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Comment by walleeee | Hacker News Reader

Yes. And a lot of that software collects dust after the paper it produced is published :/

Academia needs to recognize and incentivize software (including maintenance) as a research output, and make funding available for more research software engineers.

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Amen! More long-term staff scientist jobs of all stripes!

One lesson I hope people take away from AlphaGo/AlphaFold (and a lot of the work coming out of the Allen Institutes, Broad, etc) is that some really amazing work can be done when big groups of experienced people can work together on a project.

Seriously! My lab does plant root growth modeling, which (like protein folding) is a 3D morphology prediction problem. Tweaking crops for even a small increase in carbon uptake and sequestration in soil (e.g., via deeper or longer roots) may be able to cut a sizeable chunk out of annual CO2 emissions[0], but almost nobody's working on it because it doesn't have direct applications to human healthcare.

[0]: http://www.nature.com/articles/nature17174

This is really cool and I wasn't aware of this previously. Thanks for sharing!

Sure thing! Seems almost nobody is (I wasn't until a year ago)

Do these software collect dust and rust over time?

ok sorry.. bad dad joke..

wish I'd thought of that...

This just made me discover the Dust programming language[1].

[1]: https://bilalhusain.com/dust/

There is also DustJS [1]. It is much more popular.

1: https://github.com/linkedin/dustjs

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