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Comment by throw_pm23 | Hacker News Reader

In 15 years as a TCS researcher I have followed one heuristic: if something has the word "quantum" in it, I ignore (articles, surveys, conference talks, projects, etc.).

This is more from personal ignorance/laziness and convenience than strong conviction: you cannot follow all areas, you have to make some choices how you spend your time, and this is one particular area that is easy to delimit. (EDIT: and if it does turn out to be a dead-end, I can be glad I made the right call.)

At times this policy has been quite hard to follow, and I may reconsider it sometime, but so far it has served me well.

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It would be one thing to say yeah, you don’t think the field is interesting and is likely to be a dead end.

But that’s not what you’re saying. Instead you are saying that you don’t follow it because well, you can’t follow everything. And I agree with that. But in that case, you could go to every single HN topic and post “I don’t follow <insert topic here>, I’m just posting to tell you that I can’t follow everything. So far it has served me well to not follow everything.”

Which doesn’t seem particularly useful or contributory in any way.

I just wanted to post a quick comment apologizing for extending this thread any further.

Sorry, you are right. I didn't want to post something too negative about it. Obviously, I have to decide what I don't follow, and underlying such a decision is also a belief that the field is more likely to be a dead end than others. But I have no solid argument to back that up.

Within the field of CS, this is not a bad approach.

However, if you work in: biology, physics, or chemistry: quantum is a frequently used word. It covers far more than QC, entanglement, coherence, tunnelling, or any other crazy bits of quantum. It forms the basis for our atomic theory of matter and has led to extraordinary engineering and science projects.

I used to be excited by DNA computing but it became clear quickly that regardless of any stated advantages of DNA computing, they were tiny compared to the modern working digital computer and the global infrastructure dedicated to improving it year after year (even after Moore's law putters out).

Interesting that the top rated comment on a post is related to how not reading the post (or any posts in the category) is optimal from a time management perspective.

Ironic that writing this comment as well as reading it is considered a worthwhile time expenditure.

But this is quite common -- on most bitcoin-related topics the top comment usually points out (correctly in my opinion) how it is all bogus. I don't have the knowledge to say the same about quantum computing, but my heuristic points in that direction.

> In 15 years as a TCS researcher I have followed one heuristic: if something has the word "quantum" in it, I ignore (articles, surveys, conference talks, projects, etc.).

Same for "crypto" here :-)

TCS?

theoretical computer science

Sounds a lot like information theory,

Which is a well-known area in both computer science and.. quantum physics of black holes.

Theoretical Computer Science

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