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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

It's more fun to create something novel that many people use and appreciate (e.g., an iPhone game).

Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.

ok, i'll bite ;)

if everyone thought the way that you did, then we'd still be programming by submitting our punch cards to some gigantic centralized machine. think about how much basic academic research occurred before the invention of something like the iPhone became possible

There are plenty of necessary things in life that aren't exciting to do. There's nothing wrong with pointing it out unless you're trying to get more people to unwittingly do those things without fully understanding their choice.

EDIT: I'm not trying to say that pure science is universally unexciting. Few things are. But generally, more people seem to be interested in consumer products than pure science research.

I think a lot of researchers (myself included) really do prefer doing what we're doing, though. It's not like I'm doing research instead of making iPhone games because I have no choice; if I wanted to jump and make iPhone games instead, plenty of companies have open positions. I just find what I'm currently doing a lot more interesting.

(That said, I wouldn't want this prof's job, because managing a large group of people, whether in industry or a research lab, is not my idea of fun.)

Seriously? You'd rather implement Tetris in Obj-C than make a fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm? We have very different ideas of fun.

A Tetris clone would not be novel though.

I would rather build novel games based on my ideas for the iPhone than do basic research.

Personally, I hope I do something important enough that someone will stand on my shoulders to do something even more important.

If by "fundamental, provable improvement to an important algorithm", you mean something like discovering Floyd-Warshall, then yes. I'd rather be programming Tetris in Obj-C. Floyd-Warshall, while cool, wouldn't be recognized by 99.9999% of the people out there, while iPhone Tetris would be used by millions. More to the point, if you hack up iPhone Tetris, you have a game that you can play, while if you invent Floyd-Warshall, you have a graph algorithm that you can...er, it's bound to be useful sometime. Plus it takes maybe a day or two to hack up Tetris, while it takes several years to do basic CS research.

This is why I'm not an academic.

I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself. I use the fruits of it all the time. But when faced with a problem, I'd rather hack up something that's good enough to get something on the screen than spend the time necessary to cross all the Ts and dot the Is for a publishable paper. To me, the code and what you can do with it speaks for itself.

I would guess that Floyd-Warshall has affected far more people than Tetris has, despite the fact that most people do not recognize it. Personally, I would rather have a positive impact on the world than simply be recognized. Hundreds of years in the future, Floyd-Warshall will still be used.

Will Tetris be used? Maybe. But it is a game. It is not solving real problems. Famous people today being recognized far in the futre? Even less likely.

With all respect, people should be doing things they're drawn to. When you're about to retire, if you didn't enjoy the ride, you probably chose wrong, even if you were Floyd or Warshall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

>I can respect basic CS research without wanting to do it myself.

Sure. Likewise. I don't plan on doing a PhD. I was primarly responding to the lack of respect for CS research:

>Much better than research prototypes that go no where beyond a publication or two.

Sir Isaac Newton would disagree with you.

"I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell, whilest the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Newto...

classic quote

Those downvotes seem harsh. I agree with you. While amazing, groundbreaking research is possible in academic computer science - the general lifecycle of research is some irrelevant poorly made prototype that ignores any number of real world concerns and leads to a couple of uninspired papers that noone reads.

The point of making game is actually in having an effect on people, mostly the point of writing papers is padding out an academic resume.

At the end of my time in academia I had become, as one friend put it "hyper cynical". However, this actually made me much better at playing the publications game - pretty much every collaboration with colleagues involved some negotiation over where in the list of authors my name would go.

I left, co-founded a company, moved onto other things and have never regretted leaving academia - I much prefer building things people do use to writing papers about things that people will probably ignore (that being the fate of most academic research).

The only bit about academic life that I wouldn't mind having is the nice juicy final salary pension scheme!

Yeah I think the other comments in this thread are extremely optimistic about the nature of academic research. The incentives just don't line up to do great work, its not that its absolutely impossible though. I miss teaching, though I was only never an academic as such, just did a PhD.

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