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Comment by Hupriene | Hacker News Reader

That's what I was thinking. Vibratory sorting/feeding machines are common and a lot of engineering effort has gone into optimizing them. I'd be very surprised if rotary oscillation had not been tried, and probably used, on many occasions.

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I have a friend who's got a doctorate in CS. He always adamantly insists his work was utterly pointless as any company interested in solving the problems he solved would simply throw people at it and solve it independently in a couple of months, they'd never find his work.

Sounds like a search problem. I wonder why sharing knowledge works so well when using Stack Overflow but not for his research results?

Because the purpose of research is to produce papers, not disseminate information or help others.

See how many CS papers talk about various algorithms without also providing the source code of said implementation.

OK, but for any individual researcher (such as the original poster's friend) what if they want to try harder?

Add a github repo with a permissible license, write a blog post, add a stack overflow answer to some relevant questions.

To be fair there aren’t many questions on stack overflow about, “How can I design my hyperblock selection algorithm for improved performance on a block-structured data flow processor?”

There might be if you first go out of your way to answer questions about dataflow throughput by pointing people toward block-structuring and mention keywords like "hyperblocks" there. People already do this; I've noticed a good few times now that I've done a number of increasingly-specific searches as I understand a problem better, and each time the answer that actually guides me to the next step comes from the same person/place.

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