resources for learning are necessary for best results.

Do you keep track of your gold mine in a list somewhere? Would be interested in looking at it. :)

Before I can wholesale share it, I have to go through to figure out which ones are locked in to ACM/IEEE to exclude them from the list. The rest are [mostly] disorganized because I started pulling them in batches of 20-100 a day. So, there's a little work to be done there before I can publish them.

I've saved your username and email somewhere so I can notify you when I get around to doing that. What topics are your core interests? My main focus is high security IT and software/system verification with a number on programming, hardware design/synthesis, software engineering, networking, databases, filesystems, OS's, and high-performance computing. Might send you a few samples of each in your interest to let you see the kinds of things people overlook. I should have time this week.

As far as computer disciplines go, my core interests are in language design, distributed systems design, software engineering, security, string and graph algorithms, high performance computing, OS and filesystem design. Aside from that I have interests in genomics, nanoscale optics, and AI/ML.

Thanks for the offer!

I sent you an email (the one linked to your HN profile description) on the subject. I hope you get back.

@ brianmwaters_hn

"took so many years and thousands of papers... due to the sheer volume of information. That time wasn't wasted sifting through irrelevant stuff - you're now an expert. On the contrary, I think the writers and organizers of all that material did a great job; both of us owe nearly everything we know to them."

I agree there's a lot of material, the learning process was worth it, and there's even more to gain. That said, the learning process taught me that a tiny, tiny fraction of those papers taught people 95+% of what they need to know for their sub-field. We need that information packaged, well-presented, and widely distributed for each sub-field. People wanting to learn more can volunteer time to do so. All I'm pushing for is that baseline packaged and ready for newcomers with few to no obstacles. Right now, it's hard enough to find that most don't. Gotta change that.

Nick, (this is a reply to your post at the same nesting depth, as we're at the max here)

We're pretty much on the same page on this whole thread, but consider the idea that perhaps the fact that it took so many years and thousands of papers wasn't because the previous generation didn't organize them well, but was simply due the the sheer volume of information. That time wasn't wasted sifting through irrelevant stuff - you're now an expert.

On the contrary, I think the writers and organizers of all that material did a great job; both of us owe nearly everything we know to them.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10420017

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