How Software is Harming Science, Engineering | Hacker News Reader

How Software is Harming Science, Engineering

businessweek.com

11 pointsTAnd5 comments

Andreesen postulated that the software industry was "eating the world" and "poised to take over broad swathes of the economy." This is delusional.

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The thesis that software is merely one component of many is certainly true. The idea that we have too many software engineers however, seems false to me. Also the idea that everyone needs to orient their career to serve a larger societal good sounds like a prescription of goal oriented blindness. There are plenty of inventions made for amusement that lead to larger societal good. If someone feels passionate about aligning their life and career with larger overall goals, that's great. However if someone working at Zygna is passionate about games, perhaps they have an insight you don't and their contribution will make a bigger difference to the world you think. Wadhwa's claim that Andresson's portolio is 'unoriginal' seems irrelevant. Facebook is Friendster 3.0? From my point of view Facebook works, and friendster didn't. Isn't there value in building something that actually works?

"Software is draining talent needed in other areas of science and engineering" is begging the question. No matter what pretty lies we tell ourselves about needing those other engineering projects, if they can't afford to bid for the talent, we haven't bothered to allocate the resources that would enable them to succeed. I would never advise those students to take the penalties for diverging so far from what society actually wants from them, whatever I think of social mobile gamification of cat pictures.

Actually, it's the lack of intellectual property protection of software (and Microsoft's practice of ape and maim) that caused it to stagnant. Here's a great article explaining why:

Are software patents evil? http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/08/09/are-software-patent...

Isn't DNA profiling and decoding software dependent?

I guess you could argue it's software-enabled rather than software dependent. The underlying scientific advances make it possible, whereas the software makes it practicable.

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