Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbmueller | Hacker News Reader

> people still can be harmful even being in good faith

That's a general truth. You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever. Make a real case for you thesis then.

View on HN

People choose academia to be within (zero-sum) system and project the same expectations to students, while real life success is about being out of any system. Hence the harm.

People don't 'choose academia to be within a zero-sum system and project the same expectations to students'. My partner and most of my friends are or have been in academia and the one common thing is a real passion for their subject of choice and industry doesn't offer the same flexibility to focus on it.

Being suspicious of those who voluntarily become academics is odd.

Talks about zero-sum. Uses things based on the results of said zero-sum system. Makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

Real life results of academia are largely propaganda (tuition billions well spent). They are not even good in figuring out why/how things work and replicating success (additionally proven by Soviets).

Your language of choice - Clojure according to your HN bio - works on a product where important parts (e.g. Generics and the Java collection framework) were done by academia. One of the most popular compilers (LLVM) was done in academia (and still is in parts!). Most of the optimizations compilers use were done by academia.

Your work stands on the work of countless academic researchers and you run around "What did academia EVER do for us?" - the Monty Python sketch about Romans comes to mind.

This is especially laughable, since I have seen how that works on practice: take something everyone already does, write 1000 of PhDs on that, add to academic history book, now wikipedia and voila.

If any of IT projects came from academia to the market, it's only because certain people were picked up by businesses that were onto something already.

I don't mean this in a derogatory way but from your bio it sounds like you work in full-stack web development - maybe with some data processing. Sure, this stuff doesn't really come from academia. But there are other bits of tech where academia does play a large part and your viewpoint is just not correct. One example that contradicts your second paragraph away is I spent several years at a consultancy that helped academics commericalise their own research - mostly medical tech but some computer vision stuff too. There's loads of great work businesses coming out of academia - you might just not be in a position to see it.

Coincidentally, before current full stack freelancing stuff, I've spent around two years in augmented reality, often having to dig through tons of published research, only to realize pretentious lab methods do not work outside. We ended up adopting some methods from hacky teens on DIY forums, but never that..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com